Well, the book is humor, commentary and amateur sociology by a professor of English literature. Fussell does not even pretend to be using the statistical tools social scientists (presumably) use to form their hypotheses. But you can’t deny there is more of value in his insights than in “Help! I am being held prisoner in a fortune cookie factory!”
Fussell 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. Please re-read the bolded first paragraph of the excerpt, with the quotation from George Orwell.
Also from Fussell’s book:
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.
Errmm . . . No, he (Lind) doesn’t. Read the excerpt more carefully.
But, remember, he is talking about thinks like cultural characteristics and status perceptions, which, by their nature, cannot be quantified for statistical analysis. Marx was an economist – but we’re not talking about economics here.
Marx was a lot more than an economist, and perception by itself is bullshit. Just because something appears to be a certain way does not mean it actually is that way. And saying “Well, we can’t really analyze it in any serious manner so we might as well assume it’s true/valid” smacks of the invisibly pink and monocerotic.
BG, where I think Fussell missed the boat is that, while it’s true to an extent that an individual can have trouble moving up (although there are many, many exceptions to that), his or her children will be fully accepted. It only takes one generation to make Old Money here. For most, that’s enough to prevent the despair that he writes of (which in turn would be likely to lead to revolution, to bring this back to the OP), and that, honestly, I don’t see except among the hereditary poor. As I said earlier, wealth, even tacky wealth, buys access, and access plus wealth definitely lands your kids in the upper class if you want them to be there.
I think as time goes by, this becomes increasingly true even in societies where there is a hereditary nobility. But it takes money. I think the reason for this is that the well-born tend not to be the wealthiest, and they want more; therefore they will accept contact with the rich and less well-born in order to better their own chance at acquiring more wealth.
That certainly was the case in 19th Century Britain, when the newly-rich industrialists were allowed – even warmly invited – to intermarry with the old landed gentry and send their sons to the same elite schools and merge the two classes into one. Which has a lot in common with Lind’s account of the formation of the modern American overclass (except that it produced a fused class modeling its values and manners on those of the lower predecessor class, not the upper).
Perception is false especially in social relations. Take, for example, this perception of economic, political, and social equality we live under here in the States. It comes up against the reality of economic inequality disproportionately affecting minorities, for example, and more often than not it’s dismissed as being an individual problem rather than a social problem because the perception of social equality is the ‘reality’. The perception is that capitalism is the best of all possible socioeconomic systems, masking the reality that it absolutely isn’t.
Basically he has created this ficticious “white overclass” based on some arbitrary criteria (that sounds like something he took from The Preppy Handbook) that exclude a good portion of people who are successful and influentual. His concept of a “white overclass” rings true if you live in the Northeast. I don’t know if that can be applied accross the country though.
What would be a lot more compelling to me would be some statistics taken from the “institutional elite” to see what their backgrounds and origins really are from.