Hildegarde

So, I’m sitting here, reading through the comments from yesterday, and being thoroughly astonished–yes, of course, on one level and in one very small segment of the world, “social class” is about who gets to go to which parties–

But social class in the real world is about who gets to be Secretary of the Treasury, and who, born into poverty, makes his way out of it or gets stuck there.

Or, for that matter, who, born into a “good” family, ends up bombing out instead of making a good family of his own.

Or her.

I’m being grammatical today.

I think what happens in the US is that we tend to think of social class in one of two ways, both of which are largely wrong:

First, we think of social class is money.  If two guys have a million dollars, they’re both “upper class.”  If two families live in the same trailer park, they’re both “lower class.”

This has the virtue of being sometimes sort of true–if you were going to make odds, that’s the way you’d bet, because a larger percentage of each group would belong to the social class they seem to on the surface.

There are reasons for this that have nothing at all to do with chance. The higher up the social scale you get, the harder families work to insure that their children simply will not fit into any of the classes below them.

This is less a matter of snobbery than it is of protection.  Class is a set of attitudes and assumptions about the world, and as such it steers children into some sorts of behavior and not in others.  Middle class parents expect their children to attend class, be polite to their teachers, get their homework done, and have a job at least in the summer to show they have a decent work ethic.  They want those messages reinforced, not sabotaged by kids who think the world owes them a living or that school is for chumps on their way to making chump change.

A family whose parents work two jobs (at things like lawn care worker and convenience store clerk) each to keep the kids in parochial school, who show up at every parent-teacher conference, who  make sure their kids do their homework, who push college and scholarships at every turn–those people are middle class, whether they live in a nice development somewhere or in a trailer park.

It’s not about the money.

What it is about, though, or sort of half about, is the style–social class is distinctly about styles, because styles is the shorthand by which we recognize each other. 

And it’s the style that causes the problem.

Go back and listen, sometimes, to liberals talking about George Bush or conservatives talking about John Kerry–listen to just how much of it is not about substance but about style.

Think of that infamous ad during the 2004 elections about how we don’t want your brie-eating, wine-tasting, New York Times reading snobs out here in Iowa.

I had people on this blog defend that ad–and defend the idea of categorizing people by their tastes–as a good way of telling one side from the other.

The problem is, it’s only half a good way to tell one side from the other. 

The personal taste side of social class is essentially superficial.  It does not really connect to any of the core issues in class.  Both Ann Coulter and Bill Maher–who, by the way, dated each other in college–are “educated upper middle class” in tastes, habits, and assumptions about other people,  and they don’t agree on just about anything that would matter in electing them to office.

What we call the “culture wars” in the US is basically a war of class–of the middle class vs the educated upper middle class, to be precise.  We like to call the educated upper middle class the “elites,” but when we do it we’re using “elites” in a way that’s new. 

The way liberals responded to Bush–not in opposing his policies, which is sane, but in being driven nearly crazy by the very sight of him–was a result of the fact that Bush was so solidly, uncompromisingly middle class in superficial tastes. 

Bush may have gone to Andover and Yale, but he talked, walked, ate and responded to things like books and movies as if he’d gone to John F. Kennedy High and Missouri State. 

Bush opponents do not respond that way to Ann Coulter, for instance, because in spite of her political ideas, she’s as solidly educated upper middle class as they come.

In fact, at the moment, the educated upper middle class has a lock on the professions, from law and medicine and college teaching to administrative jobs in government, banking and major institutions.

That does not, of course, mean that somebody whose superficial tastes are otherwise cannot get where he wants to go in those areas.  It does mean that such a person will have a harder time than somebody who walks the walk and talks the talk.

And, in general, if you don’t have the superficial affect, you’re going to have a much harder time getting anyplace in those particular areas of work and life.

That’s what college is for for a lot of poorer kids–it’s a place they go where they can be initiated into what they have to look like in order to be accepted as what they want to be, in the careers they want to have.  You don’t walk into an interview with a law firm–or a good law school–in a mustard stained t-shirt talking about yo mama.  You could be a cross between Jesus Christ and Clarence Darrow and not seal the deal.

People who do seal the deal without the superficial trappings of taste tend to do it outside the institutional structures of official organizations.  One of the best contrasts of class I’ve ever seen comes in that movie I’ve been on about, Too Big To Fail, when Hank Paulson calls Warren Buffett to ask his advice.  Paulson is dressed in Upper Middle Class Impressive.  Warren Buffett is dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and is in the middle of buying his granddaughters ice cream at Dairy Queen.

If you want another good example, look at the characters of Charles van Doren and Herbert Stempel in the movie Quiz Show. 

Books about social class tend to concentrate on the superficial aspects of taste because those are the most visual markers of the issue.  They rely on things like who goes to which party because those are the most immediately dramatic possible events in stories about the issue.

But the issue itself isn’t about taste, or about parties.  It’s about how someone navigates a change in his own class status. 

And it is, I think, the quintessential subject of American culture.  Warren Buffett at the Dairy Queen.  Mark Zuckerberg forcing himself into a jacket to go to dinner with President Obama.  George H.W. Bush trying to eat pork rinds and then not knowing the price of a gallon of milk.

Of course, I don’t know the price of a gallon of milk at this moment, but that’s because almost everybody in this house is allergic to it.