How Americans (Don't) Talk Class

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.'s The Age of Jackson is a profoundly flawed book. This is not simply the case in such ways as his appallingly ignoring the Indian Removal Act's genocidal dispossession of the Native American nations of the Southeast (the Cherokee, Muscogee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Seminole) and the Trail of Tears to which their peoples were condemned (criticism about which, I imagine, prompted his characteristically Paul Lynde-like sneer at those who regard the crimes of "our national policy toward the Indians" as "black marks on our history" in The Vital Center). It is also the case in Schlesinger's chosen area of concern, the presidency of Andrew Jackson as a period of social reform. Much as Schlesinger would make a career of hysterical condemnation of what he called "ideology," here he showed himself not only a captive of (conservative) ideology himself, but a committer of that notorious sin of the ideologue, forcing the facts to fit his theories. Thus did Schlesinger insist that the sole plausible alternative to "totalitarianism" in the modern world is Big Business Government moderated by periodic bouts of reform, with the alternation between Big Business Government and reformist government the basis for his conception of the "cycle" of American history, which posited a shift from one of those modes to the other every sixteen years or so. Today, after a half century of unquestionable Big Business Government, the theory can look utterly bankrupt--the more in as to the skeptical it can seem as if it was always Big Business Government, his bar for what constituted "reform" far too low, with reflective of this his counting Andrew Jackson in the line of reformists. If Jackson appealed to anti-elitist moods within the country, in a time in which there really were fights for reform (abolition of property requirements for the franchise, imprisonment for debt, etc.), it is significant that this went on at the level of the states, rather than the Federal government, all as I cannot think of a single reform measure for which Schlesinger was able to give Jackson any significant credit. Indeed, in spite of Schlesinger's efforts Jackson seems testimony not to the ability of American political society to address its own problems, but the fobbing off of the voters with rhetoric and noise as elitist policies prevail.

Yet if the book's thesis is fundamentally incorrect (as more would notice if they read the damned doorstop) it is not wholly without its interest, with one significant point of such the extent to which he really does discuss the class politics of early, post-Era of Good Feelings America, not shrinking from the evidences of the emergence of distinctly modern conceptions of class, and class conflict--and how (as he was to do himself) elites fought back, not least ideologically. Thus they promulgated the doctrine of the classes' interests being identical, that for example workers' only hurt themselves organizing to fight for their interests; denied that there was such a thing as social class in America at all (some said because the capitalists, too, "worked," others because the working people were "capitalists," still others because today's capitalist could end up tomorrow's workingman and today's workingman tomorrow's capitalist in the Land of Opportunity); and propounded a "pastoral mythology about the laboring classes" that taught that the poor really had it better than the rich with their worries and excesses and boredom--altogether "the identity of interests between the classes, the unimportance of class, the nonexistence of class, the superior happiness of the laborer" as Schlesinger summed it up.

Of course, not everyone bought it even then. But the propaganda was ceaseless, and remains so now, barraged at us from just about every quarter of our mainstream political life, be they adherents of the theory of the "identity of class interests" (as the libertarians especially do, warning the mooching-looting-scavenging-unhuman "takers" that in ruining the "makers" they will ruin themselves); the denial or trivialization of socioeconomic inequality in American life of the class type (the gender-and-race-minded, class politics-hating woke do their part for this propagandizing, just as do the champions of the "You can do it too!" aspirationalism that is the necessary accompaniment to the insistence that you are only a temporarily embarrassed billionaire one day trade/house flip/crypto trade making you no longer embarrassed); and the propaganda for the poor being happier than the rich (often emphasizing the unhappiness of the rich, as they downplay the hardships of the poor, as seen in so much of popular fiction, our tabloid trash melodrama, etc.). And the evidence seems to be that asinine as it all looks to anyone with the slightest grasp of social reality, a far from inconsequential part of the public is influenced by it to a far from inconsequential degree, the propaganda of two centuries having its effect on the popular consciousness, though how much, how importantly--and for how long--is certainly open to disputation.