Middle Class status was a blip...an aberration, a cultural iconic status that was well-hyped, and actually achieved by very few.
A look at American life in the rear view mirror is helpful in understanding it.
Prior to our entry into WWII, MOST people lived in a rich-poor USA. People in big cities lived crammed into small apartments (often over Mom& Pop) businesses that barely covered expenses, or in run-down tenement buildings.
Rural/small-town people lived a hand-to-mouth existence, and worked dawn to dusk...usually in very small ramshackle places.
The country was mired in depression/post depression angst, with men roaming the country looking for work, and families loading up what little they had into anything they could move, just to try their luck somewhere else. Jobs were scarce, and when found, paid little. The only "un-rich" who had credit were the ones who "owed their soul to the company-store".
WWII swooped up most of the men and sent them abroad, which immediately created millions of "job openings".
It's no surprise that an eager female workforce snapped up those jobs, and gave us pretty much "full employment".
Post-WWII (only a 6 yr span from start to finish), brought back the men (and displaced most of the women) and with those men, an eagerness to make up for lost time. It's also important to remember that most of the rest of the world's production capacity was thrashed, so we were poised to shoot right to the top of the heap, and we did.
The timeline from 1950 (when most of the ones in the GI Bill had finished college) to the mid-60's, created millions of new families who truly needed everything. The generation born after the war would be living AWAY from the "family homes". Until after the war , it was not unusual for families to be in multi-generational living arrangements.
A look at old census records showed me that at one time in the late 20's, my grandparents lived at an address that also housed 2 brothers, their wives and children and 3 elderly parents. As a kid I rode bikes & roller-skated past that old house many times, never even knowing the history of that place, or that once upon a time, my ancestors jammed so many people into that 4 bedroom house.
Post WWII vets had earned the right to have their own place, and took advantage of the opportunity.
Movies, magazines & later TV, showed us all what "middle class" was supposed to be, and Madison Avenue was happy to oblige.
As the only exporter of "stuff", and a country with tremendous pent-up demand for all the goods & services that people had been denied by first the Depression and later the war, it's no surprise that we boomed.
Even in the midst of "middle class", it never really was what we had all been sold, because the seeds of destruction had already been planted. There were many children, who would soon be fighting each other for jobs that would start disappearing as they aged.
People who had never dreamed that they would own a home, were able to buy that house & have a car and take a vacation now and then, and even save some money, but behind the scenes, business was already trying to find ways to eliminate expenses, and with them , jobs.
As a child of the 50's, it was rare to find ANYTHING in stores that was not "made in the USA". Occasionally we would run across something that said "Made in occupied Japan", and a little later, just "Made in Japan", but that stuff did not sell well to people who had recently been at war with Japan.
Business is all about profit, and every penny saved on wages & benefits, is a penny in the pockets of the ones in charge.
The children of WWII vets & their wives never experienced the Depression, and had only ever known plenty, so it should come as no surprise, that this generation would not be as frugal as their parents' & grandparents' generations had been...especially after a young-lifetime of being indulged by parents who felt lucky to have survived the war and who had so much more than many of them had ever expected to have.
This era also ushered in (in a big way) cheap throw-away stuff. It was suddenly possible (even preferred) to buy single use "stuff". Where people used to hang onto things and repair them over and over, and then dismantle them for parts for the "next one", now those items were just tossed out and a new one bought to replace it. Repair shops faded away...and with them, a family income went as well.
For 169 years (1776-1945), America was rich v poor, with very little in the middle, and in a 6 year period, we "created" Middle Class". By the time the 1970's rolled around, "Middle Class" was getting a little ragged around the edges, and starting to be less achievable by more and more people.
Credit cards replaced wage-increases necessary to maintain the standard of living that most people now felt entitled to, and as the rest of the world needed less of what we "made", it was no surprise that jobs and the benefits that came with those jobs, would start to decline in number. The technology boom also made whole swaths of "the economy" outdated and non-existent. The problem though, is that there were people....real people...still attached to those segments of vanished job markets. Those people had/have families, and expenses.
The union movement (earned at great cost decades earlier) was becoming "unnecessary" because there were just so many Boomers to fill a shrinking number of jobs, and mechanization was marching along to eliminate more jobs.
Decades of bad legislation and sweetheart deals made in back rooms, have sold us all out, and the need to rely on credit for so many, have undone millions of families.
Recession after recession , with an aggravating regularity, coupled with recurring bouts of massive fraud and the following taxpayer bail-outs , has dealt the Middle Class a pretty shitty hand, and there are no more Aces in the deck.
We may be soon returning to the way of life we had for most of our nation's "life"....a hand-to-mouth, unsure way of living...We had a blip of about 30 years of what most would call "Middle Class" (mostly for the people born in the early-1930's) , and now it's ending, and we're headed back to what we always were..rich v poor, with most of us scrambling for the scraps. We may have better quality scraps these days, but they are still scraps..
