Head of Its Class(es) - A new politics for the GOP.

Growing up in '50s Britain, I became addicted to the instructive works of Stephen Potter-Lifemanship, One-upmanship, etc.-which gave satirical advice on how to triumph in the little social battles of everyday life in a class society. The fact that Potter's works existed, of course, was strong evidence that Britain, if a society with classes, was also one in which people moved with relative ease from one social class to another. For there is no need for advice on etiquette in a society in which people remain fixed in the circumstances in which they were born. Everyone knows how to behave at home.

Potter's advice is useful in any society in which men hope to shine socially, impress girls, beat their opponents at tennis or bridge, sing comic songs without embarrassment, and in general lever themselves one up over the other fellow. My favorite Potter advice ran: "If someone cracks a joke about cripples, say nothing but get up and limp slowly out of the room." But there are many other sage maxims by which the learner is enabled to cope in conversations on subjects where he is entirely ignorant. Thus, almost any statement about the culture or politics of another country, from Norway to Nicaragua, can be capped with the retort: "Yes, but not in the South."

A layman's introduction to the Potter oeuvre is available in the form of the Alastair Sim movie comedy School for Scoundrels, now out on video. Maybe the Republican National Committee can invest in a copy. For the sad fact is that the GOP seems to have got itself into a very perverse social predicament. Whatever the grounds of debate, it is permanently "one down," in Potter's terminology. If the topic is tax cuts, it is damned as rich and greedy. Even Warren Buffett and Bill Gates draw back appalled from its shameless advocacy of repealing the estate tax. But if the world is discussing government subsidies to Piss Christ, the GOP is painfully polyester in its lack of worldly sophistication. Indeed, the party's moralistic philistinism has become such a scandal that even the suburbs have noticed.

What has brought about these contrary embarrassments is a fairly dramatic transformation of the American class system. (Yes, Virginia, there is such a beast.) The workers have become rich and therefore conservative; and the rich have decided to become less conservative to spite them. This is not unprecedented: European aristos used to dress in gorgeous silks and satins, but when the poor could afford to copy them, the aristos began to wander around their estates in torn pullovers, their trousers held up with old school ties, being mistaken for the gardener. (See also the social history of denim.)

In America's case, the class conflict is further complicated by Freudian compulsions. The workers want to copy the rich they know, namely the local small capitalist and middle-class professional; the successful children of that class, rejecting parental standards, want to imitate Old Money and its Style; but Old Money camouflages itself by adopting proletarian dress and standards. The upshot is that Mr. and Mrs. Babbitt send their daughter to the Ivy League with highest hopes, and she returns home for "Winterval" with her Chicana lesbian roommate, denouncing perfume and the patriarchy. On the other side of the tracks, meanwhile, the autoworker's son reads Ayn Rand and dreams of stalking in a principled fashion through the local country club, sneering contemptuously at the assembled wimps.

And the third influence-after mass affluence and Oedipal revenge-is a change in the basis of class. Just as wealth replaced birth as the origin of high status sometime in the 19th century, so education has replaced wealth since the Second World War. There were signs of this change even before that-at some point between the wars, say 1938, it became mildly disgraceful for an able-bodied man to live solely off a private income. However rich, he needed to have a job. (Exactly one generation later, circa 1965, women caught up with this trend, realized that their lives as homemakers were a form of patriarchal oppression, and demanded careers too.) After 1945, however, as a result of such developments as the G.I. Bill and the SAT, there was a quiet social revolution. A new national elite based on education, paper qualifications, and technical skills gradually replaced existing (mainly local) elites in corporations, national politics, and cultural life.

This change is somewhat obscured by the fact that education and wealth correlate reasonably closely. Well-educated lawyers, doctors, managers, and entrepreneurs become rich over time. The correlation is not exact- there are wealthy dimwits and Ph.D.'s from the ghetto. And both upstarts and downstarts need time to get to their ultimate social destinations. But even though well-educated people generally become rich, they often harbor hostile, envious, or contemptuous feelings toward those who are merely rich, obviously rich, vulgarly rich. And to differentiate themselves from such people, they will exhibit a sympathetic feeling of patronage toward their supposed victims and enemies, namely the poor-call it conspicuous compassion. All of which- see Point 2-will sometimes mean their feeling ...