Lowry: What exactly do we mean by ‘middle class?’

That collective character, “middle class,” played a starring role in Gov. Phil Murphy’s near hourlong budget address last Tuesday.

In an early moment, while he was bashing the policies of former Gov. Chris Christie, Murphy said that the Christie era “was eight years of shutting out middle-class New Jersey families and shutting the door on those struggling to get there.”

Notice the last part, there, and its lyrical resonance with the famous words from the classic Emma Lazarus poem, “your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

On another occasion, in a nod to the state’s public workforce, Murphy said:

“Our public workers are not the enemy, they are our neighbors. They are also taxpayers. They are the heart of our middle class.”

Such is standard strategy of good persuasive writing, or speechifying: Hammer the point home, again and again.

Still, I remained at a bit of a loss. What, exactly, did he mean by “middle class?”

To get the answer, or at least “an answer,” I reached out Thursday to one who has researched and written extensively on the subject, Professor Michael Merrill, an economic historian who runs the Labor Education Action Research Network (LEARN) at the Rutgers School of Management and Labor Relations.

“Middle class, in my view, is when you talk about people who can make a respectable living, and can have choices, but they’re not infinite,” Merrill told me when we spoke by phone. “That’s what it means to be middle class.”

And I think that’s what Murphy means when he talks about the rising middle class.

Giving people a decent path to opportunity – to a place where they don’t have to choose, say, between buying cough medicine for their sick child, or paying the light bill. I don’t know if a “millionaires tax” is the best way to do that, but it seems “a way” to begin to narrow the “wealth gap.”

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When I spoke to Merrill, he took a brief, deep dive into economic and labor issues that have shaped this country since the late 19th century, when big “trusts” and “robber barons” first began to exert power, and the wage of a daily worker began to be called into question.

We talked about the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York City in 1911, which claimed 146 young Italian and Jewish immigrant women who worked there, and the famous Ludlow Massacre in Colorado in 1914, where National Guard troops, along with armed goons hired by John D. Rockefeller’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company, shot down striking coal miners and their families, killing 25 – including 11 children.

It’s imperative, in this talk of today’s “middle class,” to look back at how we got here, because the wealth gap and income gap keep growing, approaching what it was a hundred years ago. Indeed, Murphy spoke fervently of the so-called “wealth gap,” and its tie-in to racial income inequality, during his State of the State speech in January. That was followed by a new $15 minimum wage law, and the expansion of paid family leave.

Merrill said he feared that we, as a society, are “moving back to a ‘dog eat dog’ system,” where competitiveness is all that matters, where “generosity is not the first impulse” and where “the only thing that matters is whether you finish on top; you finish second and you’re a loser.”

“Being middle class is not just about how much money you make,” Merrill said, “but about how much choice you have. Can you choose leisure over work, or do you have to work all the time?

“Middle class, to me, means being part of a system where prosperity is being shared; where you don’t have to fight for every dime.”

He lauded Murphy’s goals, which seemed based, he said, in the governor choosing to recall his own middle class roots in Newton and Needham, Massachusetts, and acting accordingly.

I don’t know whether Murphy can achieve those "middle class" goals, but I too applaud him for trying.

Bruce Lowry is editorial page editor for The Record and NorthJersey.com