How do you know if you are not part of the new gilded gentry? You are paying taxes working in a non-governmental position to support the “entitled”. At all levels of entitlement.
David DeGerolamo
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The vision embedded in the Founding documents of the United States was of a free and equal people. At the time of the nation’s founding, this was not so much a fantasy but—with the obvious and inhumane exception of slavery—empirical reality. Class distinctions were extant, but they were not necessarily pronounced. The same was true of inequality in wealth and status. Northeastern financial families like the Schuylers had an edge over the yeoman farmers of Shenandoah Valley, of course, but it was nothing compared to the rigid class divisions in continental Europe.
The same seemed true for the nation for 30 years after World War II. A broad-based economic boom elevated the working class—especially second-wave immigrants such as the Italians and Polish—into the middle class.
But it was not always this way. The industrial revolution wrought fundamental changes in society and politics and created sharp divisions between classes. This was further reinforced by the seemingly endless waves of penniless immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe.
And, according to Joel Kotkin of Chapman University, so it goes today. He has just published an important book, The New Class Conflict, which is essential to understanding the “new class order” that is undermining the republican ideals of this nation.
