December 13, 2011, 9:00 AM
We Are Not All Created Equal
The truth about the American class system
By Stephen Marche
More from this author
James Victore
Published in the January 2012 issue, on sale soon
There are some truths so hard to face, so ugly and so at odds with how we imagine the world should be, that nobody can accept them. Here's one: It is obvious that a class system has arrived in America — a recent study of the thirty-four countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development found that only Italy and Great Britain have less social mobility. But nobody wants to admit: If your daddy was rich, you're gonna stay rich, and if your daddy was poor, you're gonna stay poor. Every instinct in the American gut, every institution, every national symbol, runs on the idea that anybody can make it; the only limits are your own limits. Which is an amazing idea, a gift to the world — just no longer true. Culturally, and in their daily lives, Americans continue to glide through a ghostly land of opportunity they can't bear to tell themselves isn't real. It's the most dangerous lie the country tells itself.
Hulton Archive/Getty; Oli Scarff/Getty (Cameron); Lewis Whyld/PA Wire/AP (riots)
FIG. 1: Rather than fight for wages, women now argue about whether they want to be harassed at work: "Is the anodyne drone typing away in her silent cubicle free from risk of comment on her clothes, the terror of a joke, the unsettlement of an unwanted or even a wanted sexual advance, truly our ideal?" —Katie Roiphe, in The New York Times.
FIG. 2: Why is this man laughing?
FIG. 3: The 1999 Seattle protesters had job prospects. Today, the protesters are what the British call lower class. What we call lazy.
More than anything else, class now determines Americans' fates. The old inequalities — racism, sexism, homophobia — are increasingly antiquated [
fig. 1]. Women are threatening to overwhelm men in the workplace, and the utter collapse of the black lower middle class in the age of Obama — a catastrophe for the African-American community — has little to do with prejudice and everything to do with brute economics. Who wins and who loses has become simplified, purified: those who own and those who don't. Meanwhile Great Britain, the source of the class system, has returned, plain and simple, to its old aristocratic masters [
fig. 2]. Reverting to type, the overlords and the underclass seem little removed from their eighteenth-century predecessors. The overlords preach shared sacrifice from their palaces and the underclass riots [
fig. 3] and the middle classes quietly judge. Everybody knows where he stands.
Not in America. In the United States, the emerging aristocracy remains staunchly convinced that it is not an aristocracy, that it's the result of hard work and talent. The permanent working poor refuse to accept that their poverty is permanent. The class system is clandestine.
FIG. 4: If Mad Men were set today, Don Draper, the broke son of a whore, would be getting pepper-sprayed in Zuccotti Park because he couldn't pay back the $100,000 he owed NYU for his B.A. in integrated marketing.
FIG. 5: How much you like this show depends upon whether you imagine yourself as the extremely pale, brittle, well-mannered lady in this photograph, or the boy who shovels away her horse's 
.
And yet the most cherished dreams are the hardest to awaken from. The best-made shows on television now — some of the most beautifully shot, most beautifully articulated television shows ever made — capture in achingly precise detail the era that economists call the Great Compression, that shimmering, virtuous period before the 1970s when the middle class swelled so much that it came to believe it could never stop swelling — the original dangerous illusion.
Pan Am is an unlikely parable of American fluidity. Being stuck in a tube in the air, serving coffee, and having your ass grabbed achieves glamour by virtue of the characters' ease of movement. Don Draper [
fig. 4] is a new Gatsby — he transforms himself from penniless vet to salesclerk to partner in an ad firm. Meanwhile, in Sitcomland,
Modern Family has replaced working-class heroes like Homer Simpson and Ralph Kramden with the top 1 percent, and yet everyone, including the audience, seems to accept them as representative.
Meaningful, substantive approaches to class are going to have to come from elsewhere. This month, the second season of
Downton Abbey [
fig. 5] returns to PBS, and we may as well all have a look, because if we are going to have a European-style class system, we better begin to import their values. The scenery is extremely lovely. The arrangements are very cozy. British aristocrats always look like they're daring the world to line them all up against a wall and erase the entire parasitical group of them, but at Downton, at least, the ruling class is somewhat aware of the arbitrary nature of its status. The American ruling class could learn from their humility. At Downton Abbey, where everyone has a place, at least the boy who cleans the boots and knives isn't a bad person because of his job.
Chip Somodevilla/Getty
FIG. 6: Cain or Calvin (or total )? "My parents, they never played the victim card.... No, my dad's idea was, 'I want to work hard enough so I can buy a Cadillac--not take somebody else's.' And this is why I don't have a lot of patience for people who want to protest the success of somebody else."
Herman Cain's [
fig. 6] comment in a recent interview on the Occupy Wall Street movement, which is by no means an uncommon opinion, was this: "If you're not rich, blame yourself." The old Calvinist strain that connects prosperity to divine election runs deep. Work hard and stay late and you get to be a banker or doctor; drop out of high school or start using drugs and you'll end up at McDonald's. Even among liberals, the new trend toward behavioral economics demonstrates how poor people fare worse on tests requiring self-control, how their personal weaknesses create cycles of poverty. You don't have to be on talk radio to believe that the poor must be doing something wrong.
The Great Outcry that has filled the country with inchoate rage is the bloody mess of this fundamental belief in the justice of American outcomes crashing headfirst into the new reality. The majority of new college grads in the United States today are either unemployed or working jobs that don't require a degree. Roughly 85 percent of them moved back home in 2011, where they sit on an average debt of $27,200. The youth unemployment rate in general is 18.1 percent. Are these all bad people? None of us — not Generation Y, not Generation X, and certainly not the Boomers — have ever faced anything like it. The Tea Partiers blame the government. The Occupiers blame the financial industry. Both are really mourning the arrival of a new social order, one not defined by opportunity but by preexisting structures of wealth. At least the ranters are mourning. Those who are not screaming or in drum circles mostly pretend that the change isn't happening.
Joe Raedle/Getty
FIG. 7: The last time inequality was this high in the United States was 1929. Remember what happened next? And then after that? And after that, too?
Post-hope [
fig. 7], it is hard to imagine even any temporary regression back to the days of the swelling American middle class. The forces of inequality are simply too powerful and the forces against inequality too weak. But at least we can end the hypocrisy. In ten years, the next generation will no longer have the faintest illusion that the United States is a country with equality of opportunity. The least they're entitled to is some honesty about why.
TODAY ON THE POLITICS BLOG: The Real Meaning of the New Income-Inequality Numbers,
by Charles P. Pierce >>
Read more:
http://www.esquire.com/features/thou...#ixzz1hdoeBMQE 
Is Our Entertainment Society The Reason For Our Economic Problems?
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