Have you watched it? The kids are encouraged to marry within their class (the better to preserve the wealth of that class, one presumes). They all belong to the same exclusive clubs. They all go to the same parties. If it is not a closed circle, it is something close to it.
How are you defining “class?”
It seems to me the test is what will happen if, for example, the child of some internet billionaire wants to start hanging out in these circles. My guess is that such a person would be accepted as long as as he or she otherwise fit in.
There is a subtle difference. There will always be a group of people who end up more successful or end up in positions with more power and more decision making responsibility. The difference is whether they have been prepared from birth to join this “overclass” or if they ended up part of it through hard work and ambition.
And do you really need to be part of the Overclass to be successful? There are plenty of examples of successful and wealthy people who came from modest means.
Not so much the exclusivity but the critieria for membership. Is it a chess club for the top players or just the players from the wealthiest parents? Does it exclude top players who are not the “right sort of people”?
I basically agree. There is a legend that in pre-revolution Iran, one needed to be from the “100 families” in order to achieve a position of high responsibility. I don’t know if it’s true or not, but that’s what I would call an “overclass.”
Right. To me, for a chess club to be analagous to a social class, it would have to exclude people who are good chess players, willing to pay the membership fee, but who aren’t from the “right” background.
Seems to me that the terms “nouveau riche” and “new money” exist in our language to demark this sort of class distinction. If not, why do those terms survive?
Not exactly. Overclass English is not the dialect once spoken by the Northeastern Establishment elite, it is the Midwestern dialect spoken by TV news anchormen. Which some still might find hoity-toity, I admit.
But inapposite. The overclass now (and only relatively recently) includes Jews, and other whites of non-Anglo-Saxon descent.
From Fussell’s Class:
N.B.: Fussell is not calling for a social revolution or a classless society, only trying to glean insights of and direct more attention towards a very important subject that, in America, tends to be treated as irrelevant or best not mentioned.
Lind is not calling for a social revolution either. What he wants is to abolish race-based affirmative action and replace it with a far more vigorous (and expensive, and the overclass can damned well pay for it) battery of “social escalator” programs designed to lift the poor into the middle class. He also wants to break the disproportionate political power of the overclass through campaign-finance reform (no paid political advertising at all). Then we would still have a social pyramid, but the top and the bottom would be closer together than they are now.
I think you are right. However, the group of people described in the OP are more properly described as a “subculture” (or an “overculture” if you will). Similarly for the group of kids profiled in Born Rich.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if there is a bona fide upper class out there in parts of America. People who turn up their noses at the “nouveau riche.” However, if they exist, they aren’t really important in the way that the 100 Families of Iran were (supposedly) important.
Besides the above, people might use them as a way to demean other people, even if those people are not excluded as they might have been in the past.
No, it’s a matter of power, not exclusivity. A class can maintain its existence as a class while admitting new members from below, as the gentry did in 19th-Century Britain by inviting the nouveau riche to marry into their families and send their sons to their own elite public schools.
Amen to this.
If I may wax Jessie-Jackson-esque: If you want to reap the fruit you have to water the root.
I’m not exactly sure what you mean by “matter of,” but anyway, you are free to define the word “overclass” any way you like.
I see two problems with your apparent approach.
First, if you define “overclass” in terms of power, then one can look at any nation or society, point at whatever people are at the top in terms of power, and say “aha! an overclass!” Given that every nation or society necessarily has an overclass (so defined), the term is rather meaningless.
Second, most people understand the concept of “class” to carry some amount of exclusivity with it. e.g. a competent Iranian who can’t be promoted because he’s not from the 100 Families. So you are arguably doing a bit of a bait and switch.
Of course, the OP’s quote doesn’t just talk about an “overclass,” it talks about a “white overclass.” And I suspect that this is the real grievance here. That the people with power and status in America come disproportionately from certain ethnic/cultural groups.
No, what you have is an institutional elite, which Lind carefully distinguishes from the overclass that provides most (not all) of its members. Re-read the excerpt in the OP. Barack Obama is part of the institutional elite, but not of the overclass; he might conceivably have married into it, but he didn’t.
There is exclusivity to the overclass – it is not absolute, but it is real. Being born into the middle class makes ascension to the overclass, not impossible, but difficult; being born into the lower classes makes it all but impossible. Being born into the overclass makes it easy, practically inevitable, to remain there. And that is not because the overclass has some sort of membership committee, it is because it has distinctive ways and manners and speech, which are hard to acquire if not learned from childhood; and because for a lower-born person to achieve overclass status and think of marrying into an overclass family requires a lot of education and career success.
Lind is entirely cognizant of individual social mobility in America – and of its limitations, which tend to be obscured by the pervasive myths that (1) America, uniquely, has always been a classless society anyway, and all Americans are really middle-class in some sense, and (2) class is purely a matter of wealth or economic function.
From Fussell’s Class:
The three classes described above together make up the overclass.
That is the truth (see the excerpt in post #34), and Lind does perceive that as a grievance, as he (and you) should. But it is not his sole grievance. He is careful everywhere to point out that most middle-class and underclass Americans are also white (a fact that both white racists and black activists tend to obscure). Affirmative action he sees as in part a divide-and-rule strategy* by the overclass, suppressing demands for broader social equality by subsidizing the creation of token black and Latino overclasses – which lack any independent power bases of their own and are in effect dependent, salaried auxiliaries to the white overclass. What he wants to replace affirmative action with is a set of color-blind “social escalator” programs designed to lift the poor of all races into the middle class at least. And what’s wrong with that? 
*N.B.: “Strategy” != “conspiracy.” Also from Lind’s book:
Frankly, I find your definition of “overclass” to be rather slippery. A few posts back, you said this:
Now it seems you are dragging “exclusivity” back into your definition. Not only that, but when I talked about the people with “power,” you dismissed this category by introducing a new term - the “institutional elite.” You yourself insisted that “it’s a matter of power.” Whatever that means.
So basically what you are saying doesn’t seemt to be making much sense. I think you need to define your terms clearly.
Again, I would call this more of a subculture than a class. Would the kids in Born Rich spurn somebody who was nouveaux riche? Probably not, if the newcomer otherwise fit in.
Yet again, this is more than a subculture than a class as I illustrated earlier in the thread.
It would depend on the specific proposal. The idea of gutting lending standards in order to increase the rates of home ownership didn’t work out very well.
The idea of basing college and professional school admissions in large part on multiple choice tests is great for Jewish and Asian people but not so great for Blacks and Hispanics.
It’s simple enough: The overclass has power because it (1) furnishes most of the institutional elite and (2) exercises influence over elections and public policymaking far out of proportion to its numbers and (3) collectively controls most of the wealth and the corporations and elite institutions. It is in part meritocratic and open to (limited) recruitment, but in the main an exclusive social class, composed of families bound by ties of marriage and common life experiences.
Goths are a subculture. Hippies are a subculture. If most members are born into it and more likely than not to marry within it, and if it is something with a definite socioeconomic status-cache high or low, it’s a class. (Whites and blacks at any given level of American society have a cultural division between them, they are not in the same class – yet.)
That is a process Lind sees clearly in operation, in the formation of the modern overclass from the fusion of the professionals and businesscritters with the old rentier classes.
The role of which in the lending crisis has been greatly exaggerated, but, in any case, Lind is thinking more of things that would allow underclass Americans actually to increase their education, earning capacity, and social stability. That takes a bit more than a house, though a house is important, which perception underlay America’s whites-only home-mortgage-deduction policy after WWII.
A problem that can easily (but not cheaply) be corrected at the preschool and primary-education stages. Unless you still think (and I think you do) that some races are mentally inferior to others by heredity. :dubious:
I disagree, and I think my hypothetical from before will illustrate it:
Suppose some corn-fed boy from Iowa does well on the SATs and ends up going to an ivy league school; where he becomes a bit of an environmentalist, starts listening to NPR now and then, and seriously thinks about applying to grad school.
If he starts dating a coed who is part of the whole SWPL set and things get serious, will her parents have serious objections?
If he gets good grades in college and a good LSAT score, will he have any more trouble getting into law school than the Jewish kid across the hall who is from Long Island?
These aren’t just rhetorical questions . . . I’d like to hear your response.
I’m not sure what this means, but in any event, I think most people would agree that gutting lending standards wasn’t such a great idea in hindsight. Whether it caused the current economic crisis or not.
What are your specific proposals?
That’s probably an issue for another thread, but again, what are your specific proposals?
Maybe, probably not. The main problem is not their prejudice but that your corn-fed boy in that situation is, in the current structure of our society, a relatively rare animal. (BTW, could you spell out “SWPL set”?)
Probably not. But his getting into an Ivy-League university in the first place would be a challenge, in part because of legacy preferences, which Lind wants to outlaw.
Lind’s specific proposals are set forth in Chapter Eight of his book. I am rereading it and will prepare you a summary. (Of course, you could read the book yourself, most public-libary systems will have a copy.)
I’m just not seeing the difference between “overclass” and “wealthy.” Yes, I’ve seen the comments about the nouveau riche not “passing,” but I think that would last one generation, at most. Their children will soon fall into the “overclass.” All those new people you were mentioning who have been coming in from the south and west? Guess what–they’re nouveau riche. Only now they’re being admitted to the overclass.
Replace “overclass” with “tax bracket” and I don’t see any difference.
Do wealthy people have more power, and the ability to pass that wealth and power on to their descendants? Yes. That’s the nature of wealth. Calling it an “overclass” confuses the point.
The problem I see with this is somewhat akin to the problem of making all children “above average”. 
Indeed, though I admit I have not read the man’s work, the exerpts I have seen are more describtive than proscriptive - there is certainly an “upper class” or “overclass” or whatever you want to call it, an upper level of society, and it shares a bunch of characteristics … but can everyone be “upper class”? Not really.
No, but everybody now underclass can be middle-class, even if that renders meaningless the name of the latter – i.e., can enjoy what we now think of as middle-class income, status and opportunities – and free and socially acceptable intermarriage with those families that make up the middle class at present. As for the overclass, Lind doesn’t want to destroy it as a class, only to tax it more, reduce its power and privileges, and make access to it easier. It’s a form of Disraeli’s “one-nation conservatism.”