The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy

by Peter Temin

The response to these economic and social disturbances was determined by Nixon’s New Federalism and Reagan’s reduction of funding for social programs. The alternative was to get tough with crime, to punish rather than prevent crime, to incriminate instead of educate. This approach was started in New York with the Rockefeller Drug Laws of 1973. It was followed by Nancy Reagan’s appeal to “Just say no” to drugs and by Clinton’s 1994 drug law that increased incarceration at the same time it gave funds for prevention. This toughness appeared justified in the face of the heroin, cocaine, and crack cocaine epidemics in succeeding decades of the late twentieth century. And it focused the anger of working whites at their economic troubles and social disruptions on African Americans in the form of white rage.6