Discussions of class are complicated by the fact that the language we use for it was invented during the industrial revolution, wasn’t perfect to begin with, and hasn’t been properly updated since then. Plus there’s been a century’s worth of effort from the right to muddy the waters of the discourse.
I tend to draw my class boundaries purely on wealth and income rather than profession; I think it gives a better model of reality. To me, a plumber with two new cars and a big house is middle class; an office clerk with shitty healthcare and a slum apartment is working class. The working class are living on the edge, the middle class have some resources in reserve.
In my own thoughts, I put pretty much anyone near or below median income as working class and most of the rest as middle class, with the transition to ruling class being a gradually developing factor of exponentially increasing wealth as you hit the 0.001%ers. The boundaries and definitions are grey and fuzzy, just like everything else; we live in a postmodern world, whether we like it or not.
When I’m talking about framing in this case, I don’t mean to imply anything deliberate. It’s just that our underlying assumptions shape our perspectives, and that perspective in turn shapes our understanding of reality.
I think that the frequently stated view that fascism arises from the working class is a dangerously false narrative (because it promotes ineffective solutions), so I tend to have a bit of a reflexive objection to anything that suggests it.
Fascism is built upon deliberately-manufactured fears, yes. And the people behind that manufacturing are primarily scumbag 0.0001%ers. But the people being successfully encouraged into fascism are mostly middle class, by my definitions.
