David Seaton | 7 Sept 2012 | my.firedoglake.com
The European middle class was created as a bulwark of social
stability, basically to prevent the masses from taking the “winter
palace” and stringing up the super rich. The American middle class as we
know it really came into being when Henry Ford decided to pay his
workers enough to buy the cars they made. It made Ford rich and led to
turning America into a land of mass prosperity.
The American middle class is perhaps the United States’ greatest
social achievement, an enormous mass of prosperous, educated and healthy
citizens which has been the envy of all the world for nearly a hundred
years, and the not so secret weapon that destroyed the Soviet Union and
reoriented China.
Simplifying to the extreme you could say that the modern, American
middle class was created by Henry Ford and literally saved from
extinction, (the first time) by Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The whole
story is in that reductio ad absurdum.
What most Americans, except for the one-percent perhaps, don’t seem
to understand is that the American middle class is in reality a totally
artificial construction, which if not carefully nurtured will dry up and
die like an un-watered house plant. The super-rich are quite
comfortable with its disappearance, as they think that they no longer
depend on its prosperity for their own prosperity or even for their own
physical safety.
I would argue that if the middle class is devastated then all the
problems it was created to solve, all the dangers that it was meant to
allay would reappear, just like uncut grass grows on the lawn of a
foreclosed house.
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