Why are poor Americans more patriotic than their wealthier counterparts? | Francesco Duina

To be poor anywhere in the world is hard, but being poor in America is especially difficult. While the income of wealthier Americans has grown significantly in the recent decades, the wages of the country’s worst-off have stagnated. The available social benefits (for unemployment, illness or old age, for instance) pale in comparison with those enjoyed by poor people in other advanced countries. America’s poor also work longer hours than their counterparts elsewhere, while their children have less opportunity to escape poverty than if they lived in Europe.

On these and other fronts America has let them down. From time to time, observers, like of the New York Times and the former United States secretary of labor , have asked why the poor don’t recently put it, “Why aren’t the poor storming the barricades?” For answers, we have to take into account the intensity of their patriotic feelings.