The class structure of America

Main article: Shadow Party

One day Henry Luce called me up and asked me to come to supper.

There were three of us. The second guest was a nimble, witty European whom I shall call Smetana. At supper, most of the talk was between Luce and Smetana. I was rather a silent guest. I was fresh from the shadows; bright conversation hurt my mind. In fact, I had left behind the world of Time and those who lived within it. It was only the friendliest of fictions that I still belonged to it.

No one mentioned Communism or the Hiss Case until we sat over our coffee in the living room. Mrs. Philip Jessup had just used her personal good offices to try to get me off Time. Luce was baffled by the implacable clamor of the most enlightened people against me. "By any Marxian pattern of how classes behave," he said, "the upper class should be for you and the lower classes should be against you. But it is the upper class that is most violent against you. How do you explain that?"

"You don't understand the class structure of American society," said Smetana "or you would not ask such a question. In the United States, the working class are Democrats. The middle class are Republicans. The upper class are Communists."

(Whittaker Chambers—"Witness", 1952, p. 616)

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At the time Witness was written, the "working class" referred to factory men parasitized by communist unions, while the "middle class" were service professionals, shopkeepers, and small business owners. The upper class were Shadow Party-aligned "looters" as described in Atlas Shrugged (1957). By the early 21st century, unions (aside from academia and government) had fallen by the wayside as private-sector production fled the United States and the Rust Belt fell into ruin. The lowest classes are now welfare recipients and affirmative action-mandated hires who uniformly vote Democrat, and the middle class now represents anyone who is productive based on merit.

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