A series on social class in America. Lower, working and middle here.

The upper middle class is where it is at in America. Most people, when they think of the upper class, are actually thinking of the upper middle class. They are the face of the establishment. The super "self made" rich often come from this class. They are also the celebs of the world. They are the doctors and lawyers and college professors and journalists and everyone else who "counts." They are who everyone wants to be when they grow up because, really, anyone can be upper middle class if they work hard and obey the rules of upper middle class propriety. And, if you're middle class, they're only one standard deviation away! Wow! Ain't America great?

I'll make no bones about it: I have always disliked and resented these people. I suspect most people in the Alternative Right feel the same way. They are the human embodiment of the Managerial State. Pretty much everything wrong with America was their idea, and almost nothing which is good and true about America is even believed in by these cretins. When I think of "trust fund hippies," they're always a member of this social class: no self respecting member of the upper classes would have hippy offspring, let alone give them money without them displaying enough virtue to not be hippies. Many upper middles inherit their money and self regard, though their kind probably only rarely passes on acutal wealth to the next generation. They're boorish, decadent, stupid (in a way only educated people can be), they dress atrociously and have terrible manners and taste. I blame upper middle class "efficiency experts" for the fact that America has become a giant money vacuum. I can't go to a crummy bar or restaurant or even stand in an elevator without some telescreen broadcasting ad copy at me, coffee costs $5, and upper middle class futures traders have even committed the sin of making my gasoline expensive. It's also an upper middle class idea to raise my taxes and give my money to someone else whose life the upper middle class has ruined.

Here they are, the real villains of American society according to the mass media and commentariat: the middle class. The lower classes hate them because they are better than lower class people. The upper classes sneer at them as being unenlightened boobs with no taste, or pious frauds who go to Church on Sundays and appear in Norman Rockwell paintings. Really, everyone hates them because they're the happiest people in the country. I didn't care for them while growing up (as a member of the lower orders), and I didn't for a while as a young adult (as an aspiring member of the upper middles), but looking at them now, they really have life squared away better than most other classes of Americans do. I wouldn't want to be one of them, but I can see where others might like it. In my opinion, most of the independent voters, libertarians and tea party types are, in fact, middle class people. They're the ones who need to be won over in elections: the other social classes are mostly bloc voters.

Since I was always pretty contemptuous of them when I was below them on the class structure, it is hard for me to say how to suck up to them. Probably the best way to gain their favor is to avoid frightening them. Another might be to make them think you're comfortably above them in social class. These are the people who have most obviously avoided the social decay that has set in since the 1970s; there are middle class towns which are exactly as they were in the 1950s. This is why the middle class are so hard to win over in elections; they don't notice a lot of the changes which have ruined society for everyone else. They also don't want to rock the boat. The fact that they are out in the streets protesting indicates that we live in remarkable times.

This is the second in a series on social classes in America.

My favorite class is the one I come from. This is the lower middle class. Aka, the working class.  Working class American men are real men. Working class American women, at least in their larval forms, are real women.  They kick more ass, spit farther and take less crap from anyone else than any other class of americanos; sheeeyit, the world. How great are working class Americans? Well, consider this: America has defeated every country in the world it went up against in combat, and it was working class Americans who did the fighting. You think GI  Joe was a nellie upper middle-class dude? Tchyeaaah, right! What is more, the lower middle and the upper class: we're buddies! That's right; the dudes who own it work well with the dudes who built it. Probably have been since the time of Julius Caesar.
 This is what liberals refer to when they attempt to tar Republicans as a party of the very rich and the very stupid. They're talking about something real; the alliance between the upper class and the lower middles (who are, in my experience, far from stupid; my own towering vanity prevents me from thinking so). Unfortunately, the upper class no longer has any real leaders or power, and so we end up with patrician types like John McCain and George W. Bush who have sold out to the upper middle class, and fake their allegiance to the lower middle class. Really, the only defender the working classes has any more is Pat Buchanan, who is thoroughly one of us.

I'm probably unusual in that I put most legal immigrants into this social class. True, many of the ones I have worked with (knowledge workers) have been upper middle-class aspirants, but they were almost all green-card types, rather than real Americans. Real Americans come here to do work, not to sip foamy coffee and turn their nose up at regular folks. Most of the actual immigrants I have known have been working class to the bone.

The working class has suffered greatly under the new/post 1970s regime. I'd go so far as to say this is because of a conscious hostility from the upper middle class who run everything. Many of their factory jobs are gone forever. Their families have been devastated by "social welfare" programs, and their neighborhoods have become crime ridden, due to the all the lower class uncivilized state-funded bastards running around. The prospering lower middle-class people are the tradesmen: electricians, plumbers, technicians, contractors -- though these guys are in some trouble from immigration also. Still, the working class has preserved many virtues: the virtues of hard work and manliness not the least among them.

You can't help feeling a little bad for the lower class. On the surface, it looks like they were born to it, and, really, in many ways, they more or less were. Most lower class people are lower class because they have terrible folkways, like, say, smoking crack and not having a job. They got them from their environment to be certain, but if we allow for personal responsibility at all (rather than assuming we're all inevitable products of our environments), they are in part personally responsible for their predicament. Since most of this series of essays is a sort of comedy of manners, this one is probably most clear of all. And the most sad. Many in the HBD camp would simply dismiss the lower class as low-IQ orcs. It may be statistically true in prison inmate populations, but it's well known to not be true in general. I can testify from experiences, some of the smartest people I've ever met were lower class.

How do you get along with or suck up to the lower classes? Well, you pretty much do not do so at all. But there are two ways of getting along with a lower class person at least to a limited extent. The first way is to beat the shit out of them. They deserve it anyway, and most people lick the boots that kick them. They do respect strength, in a sullen sort of way, and they really don't have much heart, like lower middle class people do. The second way, recommended for anyone who isn't a lower middle class hobgoblin with scars on your knuckles, is to give them stuff. Give them money. Give them beer. Give them drugs. They will be nice to you for a little while anyway. Maybe. Really, you should probably just throw down your wallet and run away.

Steve Sailer has an important blog at VDARE.com quoting  from Russel K. Nieli’s essay on No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal: Race and Class in Elite College Admission and Campus Life by Thomas Espenshade and Alexandria Radford. It’s no surprise that there is affirmative action for Blacks and Latinos: “To have the same chances of gaining admission as a black student with an SAT score of 1100, an Hispanic student otherwise equally matched in background characteristics would have to have a 1230, a white student a 1410, and an Asian student a 1550.”

Unfortunately, the authors lump Jews and non-Jews into the White category, but combining their results with what we know about Jewish admissions to elite universities yields some interesting results.

In a 1998 op-ed (”Some minorities are more minor than others”), Ron Unz pointed out “Asians comprise between 2% and 3% of the U.S. population, but nearly 20% of Harvard undergraduates. Then too, between a quarter and a third of Harvard students identify themselves as Jewish, while Jews also represent just 2% to 3% of the overall population. Thus, it appears that Jews and Asians constitute approximately half of Harvard’s student body, leaving the other half for the remaining 95% of America” (See also Edmund Connelly’s take.)  A 2009 article in the Daily Princetonian (“Choosing the Chosen People”) cited data from Hillel, a Jewish campus organization, that with the exception of Princeton and Dartmouth, on average Jews made up 24% of Ivy League undergrads. (Princeton had only 13% Jews, leading to much anxiety and a drive to recruit more Jewish students. The rabbi leading the campaign said she “would love 20 percent”—an increase from over 6 times the Jewish percentage in the population to around 10 times.)

In a variation on a current meme for The Baltimore Sun, Andrew L. Yarrow writes:

Thanks to a long-sour economy and radically changed gender roles and expectations, American masculinity has fractured into an "Up in the Air" male and a down-in-the-dumps male. On the one hand, the corporate masculinity of the early 21st century is based largely on a soft power conveyed by money, prestige and education and their corollaries in grooming, clothing and elan. These mostly urban, upper-middle class (to rich) men read their Economists, know their pinot noirs, and speak in politically correct, complete sentences. Working-class, poor, and much middle-class masculinity is defined by declining fortunes and capabilities in school and the labor force (and even the marriage market), feeding gender- and class-based anger. The "angry white man" losers of Bruce Springsteen ballads often react with a politically conservative hypermasculinity, replete with authoritarian and homophobic streaks.[...]

We need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated. Multiple masculine identities are OK, but they can't be ever more molded by an economy of glamorous star running backs and benched, injured second-stringers.

And yet, like Hanna Rosin and others, he can offer no real suggestions as to how we might transform masculinity thus. What sort of second-string, less triumphant, noticeably weaker and obviously less impressive masculine ideal will allow our hearty but aimless working class men to feel good about themselves again? No one can really say, but everyone is certain that average men had better hurry up and get over themselves and stop wanting to be men in the way that their ancestors have always been men since the beginning of recorded history.

One good question to ask when someone like Yarrow asserts the “need to create the conditions and the role models so that one category of men isn't arrogant and entitled while another is angry and defeated” is: or else what? 

We need to do this, or else what?

What happens when a huge portion of the male population feels increasingly angry, defeated, dishonored and desperate?

Ask history.