Arguably the most pernicious of all the Americanisms that lefty me-tooist Brits have swallowed in the manner of Monica Lewinsky is the concept of an "underclass". The term made little sense in its country of origin, which generally rejects social class as an alien concept, but for class hustling low-mid Brit lefties it came as a welcome alternative to Marx's "sub-proletariat", all-too similar to "sub-human".
The term embodies a pronounced difference in expectations among classes, whereby pathological behavior is held to define the "underclass" rather than being a possible consequence of being held to a lower standard of behaviour. Lip service to the "poor and uneducated" aside, nobody stops to ask why after over a century of universal free education there can still be uneducated people, or why all the wars and programs to eradicate poverty have simply moved the cash boundaries, and feed the pathologies they were supposed to cure.
The New York Times is the preeminent journal of European-style US social democrats, who choose to call themselves liberals. There is nothing remotely Liberal, in the historic sense, about them, but that is part and parcel of the American penchant for meaning-blurring euphemism. The NYT's class snobbery is relentlessly expressed in terms of intelligence or the lack thereof. Thus they pursue the illusion of wealth and dress gaudily to put on airs; we are not so stupid. We mortgage ourselves to the limit and buy expensive "eco-friendly" cars to . . . um . . . reflect our status.
Despite my distaste for the Brit obsession with class, within that discourse it is reasonably clear that the great American middle in fact embodies the values and vices of the lower middle class, desperately anxious to make the boundary with the lower class as impermeable as possible. Not for nothing is the cornerstone of US welfare provisions called Social Security. The concept of an "underclass" serves that function very well.
Nor should we forget that much of the lower middle class depends on the state for employment and "status", not least the army of "social workers" and their departmental bureaucracies, which have no objective self-interest whatsoever in reducing the size or improving the behaviour of their client base.
Amusingly, I even have a quotation from Marx and Engels to support my thesis. In The German Ideology they wrote that each emerging social class "represents its interests as the common interests of all members of society" and its ideas as "the only rational, universally valid ones".
The implications of this across the whole range of subjects I blog about is manifest. Within the discourse of class, much that I find odious in Britain and in the States finds a partial explanation in the frantic attempt of the lower middle class to create an environment in which it feels secure, and where mediocrity - its defining characteristic - is accepted as the highest aspiration of mankind.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Posts
The 'greatAmerican middle-class' is and has been an illusionist game. One of the unintended consequences of the New Deal of the nineteen-thirties/forties and the engine of the War pulling America out of its Great Depression has been the Myth of a kind of putative class equality obtainable by anyone with a suit, a car, and some basic (minimal) literacy.
ReplyDeleteThe illusion ran on cheap petrol, Social Security, and the hope of plentiful employment.
It was aided by cheap state universities and even cheaper community colleges. It was an illusion which did a lot of good in its time, even if it made it easier for the political elites + corporate elites to disguise their control and profit games from the rest of us.
But even if relatively few of us knew where the top of the pyramid was, we all knew where the bottom was - 'Trash' whether black or white, 'red-necks,' or as black folks put it, "the street." And frequently we knew because one or another of our friends or kin had hit that street and stayed there. Drugs and alcohol helped of course, and in America they always have.
As you can easily tell from its media, America is relentlessly cheerful, but somehow, given the failure of our supreme corporate managers recently(they were essentially the same as the political ones), I think that that street has got a lot bigger and busier. So that the essential fragility of the 'American Dream' is getting a lot harder now for its chief realtors to hide .
Thank you. All I wanted to do was to point out how pernicious the term "underclass" is; but as you say, it is simply one symptom of - dare I say it - a paradigm shift that the political parties appear to be unable to admit, let alone address.
ReplyDelete