Over all these questions hangs the single question: Why does class matter? One can see why health and wealth and power matter, but why class, which is a category wrapped up with ideals of virtue and style, ideals that, in a polyglot democracy anyway, are many and diverse? Don’t class distinctions just devolve to good vs. Certainly, there is no position from which one can write about social class in America objectively, if (success at) objectivity is measured by the reader’s inability to identify the class of the writer or belief that the writer has transcended the whole system. After all, what does it mean to have one’s class revealed by one’s feelings about class, feelings which, if they remain unexpressed, constitute a revelation only to oneself? How could one not already know one’s class? Is class necessarily a subject of self-delusion, revealed in the way one’s true personality is revealed by clever questionnaires (“Are You Afraid to Love?”) scored at the end of the magazine? 2 And why be taken aback by the possibility that others, either by observing the way you respond to the very subject of class or by observing your choices in clothing, language, leisure activity, and so forth, might have a way to identify your class independently of your claims to, or disavowals of, membership in any one of them? 3 There is something subversive, out of one’s control, about class, and this is threatening. It is the middle class that is looked down upon by both sides in return, and the middle class that grumbles or walks away, denying class a role or a reality in American society even as it studies, with great care, the rungs of the ladder.įussell’s choice of the word “reveal” is interesting. It is the middle class that does not accept its fate and function, that believes in social mobility, that envies the style and security of the networked rich on the one hand, and the claims to authenticity of those who earn their keep by the sweat of their brows or by facing real danger, on the other. No, it is the hard-working, hard-consuming middle class that feels the annoyance.

Members of the upper class don’t mind broaching the topic of class either, says Fussell, since they know themselves to be on top of the system, securely above the fray. And nor, really, do they want to, the upper classes being perceived, for all their money, as weightless and effete, and the middle classes as slaves of the marketplace, cogs in the bureaucracy, and generally “loathsome in their anxious gentility.” 1 1. “You reveal a great deal about your class,” writes Paul Fussell, “by the amount of annoyance or fury you feel when the subject is brought up.” People of the working class, he explains, generally don’t mind thinking or talking about it, since they know there is little they can do to change their station.

Fussell class