The Classless
Society
Most Americans have grown up believing that they are members of the
Middle Class, though few have given any real thought to what a class
system in America even means. America, after all, has promoted itself as
a "classless society", which is a pretty treacherous boast, intended to
say something noble about the character of the average Joe. We give
everybody an even break, a fair deal, regardless of race or religious
affiliation, or other such considerations. Or at least, that's what we
Americans like to think. One wonders about the downsides of that in a
world in which crazy economic imbalances have reached historic
proportions.
By RAR
Americans
have tended to deny that there is a class structure to American society. The
notion of it crashes with great cacophonous effect on the craggy foundations of
a country that promises so much. The culture of the nation is steeped in blue
sky optimism, typified by some variation on the following themes: "Any
child who applies his or herself, works hard, and plays by the rules can grow up
to be the President of the United States." "Every generation in America has the
opportunity to do better than did the generation before them." "In America you
can start with nothing and end up wealthy." "Every man a king!"
The
impressions created by slogans such as those carried the weight of promise and
were tremendously motivating, particularly to foreign immigrants who weren't
seeing promises anything like these coming from their own home countries.
America was that melting pot where everything that was blended together was said
to work, though this would have been news to African Americans, who got no
promises beyond "40 acres and a mule". On remarkably scant evidence, however,
the bromides and the platitudes and the admonitions to keep plugging away seemed
to be embraced by the American culture that developed during the Industrial Age
and blossomed thereafter. There developed squalid urban slums, which were
transition grounds for new immigrant arrivals, and which transitioned themselves
over time, gentrifying in parts as the U.S. economy flourished.
In
these urban areas, such as New York City and Boston, there developed a
close-quarters residential housing structure that brought attention to the
stratification of American society. There were rich neighborhoods existing next
to poor, with the differences being impossible to ignore. These same variations
extended out into rural areas, where the living proximity was not so dense as in
urban areas, and class distinctions were somewhat less apparent.
There
is no royalty structure - no royal family - in America, and for that reason many
think of America as a "classless society" relative to European societies, with
their histories of Kings and Queens, Princes and Princesses, Dukes and
Duchesses, Earls and more. There is also not a lot of outright discomfort, even
at the lowest end of American society, in terms of minimal needs being met.
There is hunger in America and huge health care issues among the lower classes,
though the general perception is that America is not a nation wherein large
numbers of people live without their basic needs being met. That is certainly
statistically true, but does not represent a complete picture of American
society.
From USA Today, September 13, 2013 - Research
issued this year by the Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University
found that the number of "extremely low-income renters" rose 2.5 million to 12.1
million from 2007 to 2011, even as the number of affordable housing units
dropped to 6.8 million. And aging Baby Boomers could swell the ranks of the
homeless — the Harvard study found that nearly one in three people in federally
assisted housing are 62 or older.
Americans don't really cross paths much with people outside of their own
social-economic class, which has been an uncomfortable thing for Americans to
define. This excerpt from Wikipedia nicely summarizes the general perceptions.
Many Americans believe in a
simple three-class model that includes the "rich", the "middle class", and
the "poor".
That is pretty much the view of class that has prevailed in America's lower
class divisions, your correspondent being unqualified to speak for the view
from the upper bunk. That, in fact, makes the point that class structures are
inherently insular and people at various levels of the socio-economic class
structure don't intermingle or interact in any significant way with people other
than of their class. "Most definitions of class
structure group people according to wealth, income, education, type of
occupation, and membership in a specific subculture or social network."
- Wikipedia. Class, in all of those ways, is an organic division into
"types", some more fully vested with advantages than others, and in that way the
traditional way of viewing society as a pyramid structure is probably wrong and
possibly counterproductive to anything but the prevailing state. This RCJ
graphic suggests that given the imbalance in annual "earned" income in the U.S.,
the traditional pyramid model of viewing the economic classes might be
jettisoned in favor of the more accurate teeter-totter model. In the U.S. the
balance of economic equality has shifted the fulcrum so far from
perfectly-balanced center that it now rests well to the right, squarely under
the advantaged class. The fulcrum of their advantage is so out of proportion to
the rest of the U.S. economy as to put them in a perfect condition of permanent
perch in a stratosphere of wealth completely beyond the comprehension of the
grounded middle and lower classes.
While Americans have been most
comfortable with the Upper-Middle-Lower class divisions, sociologists Dennis
Gilbert, William Thompson, Joseph Hickey, and James Henslin have proposed class
systems with six distinct social classes. These class models feature:
-
an
upper or
capitalist class consisting of the rich and powerful,
-
an
upper
middle class consisting of highly educated and affluent
professionals,
-
a
middle
class consisting of college-educated individuals employed
in white-collar industries,
-
a
lower middle class,
-
a
working
class constituted by clerical and blue collar workers
whose work is highly routinized,
-
and a
lower
class divided between the working poor and the unemployed
underclass.
These seem to more
closely reflect the economic divisions in the American class system.
When polled on the
subject of distribution of wealth, even educated Americans have been shockingly
unaware of the inequalities that exist. As UC-Santa Cruz Sociology Professor G.
William Domhoff pointed out in his study on "Wealth, Income and Power": "They
said that the ideal wealth distribution would be one in which the top 20% owned
between 30 and 40 percent of the privately held wealth, which is a far cry from
the 85 percent that the top 20% actually own. They also said that the bottom 40%
-- that's 120 million Americans -- should have between 25% and 30%, not the mere
8% to 10% they thought this group had, and far above the 0.3% they actually had.
In fact, there's no country in the world that has a wealth distribution close to
what Americans think is ideal when it comes to fairness. So maybe Americans are
much more egalitarian than most of them realize about each other, at least in
principle and before the rat race begins."
There again, Americans
want to believe that they are both giving and getting a fair deal out there in
the free markets of capital exchange. So how much concern should one have that
tend not to have a very accurate point of view of actual present-state economic
conditions. What are the downsides of that lack of awareness as it pertains to
the exercise of a democratic system of governance? And while we are on that
subject, how could a properly functioning democratic form of government had
allowed these economic class divisions to have developed at their present levels
of imbalance?
Writes sociologist Domhoff - "Numerous studies show that the wealth
distribution has been concentrated throughout American history, with the top 1%
already owning 40-50% in large port cities like Boston, New York, and Charleston
in the 1800s. (But it wasn't as bad in the 18th and 19th centuries as it is now,
as summarized in a 2012 article in The Atlantic.) The wealth distribution was
fairly stable over the course of the 20th century, although there were small
declines in the aftermath of the New Deal and World II, when most people were
working and could save a little money. There were progressive income tax rates,
too, which took some money from the rich to help with government services.
"Then there was a further decline, or flattening, in the 1970s, but this time
in good part due to a fall in stock prices, meaning that the rich lost some of
the value in their stocks. By the late 1980s, however, the wealth distribution
was almost as concentrated as it had been in 1929, when the top 1% had 44.2% of
all wealth. It has continued to edge up since that time, with a slight decline
from 1998 to 2001, before the economy crashed in the late 2000s and little
people got pushed down again."
The "little people", who comprise 80% of the population, remain a
skewed-against group in large part because they lack the economic muscle to
compete for the legislative and executive control that would be required to
right on economic system that has become so imbalanced.
Here, however, is where it gets complicated, because while an economic class
may share a financial profile they do not necessarily share cultural profiles
and may negate one another's initiatives for change based on cultural biases,
rather than economic calculations. People who feel they have made personal
gains, that they wish to protect, may not support programs that they feel might
take from their gains to offer special assistance to others in the lower
classes.
Moreover, while Americans may wish to deny the existence of strict and
limiting social classes, they tend to be immensely aware of their being a top
ranking class against whom they are powerless. That is the part of the class
system that Americans recognize and accept, the reality to which they surrender.
The why of acceptance is in the fact that people see the resistance to
distributing wealth in a more equitable manner, and they recognize the magnitude
of any challenge to the status quo. Nothing short of violent revolution brings
down an entrenched monarchy, for that is really what America has developed to
become. It is really just like the monarchies of old Europe, with a thousand or
so royal families reigning over the entire capitalistic enterprise, sucking all
there is to suck of its lifeblood, leaving just enough so that the unwashed
masses can stay alive for the purpose of continued labor.
That is what we have here in the way of a U.S. class system: an oligarchy,
largely invisible, who leave crumbs and promises as they exploit a nation (a
world) of souls whose defense is nothing more than denial, ignorance, and
shallow ideology. The imbalance of wealth distribution in America is beyond
historical reference, far greater than even the corruption of Rome at the zenith
of its power.
One wonders how much longer Americans can go on before finally realizing what
the country's class system is actually doing to each of them and the lives of
their families.
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