“They only call it ‘class warfare’ when we fight back.”
--Anon.
“There is class warfare in America, and my class is winning.”
--Warren Buffett
America likes to think of itself as a “classless society.” One of our founding myths was that America was created so that all men would be free and equal before the law. (Women, of course, were a different matter. As were the slaves, Native Americans and those still working as indentured servants.) The way the story is told today, our country started out as and continues to be a place of unbounded opportunity where any person, by sheer grit and talent and hard work, can pull himself up by his own bootstraps and amass a fortune. For very similar reasons, we still tell our children that – in this country – “anybody can grow up to be President.”
It is a comforting story, but it is also a lot of nonsense. It is also a fairly recent invention, one that I think was created for the express purpose of papering over the real economic differences between U.S. citizens.
Indeed, while it may be one of our “founding myths” it is not a myth that has been around since our founding. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries every American citizen would have been keenly aware that one’s status – and legal rights – turned largely on how much wealth one had. In many – perhaps all – of the original states, even the right to vote, the most fundamental right in a democracy, was limited to those men who owned a certain minimum amount of land or had a certain minimum annual income. The poor were explicitly and literally disenfranchised.
And this state of affairs, the rights that welled up not from innate ability or merit but instead from sheer wealth, continued well into the 20th century. Nevertheless, the early part of the last century saw great strides made by those who fought passionately on behalf of American laborers, and who recognized that the interests of laborers and employers did not coincide. This progress was made despite the fact that class conflicts often turned bloody and violent, as employers (very often with the help of the public authorities) took action to force laborers to work under terrible conditions for little pay. But the story of this progress is mostly swept under the rug and, less than 100 years later, is largely forgotten.
