Page 34 - American Conservative September/October 2015

VEconomy
olume after volume has been devoted to the anthropology of class, its trap- pings, its contradictions, its “tells” and secret handshakes. Here it is enough to
remind ourselves that today’s obsession with the middle class is rooted in the old, old story of hu- man self-classification. People sort, grade, gauge, and rank each other all day and night.
Everyone wants to be middle-class because hu- man beings need to think well of themselves, or else endless misery and retribution ensue. Richard Sennett and Jonathan Cobb called their 1972 book The Hidden Injuries of Class, but most of these in- juries are either quite noticeable or hidden in plain sight. Sennett and Cobb discovered that the most marginal of America’s working class would rather be perceived as “middle class” than revolt and over- throw the rule of capital altogether—or even make more money.
Entire nations suffer class anxiety. Adam Nicol- son quoted unusually candid Greek sources in Na- tional Geographic earlier this year:
When the Greeks joined the EU in 1981, we felt like a ship arriving in port ... that we were being treated as a proper part of Europe for the first time. The euro crisis was a moment of guilt, shared by all of us, a sense that somehow we were all responsible for the bad things that were happening to us. It was a huge, nation- al blow to self-esteem, a confirmation of the Greeks’ worst fears, that we didn’t really belong in Europe at all.
Naturally such humiliation is intolerable and ac- counts for the continuing “violence of shame” in Greece—herself, ironically, the birthplace of classi- cal culture, sedulously aped for centuries.
Older societies are still working through their an- cient class systems, which were actually castes: de- fined conditions into which people were born and where they remained all their lives. The New World, however, posited itself as a classless society, although it never was, even at the outset. In place of the Old World’s “better than thou,” America’s mantra was “as good as thou.” Classes in the colonies founded by Great Britain were fluid and porous; the bourgeois cult of romantic love, as opposed to arranged mar- riage, enabled many to “marry up,” and the still-open frontier permitted little men to grow grand, liberated from the constant sucker punches of class.
In today’s usage, “bourgeois” has decayed to mean square, unfashionable, boring, narrow-minded,
suburban, etc. The exclamation “How bourgeois!” is not intended kindly. The word’s fate is similar to the way chrétien migrated over time from “Christian”— a fellow soul—to “cretin.” H.L. Mencken had this decay in mind when he invented the terms “boobo- isie” and “Boobus Americanus.” Paul Fussell’s Class ridicules this rank’s shallow status fixations. From captains of industry back down to “little men,” the bourgeoisie has crumbled both linguistically and economically.
Circa 1800, 80 percent of Americans were self- employed. By 1870 it was 41 percent. By 1940 it was 18 percent. By 1967 it was only 9 percent. (The fig- ures are from Victoria Bonnell and Michael Reich, Workers in the American Economy: Data on the Labor Force.) Now, we are told, it is really only the “One Percent.”
“Middle class,” meanwhile, came to mean anyone who works for a living. It is not unusual to see “mid- dle class” and “working class” used interchangeably, which has led to the cheesy equivalence of “white collar” and “blue collar.” Even the unemployed are now eligible for elevation to the great middle. Any- one who has clung to a part-time job or might get one via state largesse is potentially middle-class. Only the rich don’t qualify.
Middle class, in other words, has completely lost its socioeconomic bearings. “High-end” signifi- ers are fetishized as much by the wannabe middle classes as they are by the One Percent. The very concept of middle class has become confounded with global issues of modernization, imperialism, and cultural hegemony. It is José Ortega y Gasset’s
E“revolt of the masses” on steroids.
veryone agrees that the middle class pays the lion’s share of taxes. It is deep in debt—illiquid. It is “endangered.” It is being “squeezed,” “crippled,” “hollowed
out.” It suffers from erosion of net worth. Its at- rophy is blamed for the widening income gap. It is courted by left and right alike with great vigor during election years, each striving to outdo the other with violent praise for its attributes. It is “the backbone of our economy.” The American middle class is tasked with lifting the entire world out of recession.
Taoist philosophy observes that the more a qual- ity is spoken of—for instance, filial piety—the less it is found in real life. Obsessive talk of the mid- dle class is everywhere. Opening a newspaper at random—the Washington Times—we read: “As he pushed a $500 billion federal investment in
34 THE AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE
SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2015