Who Is the ‘Forgotten Man'?

In 1932, at the darkest moment of the Great Depression, Franklin Roosevelt evoked the "forgotten man" as a reason to rebuild the economy from the "bottom up." More than three decades later, after Richard Nixon's 1968 victory, the journalist Peter Schrag identified the "Forgotten American" -- the white "lower middle class" voter -- as the key to the nation's apparent rejection of the Great Society and the New Deal order. "In the guise of the working class -- or the American yeoman or John Smith -- he was once the hero of the civic books, the man that Andrew Jackson called ‘the bone and sinew of the country,' " Mr. Schrag wrote. "Now he is ‘the forgotten man,' perhaps the most alienated person in America."

That this "forgotten" American could be used both to uphold and to dismantle liberalism suggests that this American political identity has never been especially fixed: Democrat or Republican, liberal or conservative, but populist above all...