Class Dismissed

Class analysis is back. Well, it never left, really. It just got overshadowed. But far more than race or sex, class dynamics are potent. And unhealthy class dynamics thrive in zero-sum power politics.

[T]here is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.
—Thomas Jefferson

John Michael Greer offers a heuristic far more fruitful than any social justice shibboleths. It requires dividing the United States—perhaps other democracies—into four fundamental classes. First, we consider their relative position, incentives, culture, and adversaries. Then, we can see how the dynamics play out.

The four classes are:

1. Investor Class

2. Salary Class

3. Wage Class

4. Welfare Class

In other words, we might invoke class analysis—not through the Marxian lens, but rather a prism that reveals the interplay of interests among the four groups. It might reveal how posturing and resource jockeying roils in the dying days of the Republic.

If we’re being honest with ourselves, these four are far more important than identitarian analysis. Greer writes:

Skin color, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, disability—these are the lines of division that Americans like to talk about, whatever their attitudes to the people who fall on one side of the other of those lines.

Such is not to deny these divisions exist. It’s just that they receive undue emphasis compared to class. Let’s see what we see when we follow Greer and adopt the heuristic.

The Investor Class

At the summit sits the Investor Class, those lords of capital whose principal occupations are accumulating, preserving, and deploying wealth. Their portfolios may include stocks, private equity ventures, or politicians. However, their overarching concern is not simply to live but to stay ahead in the shadow of a Byzantine and overweening state. So, they have endured rough seas, especially in 2000, 2008, and 2020. Yet somehow, fiscal and monetary policy keeps them afloat. Or, as Greer writes,

[A]lternative investments and frantic government manipulations of stock market prices have allowed most people in the investment class to keep up their accustomed lifestyles.

Indeed, since the Federal Reserve became untethered to the Gold Standard, the Investor Class has mostly thrived.

But their adversaries are legion. The Salary Class envies them, but most wish to join or rule them. The Wage Class doesn’t envy them nearly as much, but they sometimes see the Investors as rapacious. The Welfare Class depends on the Investor Class’s largesse, but the former doesn’t antagonize the latter much. They live in two different worlds.

The Investor Class’s incentive, nay its duty, is to practice that ancient alchemy whereby private ambition brings about some measure of overall prosperity. This is necessary and good until the Investor Class colludes with the Power Class (about which more later). The Investor Class members never want to lose their positions at the tippy top, but they don’t mind seeing others in their ilk get knee-capped so they can be brought down to their level. (For example, billionaires talk a big game about paying more in taxes but never do it unilaterally.)

The Salary Class

Beneath the Investor Class, though not so far beneath as to share any kinship with the proletariat, lives the Salary Class. These are the graduates, the managers, the professionals, the technocrats—the diligent caretakers of institutional continuity who worship mostly in the Blue Church. They are our lawyers, academics, and mid-level executives, each pursuing a life of carefully plotted ascension.

“The salary class has maintained its familiar privileges and perks through a half century of convulsive change,” writes Greer. They can thank subsidized higher education, upward mobility, and the advent of the 401k.

Their financial incentives are more modest than those of the highest caste, but they are no less fervent: They seek stability, status, and power. Their reliance on credentialism renders them vulnerable to cultural tides. They not only question the fairness of the system that is their milking cow, but they are happy to defend the value of their positions and pass the onus of responsibility for almost everything onto the Investor Class, whom they view with almost as much contempt as they do the Wage Class. (The Salaried have made a religion out of virtue signaling on behalf of the Welfare Class, but they view the Wage Class as laboring under false consciousness: If only these unlearned wage earners became welfare recipients at the expense of the Investor Class, we would not be locked in this second slot.)

A tiny subset will find a way to be equal to or greater than the Investor Class by becoming part of the Power Class, that is, of elite authority.

The Wage Class

Here, we find the nation's marrow—the Wage Class. These men and women labor with their hands, backs, and indefatigable spirits. They build, transport, and serve. They sweep, scrub, and care for others. Their culture is hard-won common sense, rooted in neighborhoods where pragmatism and communitarian ties are coins of the realm. They have arguably been gutted more than any other group in my lifetime, whereas the other three have remained stable. Here’s Greer again,

In 1966 an American family with one breadwinner working full time at an hourly wage could normally count on having a home, a car, three square meals a day, and the other ordinary necessities of life, with some left over for the occasional luxury. In 2016, an American family with one breadwinner … could find only parttime or temporary work when they could find any jobs at all.

But they can disdain the elites—especially the Salary Class, whom they view as desk jockeys, empty suits, bureaucrats, and supplicants of the Investor Class. They can sense the Salary Class looking down their noses at them. But they at least have the numbers. Their formidable adversaries include the faceless specters of automation, the unforgiving logic of globalization, and their so-called betters in the Salary Class. They desire neither luxury nor unearned largesse, only a few simple pleasures and the dignity of a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. *Fair,* of course, is a moving target, but an army of migrant competitors for *their* jobs will not be considered fair competition by this rather large voting bloc.

The Welfare Class

Finally, we come to the Welfare Class, the most vulnerable yet, paradoxically, the most contentious of our four groups. They receive government assistance, either by choice or circumstance. Officials don’t care about parsing the Welfare Class’s motivations. Politicians and functionaries are content to dispense checks to those living on the vote farm. Indeed, when someone in the Salary Class refers to the “social contract,” that’s doublespeak for a tacit money-for-votes agreement.

Yet Greer is correct in this bleak assessment:

On the other end of the spectrum, the welfare class has continued to scrape by pretty much as before, dealing with the same bleak realities of grinding poverty, intrusive government bureaucracy, and a galaxy of direct and indirect barriers to full participation in the national life, that their equivalents had to confront back in 1966.

The Welfare Class is assailed on all sides—stigmatized by their neighbors, canonized by bureaucrats, and sermonized by the punditry.

Work for this class involves navigating those labyrinthine systems constructed for them by the Salary Class, which views them as liabilities to be managed or rats in the Skinner Cage. Push the lever; get the pellet. But the promise of assistance delivers dependency. Indeed, they depend on the Salary Class for cover, but much of the Salary Class depends on The Welfare Class, too. The social scientists, social workers, and career bureaucrats feed from the same tax trough.

Much of the Welfare Class is content to subsist in relative squalor so long as nobody requires anything beyond standing in line or filling out forms. Responses to incentives are deeply human, making the Welfare Class’s behavior understandable. But goodies can whittle at members’ agency, despite any longing for the dignity of work. If this dependent class is ever to shrink from around 20 percent of the US population, its members will need a new incentive system and a different outlook.

Power Dance

The interplay among these classes is a power dance. At their worst,

1. The Investor Class makes more mischief.

2. The Salary Class makes more paperwork.

3. The Wage Class makes more barriers.

4. The Welfare Class makes more trouble.

Under Greer’s view, these heuristics elucidate a continuum of Haves to Have Nots. But let us not forget to add the Power Class, which makes more messes. Greer points the way in another work:

A glance back over our past shows clearly enough that who won, who lost, who ended up ruling a society, and who ended up enslaved or exterminated by that same society, was not determined by moral virtue or by the justice of one or another cause but by the crassly pragmatic factors of military, political, and economic power.

Power is the transmutation of money into force. Politics is its Church.

Under my construal, the Power Class sits on top of everything because it wields the threat of institutional violence. That’s why the Salary Class doesn’t always aspire to the Investor Class but gravitates to the Power Class. (Makers vs. Takers.)

The Investor Class sometimes collides with the Wage Class, but these are symbiotes. The Investor Class also depends on the Salary Class—and the reverse—but they are more at odds given how many of the Salaried create no value. When it comes to the Power Class, members of the Investor Class can either resist them or make unholy alliances with them.

What slinks from the coital bed of Mama Money and Papa Power?

The Salary Class, caught between ambition and anxiety, alternately placates and alienates its neighbors above and below in the economic hierarchy. They aspire to become the Power Class on Saturday but find ways to undermine that class on Sunday. They placate their paymasters in the Investor Class on Monday (as benefactors) but picket them on Friday (as fat cats). They hurl insults at the Wage Class on Tuesday (ignorant morons) but try to unionize them on Thursday (useful idiots). The Salary Class advocates for the Welfare Class because the latter justifies the former’s existence as administrators of the managerial state. So, the Salary Class ardently defends the underclass’s *rights* and *entitlements.* But in exchange for such defense, the Welfare Class must never have its own opinions.

The Welfare Class’s very existence charges the anxieties of the other classes for various reasons. Sometimes, they’re scapegoats. Sometimes, they’re herds of a collective pity party. The Salary Class thinks of them as powerless. But when they occasionally find their collective voice, they can inspire pathos like no other. Usually, they’re willing to make allegiances to whoever butters their bread. However, two forces can change their loyalties: a force that offers them dignity in work sufficient to become a solid part of the Wage Class or a force that abandons or ignores them out of political expedience (as with the recent migration crisis).

The Salary Class and the Power Class once effectively controlled the media, and thus the Egregores and the people. They have now lost that control—for a time.

Cleaving the Strata

My hypothesis, bold but feasible, is not just that the four economic classes can be cloven in two conceptually, but they are so cloven. The Power Class, with its organized threat of violence, cleaves the strata. Think of this cleaving abstractly as between cooperation and compulsion. In other words, the Power Class applies compulsion in a top-down fashion, and/or the classes cooperate in a bottom-up fashion, i.e., with each other—intraclass or interclass.

Each class, for all its flaws and grievances, can contribute something indispensable to the whole. The Investment Class fuels innovation; the Salary Class sustains order; the Wage Class builds the foundations; and the Welfare Class reminds us that we are not all equal or equally fortunate.

But when the Power Class comes along, that perverse transmutation process begins. Compulsion forces order by restricting prosocial modes of interaction and the motivations that drive them. Compulsion prompts the Investor to put more resources into manipulating the Power Class, which generates corporatism and corruption. Compulsion invites the Salary Class to put time and energy into growing wasteful bureaucracies at the expense of market entrepreneurship, productivity gains, and mutual aid. Compulsion encourages the Wage Class to protect its wage rates by artificially restricting labor supply and productivity innovations, which tends to reduce the quality of the goods and services they produce. Compulsion lures the Welfare Class into a torpor that causes its members to wallow in dependency and demotivation.

The more people cooperate across classes, the less they will engage in class warfare. The more the Power Class applies compulsion, the more the lower classes will engage in zero-sum thinking and wasteful conflict.

Their outstretched hands will be idle.

The moral in brief? Systems should encourage people to cooperate. The goal is not a classless Utopia but a “natural aristocracy” that generates material and spiritual plenty. To unleash the best in each class, we must see every human being as capable of growth. To unleash the best in each person, we must find ways to put the Power Class in its place.