For a while there, back in the 1950s and 1960s, it looked as if the dependent underclass might melt away completely, leaving the U.S.A. the world’s first ever all-bourgeois nation.

Now the opposite thing is happening. Our country is being re-proletarianized. The ranks of the poor and dependent are swelling. Here is a story from the CSM, headlined South’s Public School Children are Now Mainly Low Income.

For the first time in 40 years, two new studies show, more than half of public school students in the South are eligible for free or reduced lunch—a watershed moment in a 15-year wealth slide that comes amid resurging racial and economic inequalities in the former Confederacy. The rise is part of a nationwide surge: Low-income students now represent 12 percentage points more of the student body than in 1990.

Why is this happening? Globalization, rising inequality, and unskilled immigration.

Nationwide, two overarching factors seem to be driving public-school woes, experts say: In recent years, the erosion of middle-class, blue-collar jobs has led to more people working for lower wages, and many parents who can afford private school have taken their children out of public schools altogether. This skews the average income of remaining families lower. The South in particular has been hard hit by the closing of textile plants in South Carolina and the changing coal economy of the Appalachian highlands. Another reason for the shift, some experts note, is the influx of poorer Latinos at least into the Carolinas and Georgia.

Thanks a lot to all those politicians who helped this happen—Teddy Kennedy probably at the front of the line.