It’s much more a frame of mind.
Throughout most of human existence, there were only two types of people: peasants and nobility. Eventually, a few peasants were able to acquire some wealth — by producing more food than they needed, which could then be sold or traded to others, and by developing other skills (crafts) that enabled them to make a variety of things that could be sold.
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Over time, the advantages of the middle-class lifestyle encouraged more and more of the peasantry to cultivate the various skills and discipline necessary to elevate themselves to the middle class. Ultimately, a sovereign nation was formed as a middle-class paradise. It called itself the United States of America. As far as the nobility, Article I, Section 9 of that nation’s constitution states that “No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States.” Positions of hierarchical status cannot be inherited. That’s status, not property and other forms of wealth.
During the middle of the 19th century, a middle-class intellectual named Karl Marx tweaked socialism to embrace class struggle, in addition to communal ownership of what used to be private property. He called his idea communism. He also gave the middle class the name bourgeoisie. Mostly because of envy, the remaining peasants (whom Marx called proletarians) developed serious animosity for the more affluent members of what used to be members of their own “class.” Because of its being classless, the United States has been just about the last place on Earth where Marxist dogma has had any traction.
Also, among the European nobility, distaste for the bourgeois nouveau riche became manifest. Honoré de Balzac, around 1845, penned A Prince of Bohemia. This was a story about a member of the nobility of a country that was no longer sovereign. He was compelled to assume exile in Paris and begrudgingly made ends meet by giving fencing lessons to the idiot children of the aspiring bourgeoisie. He lived in a garret (attic) and loathed his patrons. Hence, the term “Bohemian” became attached to a presumed subculture of self-declared superior beings who live among the rest of us while being overtly hostile to middle-class attitudes. Jack Kerouac formalized the concept for the U.S. with his gang of post–World War 2 veterans and fellow travelers in On the Road. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen called them Beatniks, which offended Kerouac because it sounded too much like “Bolshevik.”
Back to Marx — he singled out Jews in particular as bourgeois enemies of the proletariat, even though both of his grandfathers were rabbis. Jews were shopkeepers, accountants, physicians and lawyers, in addition to being proletarian working stiffs in the garment industry.
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Thomas Sowell’s Black Rednecks and White Liberals has as a second chapter “Are Jews Generic?” At first, I thought he said “Genetic,” referring to the DNA tracers used to identify descendants of the diaspora. But he really meant the role of the ethnic “minority middleman” in a plethora of endeavors in many places. To flesh out his contention, he presents several ethnic types: Lebanese, overseas Chinese, Armenians, etc. They all fell into mostly the same social category as the Jews, though without the same historical or sectarian baggage.
Some like to point to the U.K. as another middle-class haven, especially since Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations. Hence, the term “a nation of shopkeepers,” sometimes attributed to Napoleon, has been affixed to the British culture.
But, for the record, “middle class” is not really a social position. It is a state of mind. The middle class is typified as a strategic approach to life. Get educated, learn to budget and control your liquidity, be patient, and protect yourself from the usual predators who prey on what appear to be attractive targets.
What is often not mentioned enough is the especially unique feature of American culture: social mobility. None of us is a prisoner of his ancestry; we get to choose to be Beatniks, carpenters, or suburban Ozzies and Harriets, and also take over our parents’ businesses. Marxists hate this, since they are compelled to exploit the contrived belief that we are downtrodden proletarians, trapped in factories, on farms, or in other vehicles for capitalist exploitation.
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Image via Pixabay.