My Take: The Middle Class: an integral part of liberalism

The first mentioning of the middle class was in James Bradshaw’s 1745 pamphlet “Scheme to prevent running Irish wools to France”. The term in Bradshaw’s world meant the people in the class hierarchy in between the proletarian peasants and the bourgeois nobility. However, this term came to mean the petite bourgeoisie, people who are educated, have qualifications and work in professional industries like business and managing roles. In theory, this seems like a best of both worlds scenario, with the education and fiscal security of an upperclassman without the image of an aristocrat, however, in modern politics, of the ideologies currently in the worldwide political arena, only one has a vision that includes the middle class as its centrepiece: liberalism. While many libertarians and neo-liberals see the class struggle as between the rich and the rest (also called social Darwinism) and many socialists see the struggle as between the working class and ruling class, modern liberalists sees no class struggle and a utopian harmony where the upper, middle and lower classes live in peace. Unfortunately for liberals, neoliberal ideology is ascendant in many countries including Australia, where both major parties have spread neoliberal ideas such as privatisation of state assets and deregulation and the United Kingdom. These ideas have put our respective middle classes in grave danger. In the United States, while the ultra-obstructionist Republican Party continue to pass bills attacking the middle class, President Obama continues to simply sprout lines on why the middle class needs to be saved rather than actually acting on it at a time when poverty rates are at 15% and rising ever higher and the percentage of people not in the labor force is at a 36 year high and continues to rise. The most shocking stat is that just 44% of people consider themselves to be middle class as people start to realise that their dreams of living the high life and the American Dream are just a dream. The middle class in the west will continue to shrink so long as liberalism doesn’t defend it. The problems of poverty and unemployment were the same problems that were the triggers for the Arab Spring revolution.
With all the talk on liberals and conservative neo-liberals, seemingly the mainstream political ideologies today, it maybe time we think about the socialists, whose concept of the working class proletariat rising up to form one “middle class” is a concept that is foreign to the liberal view of the middle class being the educated, aristocrat-like group it has become.
My take is that the middle class is a concept that in its current form is fabricated by liberals to keep the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeois away from the limelight and that really their efforts to keep a flourishing middle class will be undermined, by both the neoliberals, who are the default ideology under capitalism, and the socialists, the radical fringe, who won’t back down from the working class, rather than the middle class being the answer to inequality. Within 50 years, whether we are governed by capitalism or socialism, the middle class in its present form will be a forgotten concept, never to be seen again, or if it does exist it will be a group, not a class.