POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY GARY YOUNGE IN THE GUARDIAN
This is an utterly unrealistic idea.
Anyone who knows American society well, knows that the word "class" is considered a dirty word, and at many levels of the society.
It is used much like "communist," a word which can keep you from even getting a visa to the United States.
It has been chanted into disgrace the way "liberal" has, and liberal surely is one of the finest political words in English with a glorious history, but in the U.S. it has become an epithet.
Of course, the Orwellian alteration of these words is not based on reality, because the United States has certainly become one of the most class-ridden societies on earth, certainly amongst advanced societies.
No, everyone in America has learned to consider him- or herself as middle-class or actively aspiring to become so, and they all live, or want to live, a kind of Ozzie-and-Harriet cozy suburban life.
That is the mythology, and a strongly held one, that covers the actual social philosophy of the United States.
Social Darwinism is the official, if unspoken, social philosophy of America.