[Marxism] Class in America

[Louis Proyect <lnp3@xxxxxxxxx>]

NY Times, May 15, 2005
Class in America: Shadowy Lines That Still Divide
By JANNY SCOTT and DAVID LEONHARDT

There was a time when Americans thought they understood class. The upper
crust vacationed in Europe and worshiped an Episcopal God. The middle class
drove Ford Fairlanes, settled the San Fernando Valley and enlisted as
company men. The working class belonged to the A.F.L.-C.I.O., voted
Democratic and did not take cruises to the Caribbean.

ABOUT THIS SERIES
This is the first in a series of articles examining the role of social
class in America today. A team of reporters spent more than a year
exploring ways that class - defined as a combination of income, education,
wealth and occupation - influences destiny in a society that likes to think
of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity.
Monday: Class Is a Matter of Life and Death

Today, the country has gone a long way toward an appearance of
classlessness. Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have
dazzled their grandparents. Social diversity has erased many of the old
markers. It has become harder to read people's status in the clothes they
wear, the cars they drive, the votes they cast, the god they worship, the
color of their skin. The contours of class have blurred; some say they have
disappeared.

But class is still a powerful force in American life. Over the past three
decades, it has come to play a greater, not lesser, role in important ways.
At a time when education matters more than ever, success in school remains
linked tightly to class. At a time when the country is increasingly
integrated racially, the rich are isolating themselves more and more. At a
time of extraordinary advances in medicine, class differences in health and
lifespan are wide and appear to be widening.

And new research on mobility, the movement of families up and down the
economic ladder, shows there is far less of it than economists once thought
and less than most people believe. [Click here for more information on
income mobility.] In fact, mobility, which once buoyed the working lives of
Americans as it rose in the decades after World War II, has lately
flattened out or possibly even declined, many researchers say.

Mobility is the promise that lies at the heart of the American dream. It is
supposed to take the sting out of the widening gulf between the have-mores
and the have-nots. There are poor and rich in the United States, of course,
the argument goes; but as long as one can become the other, as long as
there is something close to equality of opportunity, the differences
between them do not add up to class barriers.

Over the next three weeks, The Times will publish a series of articles on
class in America, a dimension of the national experience that tends to go
unexamined, if acknowledged at all. With class now seeming more elusive
than ever, the articles take stock of its influence in the lives of
individuals: a lawyer who rose out of an impoverished Kentucky hollow; an
unemployed metal worker in Spokane, Wash., regretting his decision to skip
college; a multimillionaire in Nantucket, Mass., musing over the cachet of
his 200-foot yacht.

The series does not purport to be all-inclusive or the last word on class.
It offers no nifty formulas for pigeonholing people or decoding folkways
and manners. Instead, it represents an inquiry into class as Americans
encounter it: indistinct, ambiguous, the half-seen hand that upon closer
examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.

The trends are broad and seemingly contradictory: the blurring of the
landscape of class and the simultaneous hardening of certain class lines;
the rise in standards of living while most people remain moored in their
relative places.

Even as mobility seems to have stagnated, the ranks of the elite are
opening. Today, anyone may have a shot at becoming a United States Supreme
Court justice or a C.E.O., and there are more and more self-made
billionaires. Only 37 members of last year's Forbes 400, a list of the
richest Americans, inherited their wealth, down from almost 200 in the
mid-1980's.

So it appears that while it is easier for a few high achievers to scale the
summits of wealth, for many others it has become harder to move up from one
economic class to another. Americans are arguably more likely than they
were 30 years ago to end up in the class into which they were born.

A paradox lies at the heart of this new American meritocracy. Merit has
replaced the old system of inherited privilege, in which parents to the
manner born handed down the manor to their children. But merit, it turns
out, is at least partly class-based. Parents with money, education and
connections cultivate in their children the habits that the meritocracy
rewards. When their children then succeed, their success is seen as earned.

full: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/15/national/class/OVERVIEW-FINAL.html


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