What follows is a rant, a civilized rant from an earlier era, from Seymour Deming, published in Atlantic Monthly in 1914, as the First World War had begun. It seems curiously appropriate to today. The items in parenthesis were added by me.
Is it possible that you don not realize the jeopardy of your position? If your diplomats, under the flimsy pretext of national honor (9/11), are beguiled by wily financiers (and Halliburton) for the pawing of investment chestnut out of a foreign fire, you are the ones who must do their fight--and pay the taxes afterwards...
The schooling which once equipped your children for their grapple with life now delivers them over to the mercy of any employer whom the fierce necessities of competition force to coin their youth and their ambition into his narrow margins of profit. Your reddest blood is steadily draining into into the cities. There..it is thinned by artificial standards of living which are fast reducing wives and children to the position of luxuries for the few. Your city children marry late, if at all; and the children they think they can afford are half the number they would normally desire.
Meanwhile, the manufacturers are bracing open the gates to Southern European (South American and Mexican) immigration, partly because is is cheaper to produce wares with low-priced human machines than with higher -priced patented machines...
The competitive tide of this lower standard of living is pitilessly creeping up your own shins. You feel the chill (I feel the chill, how about you?), mock yourselves with the vain assurance that it will crawl no higher and protest desperately against a thing known to you as the high cost of living. And you lend a credulous ear to any politician with contempt enough for your intelligence to assure that it can be mended by tariff-revision, currency reform, restriction of immigration, control of trusts or any or all of these, including an underdone hash of economic compromises styled Progressivism (is he talking about us?)...
The poor know what they want (food and shelter). The rich know what they do not want. You--hardly know that a dispute is going on. For while the poor, in the stress of a desperate strike (except that the poor these days have no jobs from which to strike), can rise to an incredible pitch of heroism, you have never even dreamed of the abysmal unimportance of practically everything that is thought about and talked about (American Idol, Facebook, tweets) in the middle-class society to which you belong.
From the windows of a train rolling through the steel-mill district of a Great Lakes port, you look on gaunt chimneys belching flame, a smok-stained heaven and befouled tenements where the workers snatch their brief rest before hurrying back to the inferno which burns their lives away. The man in the seat ahead pulled down his window-shade. On an impulse, he was asked, "Why did you pull down your shade?" To shut out that dreadful sight," said he, quit simply, " it is too horrible to think of. (and yet today, we bemoan the loss of steel mills and factories in the midwest)."
No amount of willingness to do the right thing will get the right thing done, so long as the huge mass of these well-intentioned people is conscientiously bent on the wrong thing. You must first chew up the facts very fine--a tough mouthful; and you must digest them very well; it will need a strong stomach.
You protest that the gentleman, who, to preserve incomes of five figures (six, seven, eight, now nine figures), persist in steering us into these dedly perils, are good husbands and kind fathers...
And since you are the ones who must settle this muddle, if you are to save your institutions and your ideals, why not be about it (Action Diaries, anyone?). Grow a new species of social responsibility on the healthy old stalk of your personal characters. For if we cannot shoulder new duties, life has a way of jostling us aside to make room for those who can.
But if your ignorance is more perilous to society than the righteous discontent of an idealistic working class, you have at least the excuse that the machinery which, if it is to go on, has well-nigh perfected a process (Fox News) whereby you are automatically misinformed, or not informed at all at all.
The only two parties who know that the newspapers (and TV news programs) are not to be trusted are the radicals who maintain a non-too-trustworthy press of their own (surely he is not talking about DailyKos?), and a small group of financiers who pay a statistician a high price for a weekly news-service on the understanding that they alone are to have advantage of acting on the information it contains (Bloomberg and all the financial newsletters). Naturally, both these news-services, the radical press and the confidential letters, contain the same material--what is lef out of the daily papers. You have yourselves to thank. Your editors, as tradesmen, do not keep goods for which they see no demand (News is really entertainment--just ask Glen Beck)...
Even if your schools and colleges, however could afford to be honest tradesmen, the ware they are selling are rapidly becoming not worth your purchase (How many will repay their student loans?. They belong to a time when education was for the few. When educated men were scarce they could sell their disciplined brains in a virgin market. Then the news went out that higher education meant good pay (tell this to my former student, a master's degree in biology now working at Starbucks)...The spread of higher education has spoiled the market; and you mere college graduate, untrained to any special profession, is even more at the mercy of the employer, and lucky if the white collar which is his badge of respectability is not also the badge of his life-servitude.
You have one refuge: to cast in your lot with the under-dog. Unless you accept the leadership it will pas from you, as it has done before, to another class who are the idealists. Their need has made them so. They stretch hands to you for help.
Make no mistake about this.. You will have to think hard and think twice. All your traditions, all your teaching, all your ambitions have bidden you to aspired to the estate just above you. The only refuge from capitalism which the capitalism has offered you is to become a capitalist. The prize which has been dangled just beyond your fist is the contemptible existence of living without working...
Reading this long message, it occurs to me that the definition of middle class has changed. Once it was composed mainly of businessmen, doctors, dentists, professionals, etc, the people to whom this message was really addressed. For a brief shining moment during the late 20th century, it also included skilled workers that were unionized, nurses, teachers, technicians, educated workers, artists, musicians. Now that is receding, and a middle class of any kind at all is threatened.
Now we are facing banana republic status. Is it time yet to man the barricades?