Oppressive regimes hide economic inequalities with bread and circuses. The US does it with a mere idea: classlessness. It explains the national self-image of social mobility that data, as is its impertinent wont, tends to refute. An elite need not be defined by accent or blood to be as ossified as any Old World aristocracy.
As far back as 1828, when they elected the anti-patrician Andrew Jackson, the first president from outside the Virginia or Massachusetts gentry, Americans were aware of entrenched, self-perpetuating privilege. The historian Nancy Isenberg has waded yet deeper into the annals, charting 400 years of antagonism to do with rank and status that began with the earliest settlers.
Americans should face up to their own class consciousness. They should, in fact, embrace it. Class has the potential to divide and embitter, no doubt, but democratic politics has to be contested on some faultline or other. This one feels less fraught than the rifts over race, gender and sexuality that make up what we know, for want of a better euphemism, as identity politics.