seemed to be on the verge of losing: the capacity for self-denial and deferred gratification."

The stereotype of the hard hat blinded the media to the true nature of working-class revolt, according to Ehrenreich. "For all the talk of racial backlash, black and white workers were marching, picketing, and organizing together in a spirit of class solidarity that had not been seen since the thirties." They were "wearing their hair shoulder length, smoking pot, and beginning to question the totalitarian regimen of factory life." Indeed "there was even the possibility, in the late sixties, of an explosive convergence of working-class insurgency and the student movement." The inspirational rhetoric packed into these sentences—"black and white together," "class solidarity," "the thirties," "working-class insurgency," "explosive convergence"—indicates that Ehrenreich has left the land of the living for a visit to the Marxist mortuary, where old revolutionary slogans lie beautifully embalmed. She counters one stereotype of the worker with another, the image of Archie Bunker with the image of revolutionary solidarity enshrined in the annals of the left. The second image bears no closer relation to reality than the first.

New-class theorists attribute the worker's cultural conservatism to his embourgeoisement, ignoring his resentment of the rich. Radicals and social democrats accurately perceive the decline in his socioeconomic status but ignore his lower-middle-class values. They also ignore his opposition to busing, affirmative action, abortion, abolition of the death penalty, and other liberal causes. In support of her untenable contention that workers never moved to the right, Ehrenreich feebly argues that workers who voted for Wallace in 1964, 1968, and 1972 were attracted only to his economic "liberalism." But if they wanted economic liberalism, they could just as easily have voted for Johnson, Humphrey, or McGovern. What they wanted, it would seem, was populism, with its petty-bourgeois morality as well as its economic radicalism; and Wallace provided them with the closest available approximation to the real thing.

Ehrenreich's account of "yuppie guilt" is just as fanciful as her account of working-class "insurgency." The title of her book, Fear of Falling, refers not to the fear of falling down the social ladder but to the fear of falling away from the upper-middle-class ethic of self-denial. The professional class feels guilty about its increasing affluence. It has an irrational horror of "softness," which it tries to "expiate" by means of exercise and

-525-