"Class warfare" is on a roll right now. The phrase has appeared in the press more often since the beginning of January than it did in the whole second half of 2002, and it's on track to blow right by its previous two peaks. Those were in the summer of 2000, when Republicans were accusing Gore of waging class warfare in his presidential campaign, and back in 1995, when they were making the same charge about the Democratic critics of Newt Gingrich's contract with America.
That conservatives keep coming back to the charge of "class warfare" is a sign of how well it works. Some liberals are willing to throw the phrase back at Bush -- as New York Congressman Charles Rangel put it, ''If this is class warfare, who started it?" But to most Americans, "class warfare" echoes too much of cloth-caps and barricades. It's a foreign-sounding phrase -- like something out of "Les Miz," not "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington."
What makes "class warfare" so alien? According to conservatives, it's because Americans reject "the politics of envy" -- another favorite phrase. As David Brooks put it in a New York Times op-ed piece a few weeks ago, "[In America], People vote their aspirations. . . [We] have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon. . . None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich."
Well, that's one theory -- that working Americans will welcome the Bush tax proposals in hopeful anticipation of the day when they'll be living off their own stock dividends. But I suspect that the discomfort that Americans have with the notion of "class warfare" owes a lot to the way we use the word "class" itself -- or rather to the way we don't use it.
It's striking that the conservatives who decry the politics of class warfare never go on to finish the thought -- you're never hear them talk about the virtures of class cooperation. In fact the phrases "class warfare" and "class envy" are pretty much the only place where the word "class" occurs at all in the American conservative lexicon -- I mean, when it's not preceded by "middle." If you search on the speeches and statements at the whitehouse.gov Web site you'll find fifty hits for "middle class," but none at all for "working class." You get a few more hits if you expand the search to "working families," but that's not the same thing -- it's the difference between the Bunkers and the Huxtables.
Needless to say the phrase "upper-class" doesn't appear at the whitehouse.gov site either. In fact that phrase has pretty much disappeared from American political discourse. People may still talk about upper-class neighborhoods or the upper-class character in a movie, but you very rarely see a phrase like "upper-class voters" or "upper-class taxpayers."
The connection between "upper class" and income and power was already getting cloudy when Jay Gatsby moved to West Egg, and by now it's almost too vague to define. You could see that in the exit polls conducted by the Voter News Service after the 2000 presidential elections. Not surprisingly, the 29 percent of voters who described themselves as "upper middle class" went for Bush over Gore by about a five-to-four margin. But the four percent of voters who described themselves as "upper class" actually voted three-to-two for Gore.
But just who were those voters, anyway? They clearly weren't just the four percent at the top of the income scale -- in fact the same exit polls showed that voters with incomes over $100,000 went decisively for Bush. And it isn't likely they were old-style patricians like the Bushes, the Auchinclosses, or the Rockefellers. That crowd certainly didn't go three-to-two for Gore, and anyway they don't make up anything like four percent of the population, which would come to around 6 million households. That's a lot bigger than the circulation of Town and Country.
Actually, those self-styled upper class voters were probably no different in income or social status from the ones who described themselves as upper-middle-class. They were simply the ones who were willing to say that an income of $100,000 a year put them in a privileged group -- something that Democrats are more likely to own up to than Republicans are.
Conservatives like to say that class is an illusion in American life. As David Brooks puts it, "Americans do not see society as a layer cake, with the rich on top, the middle class beneath them and the working class and underclass at the bottom." It makes you wonder why people use those phrases at all.
But it's significant that Brooks started that list with "the rich," rather than "the upper class." Americans have no qualms about acknowledging a distinction between the middle class and the working class -- if they didn't, where would that leave Rosanne or Bruce Springsteen? And we recognize the existence of an underclass, too, even if we usually describe it in racial or ethnic terms.
But as those exit polls showed, most Americans don't see the wealthy as a separate class. Say "upper-class" to most people and what comes to mind is Thurston Howell III, not Jack Welch. In fact my guess is that if you asked him, Welch would be quick to describe himself as upper-middle-class, pointing out that he still prefers beer to wine.
That's the trick to all this talk of "class warfare." Middle-income Americans may be painfully aware of the gulf that separates them from the wealthy, but they don't think of those in terms of class lines. To a high-school principal making $80,000 a year, the only class difference is between herself and the school janitor, not between herself and a dividend-clipping investor. "Class" is a word that sets Americans to looking over their shoulder. I think of what my friend Bob said many years ago as we were nervously chaining up our bicycles outside a restaurant on Broadway in New York: "When you buy a ten-speed, the class war comes home to you."
