"Class" in America

AVI linked this essay on class, which is a little difficult to decipher; the markers have become so obfuscated that it's hard to say who is in what class now. They try really hard anyway, but it probably just comes down to how you make your money (much more than how much money you make). All the cultural stuff doesn't really work any more, as they admit at one point:

Anyways, back to taste, the striking thing to me is that these distinctions are all collapsing, as increasingly large numbers of Americans all listen to the same music, watch the same YouTube shorts, and read the same tweets. Fussell was already tuned into this back in his era, and called it “prole drift”: the tendency in the United States for all classes to drift downwards over time. Perhaps we can explain it via the barber-pole theory of fashionability spinning in reverse, with the highest classes emulating prole tastes to shock the middles, who eventually can’t help themselves in aping what they now perceive to be high. I think you see something like that process in many places, here’s a concrete example: underclass thugs like NWA invent gangster rap → very posh kids shouting rap lyrics ironically → midwits embracing rap-inflected cultural products like Hamilton and Beyoncé completely sincerely. 

The problem with that example is that it happened across several decades, which is the timeframe in which these sorts of things can fall aside anyway.

In contrast, the new generation are, as Helen Andrews once memorably put it, “pretty dumb”:

I mean that the majority of meritocrats are, on their own chosen scale of intelligence, pretty dumb. Grade inflation first hit the Ivies in the late 1960s for a reason. Yale professor David Gelernter has noticed it in his students: “They are so ignorant that it’s hard to accept how ignorant they are. It’s very hard to grasp that the person you’re talking to, who is bright, articulate, conversable, interested, doesn’t know who Beethoven is. Looking back at the history of the twentieth century, just sees a fog.” Camille Paglia once assigned the spiritual “Go Down, Moses” to an English seminar, only to discover to her horror that “of a class of twenty-five students, only two seemed to recognize the name ‘Moses’.… They did not know who he was.”

“Dumb” is the wrong word here, what she really means is "ignorant." But ignorant of what exactly? Why does it matter that you know who Beethoven is (and that you be able to recognize even his lesser-known works from audio alone)? ...

Jane: The former top culture has certainly failed to perpetuate its specific markers, but that’s nothing new. Once upon a time it used to be really important to be able to dance, bow, and even walk “correctly” — who cares about that stuff now? 

It's interesting to me how much attention people pay to this; as they point out, books and movies are made about it all the time. I figured out around 2004 that, while it was nice to have more money, what I really liked was the stuff on the "lowbrow" side of the graphic. Old Army clothes? Beer? Jukeboxes? Pulp fiction like "Conan"? Western movies? Absolutely.

At some point you can just be who you want to be, and stop worrying about what class people think you're in. You still have to make a living; you don't have to tell people what you do to make it. I've had people ask me if I'm retired because I never talk about work. Sadly, no! I still have to work for a living. We just don't have to make conversation about it.