GOP winning the middle 50% of the income distribution while Dems win the bottom and top 25% in a populiberal vs liberaltarian alignment doesn’t really involve this.
Would be trippy to see Dems win small business owners on top of big corporate interests in a full economic realignment though.
I think this old forum Republican, JJ, once argued to me when I tried to categorize class structure in America that there really isn't "class" any more and that most decisions are now being made on a decentralized basis by an educated middle and upper-middle class. What this could mean is that we could face a future where there is still probably a class system, but with it being less of a ladder and more of a monkey bars type of deal with various groups enjoying various different types of privileges and responsibilities and the political discourse revolving around balancing their responsibilities in privileges in a way that keeps society stable and advancing.
What do you and JJ think this would look like in terms of how the parties would differ from each other?
The only thing I really remember about his is that he was a middle aged white guy in Philly who went to a black church, was slightly pro-choice, and otherwise was a pretty Republican hack that kept on ranting about the coming of the "deluge". It's all part of this thread called "Two Guesses" from around the time of the foreclosures and Obama's subsequent landslide win. If you have time, its long but relatively easy to read the first few posts or pages. A lot of questions will be answered.
In JJ's mind 2010 was probably this prelude to the deluge and we have been living in the deluge since the combination of the failed initial administration of the ACA, the backlash against protests against police brutality, and the libertarians and socialists in congress allowing Russian occupation of Crimea and Syria culminated in Republicans winning bigly in 2014 and Trump winning in 2016. Now that we had a major event and our nation's laws were totally rewritten by judicial fiat, it could be argued that we are still spiraling towards something more extreme this decade or next or simply coming out of a "deluge".
My view on class is that it is still dominated by something that vaguely resembles more classical sociological interpretations that pull ideas from liberalism, socialism, and the ancien regime.
I believe that society is comprised of two or three levels of people in the upper class (regional, theater, and global level oligarchs) and they are compartmentalized by whether they wield social (celebrities and athletes), economic(billionaires), or political power(members of Congress, the President and members of the SES, SCOTUS et al).
These oligarchs delegate strategic social, economic, and legal power to some sort of class of PhD-level(though many just have elite bachelor and professional degrees) workers and executives. There's a lot of crisscrossing of wires here, but they make all of the strategic decisions. Members of this class are people like Social Media influencers (including prolific sex workers), elite lawyers, doctors, researchers, and programmers, State Legislators, some GS 14s and many GS15s in the federal service, more typically senior managers of publicly traded company.
This executive class is basically pulled from an upper-middle professional class that make up the top quintile of society that is mostly made up of people like lawyers, doctors, merchants/shop owners, psychologists, commissioned military men and women, managers, and programmers. Typical salaries from "absorbed" elites range from the project manager of a prestigious federal benefits or weapons program that makes 150,000 a year, to a lead or principal IC at a profitable law firm or technology publishing company that makes like 800,000 a year. Typical salaries of "non-absorbed" professionals range from about 100k to about 250k or 300k. Non-absorbed professionals make a lot of society's tactical decisions as the strategies are delegated from the absorbed ones.
Immediately below them is the 4th quintile of society and they make up the typical "college educated", "unionized", or higher-skilled trade population. These are people like nurses, teachers, accountants, plumbers and electricians that provide goods and services that someone can't be readily trained to do and fulfill a distinct social purpose. Typical pay here is between like 57000 a year and 95000 a year. This is the "Middle Class". They aren't the "average" people, but rather the "slightly above average" people.
Below them is the "Working Class" or the people who have truly average intelligence, skill, earning ability, and social and cultural achievements.
Below them are those who you would consider poor, but not completely destitute or reliant on transfer payments and at the very bottom, you have people who are homeless, institutionalized, or who cannot completely care for themselves.
So I guess, I subscribe to even balance of "Classical Structuralism" and who I call the "Social Neorealists" that you are talking about.
