POSTED RESPONSE TO A COLUMN BY JOHN SAINSBURY IN TORONTO'S GLOBE AND MAIL
It wasn't so just 50 years ago, but now you never hear words
about workers or the poor.
It's a reflection of two developments.
First, the middle class has grown in size with general
prosperity.
Second, politicians have discovered that it is the middle
class who dependably vote, not poor people.
The results are inevitable, even if the words of politicians
are annoying.
I would also throw in the modern philosophical reality that
in America - which influences everyone with its spillage - any notion of class
warfare is verboten: Americans are just all happy consumers of one level of
spending or another.
In the United States, the appeal of the term "middle
class” is such that people as low on the totem pole as, say, Wal-Mart workers
view themselves as being middle-class.
Further to this development in language, Americans, for
years now, have not been addressed as "citizens" but as
"consumers" at 4th-of-July-picnic speeches by local politicians.
The vision is of one vast conveyor belt of production and
distribution and marketing to a sea of mouths.
