Alexander the 5th's Blog

I find your argument to be rather frustrating because it jumps around and ties quite a few irrelevant things together.

The middle class as a whole has been shrinking for the last 20 years now, mostly due to their jobs departing for overseas locations and their wages not keeping up with inflation/living standards. The "intellectual" middle class, as you put it, is the large group of college graduates/college students. They're the ones that can't find jobs, and thus are forced to search for jobs they are overqualified to take. They're the ones that, as you claim, emerge with over-ideallized visions of the future and abandon those ideas as they progress into their 40's. I'm not entirely sure if that's true, but this is the class that often promotes change and progress. These are the social progressives that push society forward, and you find fewer of them nowadays because nobody has the money to fund them through college and give them a job they are qualified for.

A vast majority of the government is made up of the middle class intellectuals you seem to be looking for, as are the corporations. The difference is that much of the wealth is concentrated in corporate America, and it is in corporate America's best interest to not only sway the government to benefit itself, but also to employ fewer people, destroy the unions, pay people less, and demand more productivity; you'll notice if you've read anything about the wealth gap in America that real wages for the middle class have gone up far less than inflation and prices have, and this is, in large part due to the sway of the wealthy elite class's politics and corporate power.

NAFTA, deregulation, tax cuts - all of these things benefit the wealthy elite and seriously damage the middle class. In other words, you should read more about wealth and politics in America because your ideas are focusing on the wrong aspects of society. I would recommend several books written by Kevin Phillips, among them "Wealth and Democracy; a History of the American Rich" and "American Theocracy; the Perils of Oil, Religion, and (something else) in the 21st Century".

You seem to think that someone being middle class makes them objective. This is incorrect. Most middle class people have absolutely no idea how the poor live or what the rich are up to, and are filled with prejudices taken from the newspapers. Generally speaking their 'intellectualism' is rooted in their social position like everyone else's. That social position just happens to have become the idealised standard of bourgeois society.

It seems some people are getting there wires crossed.

I meant people who are intellectually in the middle,

I do not mean purely in the economic sense(though there is some correlation, no doubt)

Can you define the term intellectual middle-class?

In my usage of the word, intellectual middle class would refer to someone in terms of intellectual development who is above the common suburbanite, but below the power elite.

While the Intellectual middle class often belongs to the economic group of the Upper middle class , or lower part of the wealthy class, that is not always the case, and they can come from almost any economic background.

Hmm, again, can you define intellectual development or could you explain in what way you are defining intelligence? I'm not sure what attributes you are assigning to define the classes, or what separates them.

When I refer to intelligence on this issue, I mean knowledge of history, sociology, and various other topics related to politics and human thought and society.

I see. And what data are you using to make that declaration of a shrinking class, or was this a general observation?

General observation.

Something like this is hard to prove.

Though, part of it comes from the fact that America is so messed up, and the fact that not many people are pointing out the right things.

So people with at least a bachelor's in one or more of a selection of liberal arts degrees? Also, citation for evidence to some of the claims made would be nice. You *do* make quite a lot of unsubstantiated claims, and without that, it's hard to take this seriously. Finally, correct capitalization and punctuation would be nice. You actually did quite nicely on the spelling, especially for having the other errors there.

It's a cruel world

The rich get richer and the poor get poorer

The smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber.

So people with at least a bachelor's in one or more of a selection of liberal arts degrees? Also, citation for evidence to some of the claims made would be nice. You *do* make quite a lot of unsubstantiated claims, and without that, it's hard to take this seriously. Finally, correct capitalization and punctuation would be nice. You actually did quite nicely on the spelling, especially for having the other errors there.

Err not quite, they do not exactly have to have a degree, it can be self learned.

As for citation, you got me there, feel free to totally dis regard my post, it was simply meant to publicly present a thought I had.

And for punctuation and capitalization, what can I say, I am awful at writing, I will do better next time?

I voted other: Banana!

Blah blah blah class war blah blah blah people are idiots.

It seems to me you are taking a complicated world of politics and shrinking it into an ideological paradigm of a few undefined titles for people. You also are making the jump from middle class people are quiet to middle class people are uneducated. Many people especially in the middle class are just content enough with the current system that they don't care much for political activism (especially after working/community involvement etc) But unless you have some facts to back up your ideas I am gonna basically say its an elitist generalization.

I'd say a (competent) bachelor's degree counts as intellectually middle class these days, or at least a high school graduate who reads a lot of books and watches some documentaries. But where do you group the more elite ones with specialized knowledge - scientists, doctors, lawyers, engineers? And f the attitude prevails that degrees are worthless, then that alone is an indicator that the intellectual middle class is eroding or at least shifting.

Governments rely solely on them for money. Nobody would willing destroy them, not even the tyrants, because you can't make money from your oil rigs if you don't have petroleum engineers.

How about those of us who could complete a degree if they wanted to, but don't. The only reason I haven't gone to university is that I don't want to have to spend half my life paying off a student loan. Not having a degree does not immediately make me less intelligent than someone who does. Perhaps I will have less specific knowledge about particular subjects, but my general knowledge base remains broad. More important than scripted learning is the acquisition of skills such as analytical thought, lateral thinking, and the ability to construct an argument. Admittedly, these things should ideally be taught at school or your tertiary institute, but that is not always the case. Ideally, too, these types of skills are taught at an early age. Alas, as Alexander suggested, the average person over 30 is generally poorly informed, which is more of a generational issue than anything else. It tends to be a broad spectrum of ages from about 35-45 in my observation, and these are the people who are teaching the new generation, the parents. If they can not impart as much knowledge onto their children as I was fortunate my parents did me, the world of tomorrow may be a sad place to be.