Our Common Cause

There is often much talk of class warfare, especially from those who use it as a pejorative term to defend their status as the upper class that has been winning the war for quite some time. I basically divide our social hierarchy into five categories, at the top you have the wealthy, those whose salaries reach well into the six and often seven or eight figures. At the bottom are the poor, those who are truly destitute and living pretty much at the mercy of whatever social welfare is available to them. These two groups combined probably make up less than ten percent of our population, which leaves the large majority in one of the three so-called middle classes.

The upper middle class is generally well to do, perhaps not living quite as comfortably or being as insulated from the reality of economics as the truly wealthy, but nonetheless reaping the benefits of a comfortable existence, at least until recently. These people tend to be educated and industrious, entrepreneurs and managers, they tend to be mostly white and mostly conservative, although thankfully they are becoming more diverse on both counts in our contemporary society.

The lower middle class is the working class, people that are hanging on by a thread, barely keeping themselves above the poverty line, generally working hard, often as hard or more so than the white collar upper middle class, but working in blue collar and service jobs that increasingly don’t go very far toward making ends meet. They tend to be under educated and are more likely to be non white in the cities, but much of our rural population also fall into this category. They are the people who work on assembly lines and perform customer service tasks, jobs that lack both prestige and high pay.

The middle class falls somewhere in between these two levels, consisting of a blend of education levels and ethnicities, a group that is a majority in both urban and rural settings, people that work as teachers and nurses, rank and file office workers and other valuable service providers who do much of the important work of society but who don’t share in the financial rewards at a level that is commiserate with the value of the work they do.

What many of us in today’s society fail to realize is that our plight, and our interests therefore are much more linked and dependent upon one another than we might like to think. We are a nation of strivers for the most part, and we have been ingrained with what is referred to as the Protestant work ethic, the belief that if you work hard and follow the rules, if you are talented and disciplined and willing to work your way up the ladder that you will eventually be rewarded. The result of this ethic has been throughout most of our history a steady generational upward mobility. Another, less productive result has been the tendency to disassociate ourselves from the group below us on the ladder and to almost slavishly serve the interests of those above us, those who occupy the spots that we covet and expect will become our own in due time.

This explains why so many of the middle class seem to vote against their economic self-interest by voting for Republican fiscal policies that clearly favor the wealthy at the expense of the working class and the poor. Nobody anticipates that they will descend the social ladder, so why worry about what is happening to the people below us. The Protestant ethic also convinces us that those below us are there because they just don’t work hard enough, have enough education, or enough dedication to climbing the ladder, that in our society full of equal opportunity these people are where they are due to some personal defect of character and mind. The result is that despite being a nation comprised mostly of Christians, the term welfare has come to take on a very negative connotation.

What many in the middle class fail to realize, is that those above us on the ladder likely feel the same way about us. That if we had just gotten more education, or been willing to sacrifice more and put in more hours at our job, that we too could have the benefits that they have worked for and to their mind earned. We like to rail against the rich for their seemingly uncaring attitudes toward the middle class, but in reality many of us hold these same attitudes toward the working class and the poor.

Perhaps this is to an extent human nature, perhaps it is owing to our social environment and our capitalist economy and its aspect of competition. Regardless of the reasons for these attitudes, my assertion is that they are unhealthy and counter productive for both our society and our economy. If we were to realize that all classes rely on the others, and that policies that benefit one can have a positive effect on the others, that it is not a zero sum game, we might start to support a more sensible and humane politics, and in the process improve our society for all of its members.

What would such a society look like? It is difficult to predict, and I certainly don’t adhere to a utopian view that defies political, economic, and social realities, in short human nature is such that there will always be class distinctions and people will always want to fraternize with those whom they share common values and a common lot in life, and to avoid to at least some degree those with which they do not. But that shouldn’t preclude us from realizing that our interests are such that we have much more commonality than reasons for opposing one another.

For the middle class, where most of us dwell and in all likelihood will continue to reside, it means that we must neither look down on the poor and working class, nor should we have an attitude toward the rich that is hostile or, on the other hand overly admiring. We need the working class to do the jobs that are required to keep our system going, just as we need the upper class to provide the capital and to create the jobs that keep us going. Again, it is not a zero sum game where the gains of one necessarily need cause the loss of another. If done properly, our political, social, and economic policies can be to the benefit of all.

We have common interests, and the sooner we all realize and accept this the better off we will all be. Societies and civilizations most often fail to realize their potential not due to a foreign conqueror, or to the tyranny of the aristocracy or the government, but because the different parts of the society become so fractured as to prevent the whole from working as efficiently and productively as it can.

We have come a great ways in the last half century towards breaking down ethnic and gender barriers. Granted that those that still exist are stubborn and will require more work to eradicate completely, but the momentum is clearly on the side of equal opportunity for all members of society, and towards a culture that in the words of one of our greatest moral philosophers Martin Luther King, judges individuals on the content of their character.

Yet a barrier that still exists and which poses a serious threat to our common good is that of social class. Considering our recent history in breaking down other noxious barriers, there is cause for optimism that this wall too will in time come down, and that the result will be a society that produces what the utilitarian philosophers advocate, which is the greatest good for the greatest number. Only then will we be a nation that has reached its true potential, and that can serve to better the lives of its own members while serving as a shining beacon for those around the world, which ultimately is the promise of this great nation at and since its founding.