Am I Suggesting Class War?

I realized the last few posts could be fairly easily classified as class war.  The short answer is that no this is not meant to advocate for class war.

The longer answer is that this is not class warfare from anything like a socialist perspective, I am making no claims, and do not believe, that there are any inherent conflict of interest between the wealthy and the rest of society or that this is some way linked to control of the means of production or any particular segment of society's resources.

What I'm suggesting instead is pure interest group politics.  A number of innovations, some outside our control and ultimately part of the international system, as well as a number of others particular to decisions made by our government, have led to a shift in incentives and potential awards among groups that individuals can potentially identify with and become a member of.  Unsurprisingly, this leads to them joining and identifying more frequently with the groups whose rewards have become greater.

This of course is a huge problem.  Our system works because it manages to align the interests of many groups in our society, I would be willing to say that the success or failure of a society is largely determined by its ability to align the interests of the individuals making it up and its ability to attract new individuals into it.  Changes that interfere with this are potentially extremely destructive, the more interests begin to diverge the more potential gain that individual actors see in creating further divergences that benefit themselves more than others.  Eventually, cooperation becomes increasingly more difficult the further interests diverge and the lack of coordination between actors begins to shrink the pie.

In our system, it used to be that the interests of the wealthy diverged significantly from each other and were more closely aligned with the interests of their business and those that were involved in their industry.  While this may not have declined greatly, their interests as members of the upper income bracket, and probably more significantly, as earners of investment income have certainly converged meaning that, at the margins, they have become more likely to cooperate with each other and gain those benefits and let the interests of their individual industry and business be secondary (at the margins is an important phrase here, I'm not suggesting they no longer put their business first, just that there is a greater range where their business interests seems less relevant than the interests they share with other wealthy folks).

So, fundamentally, this is a simple failure of political economy, not class war.  There is no inherent conflict between income brackets, but a failure of political culture has strengthened a community of interest within the upper income bracket while weakening the community of interests between income brackets relative to this.  This is leading to a predictable outcome.