Of the Quasi-Middle Class

Recent years have had me thinking me a lot about the term "middle class"--starting with the awkwardness of the "New" middle class concept which completely overlooks the whole issue of property and independence to treat people who work for a paycheck at the pleasure of a master ("boss" is just a euphemism for master, because apparently someone thought saying it in Dutch made it different) as a privileged stratum.

The idea was that they enjoyed a higher level of material consumption, more security, more opportunity to get ahead than other people working for a boss for the sake of a paycheck--but on close inspection it seems that while in the post-war era and after a great many people had houses and cars, this was a matter of having a mortgage and making car payments rather than owning things outright, all as (in part because of their indebtedness and its perils) they had relatively little of the security and opportunity promised. And all in all I think a case can be made that what we speak of as the "middle class" is overwhelmingly just the "quasi-middle class"--and that we would understand the stresses of the present situation a good deal better than we do now if we started to recognize it as such.