From John Judis’, The Bern Supremacy (boldface mine):
But who are the voters flocking to [Bernie Sanders’] message? Sanders often uses the term “working people” to refer to the constituency he wants to lead. It’s a term that conjures guys in overalls; yet the bulk of the people at the rallies I attended were college students, recent college graduates, or white-collar professionals who have the types of jobs that require a college or even a post-graduate degree.
At the Sanders rally in Las Vegas, I interviewed about 30 people and also circulated around the crowd. I did talk to a janitor from Las Vegas’s militant culinary union and to a retired auto mechanic from Idaho who had moved to Las Vegas, but the rest of the people I encountered were students, teachers, scientists, civil servants, and social workers. At a Sanders rally at George Mason University in Fairfax, Virginia, I found a similar crowd, with government consultants, IT administrators, and engineers also thrown into the mix.
These Sanders supporters are part of a stratum of the American labor force that the census designates as “professionals.” They most often work for a wage or salary. They produce ideas and sophisticated services rather than physical goods. They work in hospitals and clinics, schools and colleges, and, above all, offices. Unlike routine service workers, they make decent or even very good money. In White Collar, which appeared in 1951, C. Wright Mills labeled this group “the new middle class.” The French sociologist Serge Mallet called them the “new working class.” At the socialist journal I helped edit in the early 1970s, we called them “educated labor” and part of a new “diversified proletariat.”
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