Introduction: Common Sense in Anxious Times

A paradoxical situation emerged in the late 1990s: the dramatic upscaling of the suburban American dream, even as the possibilities for achieving and maintaining it diminished. This book explores middle-class anxieties and suburban life during those years. It was the "dot.com boom," and the media overflowed with unbridled enthusiasm for the state of the economy, with only sparse attention paid to those who were feeling the downside of its effects, financial or otherwise. And yet, contradictory conditions of middle-class life could be seen everywhere: in suburban towns, as countless new subdivisions of ever-larger homes sprouted up while municipalities struggled to maintain their infrastructure; in people's jobs, as wages increased and stock options proliferated but job security became ever more fleeting; in aspirations for children's futures, as expectations for achievement intensified while public resources for education diminished; on credit-card statements, as credit lines expanded but were matched by new "had to have" consumer items and once-considered luxuries that had somehow become "needs"; in retirement and college funds, as balances grew dramatically on paper but were increasingly vulnerable in a volatile market. A decade later, the economy would head into a tailspin and the media would start to unpack why the middle class had come to be less secure in the late 1990s than at any time since the Great Depression. But during the 1990s, before the extraordinary amount of public discussion about the "squeeze" on the middle class, people's anxieties about transformations under way were largely dismissed amid celebrations of the generous benefits of the booming economy.

In a time before a settled narrative emerges to explain disconcerting changes in people's lives, what becomes of the anxieties produced out of this disorientation? Where do these anxieties play out in the intimacies of everyday life and the intricacies of public debate? How do they intersect with other enduring fears, hopes, and aspirations? What effects do they have on people's subjectivities, their families, and their communities? What might children and youth be learning by coming of age during a time of major class transformation? How will their new habits of everyday life shape the political-economic future and the future (or lack thereof) of a commitment to the social good? Moreover, since ways of being classed change in different historical moments, might we be able to see the friction of old and new ways of being middle class as they rub up against each other?

To explore these questions, I conducted ethnographic research in a suburban New Jersey town in the late 1990s among families who were experiencing firsthand the uneven and shifting structural conditions undergirding middle-class life and who were living in a town that embodies late-twentieth-century changes to the postwar American dream. Danboro (a pseudonym) had been a farming community until the mid-1960s, when suburbanization began with the arrival of white- flight émigrés from the outer boroughs of New York City, particularly Brooklyn. The families who flooded the town in the late 1970s and early 1980s moved to Danboro from working-class and lower-middle-class urban neighborhoods to get their piece of the suburban American dream. They were doing so, however, just as the glory days of middle-class security were coming to a close and "keeping up with the Joneses" was transforming into "keeping up with the Dow Jones." The changing architectural and infrastructural landscape of the town over the years since they first moved in provided a powerful iconic expression of the shift. The houses built in the subdivisions of the 1960s and 1970s were moderately sized (by American standards) colonial-style homes, the size and style of which signified the suburban American dream in the early post-Fordist period. During the late 1980s, a few developments of larger colonial-style homes were built. But in the late 1990s, the architectural landscape of the town began to change profoundly. Huge homes, which some disdainfully refer to as "McMansions," were built adjacent to older subdivisions. These new houses dwarfed their neighbors and produced jarring juxtapositions. When compounded with increasing concerns about overcrowding and limited public resources—whether in regard to never-ending traffic, overflowing public schools, or diminishing open space—these architectural shifts provoked anxieties and aroused uncertainties about fiscal and discursive boundaries of inclusion and exclusion in the imagined future of the town and of the middle class itself. Like gentrification in urban areas, changes in the grandeur of suburban housing reflect a transformation of the class makeup of a town and reveal shifts in the larger class structure and the structuring of people's social locations.

To understand the manifestation of class anxieties in the intimate spaces and quotidian moments of family life and the ways they shape public discourse and municipal governance, I moved to the Danboro area in the fall of 1997. Drawing on the tools of ethnography, my research mined the habits, practices, and sentiments of everyday life for insights into the cultural politics of class in the late 1990s. Over the course of two years, I conducted participant observation and interviews in sites of public and private life, including people's homes, their town hall, and even their sport-utility vehicles. I spent time with several families and worked as an "ethnographic babysitter" to have particularly focused time in the everyday life of one family. The ethnographic sites, spaces, and situations in which I spent my days and nights included family dinners and gatherings, shopping trips to the mall and the local strip malls, workouts at the gym where stay-at-home moms gathered after kids went to school, drives around town and through neighboring areas, TV- watching parties and Nintendo-playing hangouts, after-school activities, pre-prom parties, and a host of other ordinary aspects of suburban life. I also spent many evenings at public meetings in the town and the school district of which Danboro High School is a part, including those of the zoning board of adjustment, town council, planning board, and board of education.

During my research I found that even as middle-class stability continued to be undermined by neoliberal policies, people's sense of entitlement to the privileges and accoutrements of the middle classes was nevertheless amplified. Anxieties emerging from these conditions played out in a nervous and somewhat aggressive struggle for the appearance and feeling of class security, rather than coalitional efforts to address structural conditions threatening middle- class life. Each chapter of the book depicts how people were trying to create for themselves "a little security in an insecure world," to borrow a tag line from a Chevy Blazer...