The C Word

Accusations of class warfare are popular these days. Many commentators agree that questioning the size of Wall Street bonuses is Marxist and thus very bad. The logical end result of such class warfare rhetoric—these breathless pundits will tell you—is standing in bread lines. Scowl at billionaires one day, they say, and the next day you’ll be reenacting the Terror.

The National Review likened class warfare to the “politics of personal destruction.” World magazine suggested that the “preaching of class conflict, envy, and resentment” was the undiluted legacy of Stalin, Mao, and Castro. Their writers expressed tremendous concern that the economy would tank because of all this counterproductive talking. Say “soak the rich” enough times and the poor, the bitter and twisted lower classes, would decide to just take a seat and wait for their welfare checks. At the same time, the demoralized rich would feel unappreciated, sulk, and go Galt.

I understand why exhorting people to think in terms of haves and have-nots can be seen as callow pandering. (To wit: John Edwards.) People who’ve made a fetish of their own empathy earn whatever late-night jokes are made at their expense.

But as for the idea that the more we talk about class, the less inclined people will be to improve their situation in life, that’s a whole other leap. I’m not convinced it’s a safe assumption to make.

Class tension has many uses, after all. Listen to any rap album from the early to mid 90s and you’ll find that it’s perfectly possible—and eminently sane—to identify as poor, glower at the bastards that you believe have benefited from your poverty, and still aspire to be a rich bastard yourself. “Birthdays were the worst days,” said the Notorious B.I.G., “Now we sip champagne when we’re thirs-tay.”

Enacting revenge for adolescent slights via piles of dollars—that’s the American Dream. There’s a reason bankers call it “having ‘f-ck you’ money.”

There’s also plenty of historical weight behind the idea that more class consciousness actually keeps the capitalist system humming smoothly. At the height of the Gilded Age, Nebraska-born muckraker Rheta Childe Dorr argued that the dreary conditions that the domestic staff of New York City’s finest mansions had to endure—sleeping on mattresses in unheated basements, never allowed to have friends over—were the direct outgrowth of their employers’ refusal to acknowledge that they were, in fact, upper-class people who employed household servants. “In England people recognize the fact that they have a servant class. Every house of any pretensions provides a servants’ hall.”* But in America, the rich didn’t really understand that wealth carried with it certain obligations, and so, Dorr claimed, the working classes suffered greater indignities than they did in places that weren’t so shy about privilege and its repercussions.

But the main reason it’s pointless to rail against class warfare is that people are reacting to real numbers. The U.S. long prided itself on being a highly mobile and meritocratic society in which anyone from any background stood a reasonable chance of doing better than their parents did, as long as they were smart and worked hard. And yet. This is increasingly a fantasy. As David Moberg wrote in a meta-commentary on the New York Times 2005 series on class in the U.S.: “There is less social mobility in the United States now than in the ’80s (and less then than in the ’70s) and less mobility than in many other industrial countries, including Canada, Finland, Sweden and Germany… While the real income of the bottom 90 percent of Americans fell from 1980 to 2002, the income of the top 0.1 percent—making $1.6 million or more—went up two and a half times in real terms before taxes.”

Class consciousness doesn’t need to be preached by callow politicians for people to feel that.

In March of this year, Michelle Malkin took great offense to a lede in an AP story that characterized the 14 victims of a place crash in Butte, Montana as “headed to a retreat for the ultrarich.” Indefensible detail, Malkin fumed. “For crying out loud,” she fumed, this “class warfare-tinged coverage” was “dehumanizing” and “gratuitously callous,” as if the AP, in adding the term “ultrarich,” essentially stated that the crash victims deserved their fate. But the AP said no such thing—yes, that would be outrageous. So why the outrage? Let me propose a litmus test: We’ll know whether Malkin thinks all references to socioeconomic class are egregious, dehumanizing, and callous if she gets upset when the AP reports that 14 people have died, say, on the Q100 bus headed to Rikers Island.

*A place where the household staff could socialize and receive callers, prevented as they were from leaving the property except on days off.