A Better Paradigm for Class Analysis

John Michael Greer over at The Archdruid Report has produced a great piece of analysis on the American economic arrangement an, as a consequence, the Trump phenomenon. He redraws the lines of political class and the picture he develops is useful:

“It so happens that you can determine a huge amount about the economic and social prospects of people in America today by asking one remarkably simple question: how do they get most of their income? Broadly speaking—there are exceptions, which I’ll get to in a moment—it’s from one of four sources: returns on investment, a monthly salary, an hourly wage, or a government welfare check. People who get most of their income from one of those four things have a great many interests in common, so much so that it’s meaningful to speak of the American people as divided into an investment class, a salary class, a wage class, and a welfare class.”

What makes this paradigm interesting is what happens when he superimposes it onto the last couple decades of political and economic developments. Through this new lens he is able to explain that a lot of the conventional finger-pointing from either end of the party spectrum has been misguided, or if not misguided, at least incomplete. The top one percent has a great deal more political power than it knows what to do with, to be certain, and the welfare class has a great deal less, but who has been receiving the preponderate amount of the screwing in recent years, and who has been responsible for delivering it? According to Greer, both answers are found more toward the middle.

That is to say, if we are speaking in terms of actual decay, it is the wage class which has been destroyed in recent years; and if we’re speaking in terms of practical indifference and political irresponsibility, we need to look more at the salaried class, which has been sitting comparatively pretty during most of the chaos.

Finally Greer applies these assertions to the phenomenon of Trump and it becomes clear why, regardless of the universal scorn of pundits from both parties, and in fact because of it, no one has been able to stop him. The pundits speak for the salaried class (on both sides of the spectrum) while the things Trump says are the things you would hear from wage-earners at the bowling alley. They are tired of being screwed, and may be beginning to see that the pundits are not really on their side. Trump is the only option that even appears to represent their interests and concerns, the only one who speaks their language. The more both sides pour scorn on him, the more the wage earning class supports him, because many of the sentiments scorned on the news are the sentiments of the wage class. Trumps rise is showing us the power that this class wields, and the salaried class is scared.