Middle-class warfare

Another election campaign is starting, and that means politicians will be telling us that they are standing up for the middle class (and that the other politicians are not). Knowing what class you’re in is important these days because class warfare has become a standard feature of political campaigns. The middle class clearly is the place to be unless you’re Warren Buffett or Bill Gates.

Problem is, the definition of the middle class keeps changing. When I studied sociology in college the middle class was defined specifically as people who had acquired education and specialized skills and worked as professionals, small business owners and skilled tradespeople. Sociologists conducted elaborate studies to further stratify the middle class into upper-middle, lower-middle and the ever-popular middle-middle. Still, everyone agreed that Ward and June Cleaver were middle class and Ralph Kramden was not.

Those tidy class distinctions have eroded. Auto assembly-line workers began identifying themselves as middle class once they could afford Winnebagos. Now the middle class has been hijacked by the politicians.

During the 2008 election the middle class suddenly expanded to practically the entire population from just above the poverty line to the six-figure-salaried. It was a little like Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon, where all the children are above average.

That definition is slipping, however. The government workers who disrupted Wisconsin claimed that they are the middle class, which implies that the ordinary taxpayers who voted Republican are not. Then there’s the 50 percent of the population that pays no federal income tax: Are they middle class? And how do we categorize the Tea Party people and the illegal immigrants? It’s all very confusing.

It gets worse. The traditional middle-class definition includes doctors, business owners and lawyers, some of whom earn more than $250,000 a year. Are these folks still in the middle class, or are they now on the other side of the class divide along with those millionaires and billionaires who ought to pay higher taxes?

The 2012 election campaign is just beginning, and new and exciting definitions of the middle class are bound to emerge. It’s enough to drive a sociologist to drink.