Finally, on the right there has been a tendency to reduce class identity almost entirely to various signifiers in consumer culture. Defining class solely on the basis of one’s relations to capital-the owner-manager of a diner in rural Iowa is the holder of capital, which the president of Harvard University merely serves-will lack the fine texture that such analysis necessarily requires to be of real value. Then on the left there are Marxist accounts of American class, which may or may not tell us something worthwhile about economic relations but will almost certainly fail to say anything of value about class distinctions as they are actually experienced. President Biden’s comments about the middle class, which he seems to conceive of in the same terms that would have been familiar during his childhood).
Liberals are either uninterested in the subject, which tends to to put paid to their most lunatic speculations concerning so-called “identity politics,” or working with dated categories (cf. To the extent that class is seriously discussed in this country, it is usually in bad faith. These 12 propositions are not meant to be exhaustive:ġ. For this reason, rather than venture a systematic account of the American class system as it actually exists, I will confine myself to the following loosely ordered observations. Any attempt at a thorough treatment of class is likely to end up as diffuse and inconclusive as the subject itself. Equivocation about the meanings of words such as “elite” is widespread and often willful. There is probably no topic on which confusion is more widespread than that of class in the United States.
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