Fair Game

...It is not easy for liberals to make an approach to the Newer Class...

...So unsure are they of their judgment that they might as easily have come out for conviction as for acquittal...

...Yet many blacks themselves, moving into mainstream America, are staunch members of the Newer Class...

...Why, after all, should one be well-disposed toward institutions whose existence calls attention to one's own limitations...

...The Newer Class has none of the assurance of the New Class...

...A conservative stance is evidence of one's escape from the ghetto and the ghetto mentality...

...In the Mitchell-Stans case, they followed a banker, but so unsettled is their condition that almost any other symbol of superior accomplishment could have carried the day with them...

...Where are their spokesmen...

...Ins and Outs The strong sense of independence that marks the New Class grows out of more education, more professional skill, more faith in one's competence than has yet accrued to the clerks, managers and sort-of-professionals who make up the Newer Class...

...They may serve on our jury...

...Harvard and Yale, open to the rich and the poor, are not open to the low-middle????or so they feel...

...Its members have not known the fancier four-year colleges, much less graduate schools, and the very thought of them may arouse discomfort, even anger...

...Blacks within the Newer Class, to be sure, are likely to be less harsh on other blacks, but divisions are evident beneath the rhetoric of Soul...

...In defense of his own self-regard and in quest of the good opinion of colleagues at the other desks, the black office worker is tempted to draw attention to the differences between himself and the welfare cases who give his people a bad name...

...They do not enjoy the luxury of being able to see politics apart from immediate self-interest...

...These are relatively late arrivals into middle-class respectability, who hold positions some rungs beneath the New Class but above what would have been their lot in past generations...

...No, this Newer Class of the upwardly mobile????if not all that mobile and not all that upward????does not fit into the category of "liberal," spacious though it is...

...Here is a group waiting to be led...

...Why should they not be exasperated by those TV interviews that seem always to have politicians and professors making a pitch for the underdog...

...White and Black The groups that comprise the Newer Class have no special affection or regard for one another...

...Any opening up of the society can be taken as a personal threat...

...It is much more agreeable to go all out for the very poor, ghetto families, migrants, Indians...

...And they are entirely alien to the Eastern intellectuals whom Spiro Agnew used to insult for their delectation...

...Why aren't their concerns being wept over on the networks...

...Their needs are so great that other considerations fade into insignificance, and they are far enough away so that we can allow our imaginations to work on them, to their benefit and our satisfaction...

...Probably it was just a case of conspicuous consumption...

...they read slick magazines, if they read at all...

...Game BY WALTER GOODMAN The Newer Class Why the lawyers for John Mitchell and Maurice Stans had to hire a consultant to tell them a jury of ignoramuses would be better for their clients than one made up of college professors remains a mystery...

...They have more now than they ever had, yet much energy must be expended on protecting their holdings...

...Their collars are white and they mean to keep them that way...

...Now the Mitchell-Stans jury presents to us specimens of a Newer Class????different in every way from the New Class????whose numbers are larger and whose influence promises to be less benign...

...Still, the phenomenon so nicely exposed in that trial warrants attention...

...In 1972, the Newer Class audience had no difficulty seeing on the TV set that the Mc-Govern camp was in the possession of people who scorned the values they hold most dear...

...Nor is the Newer Class kindly disposed to Women's Lib or Gay Lib or to any of the other proliferating Libs that treat so lightly the underpinnings of their lives...

...They are much closer in most ways to the whites with whom they keep coming into conflict than they are to their champions, those limousine liberals the Mitchell-Stans defense sensibly sought to exclude from the jury...

...They had become the indispensable men of the modern world...

...Though the latter are pleased with their accomplishments, they know how easily they can be replaced...

...While the New Class is taking off its neckties, the Newer Class is happy to be in positions that require them, and the wider the better...

...Nonetheless, they will continue to serve on juries...

...They are close enough to the poor to see them more realistically than those friends of the poor who live in neighborhoods that the Newer Class cannot afford...

...To members of the Newer Class, the poor are seen not as an opportunity to practice charity and brotherhood but as a shadow over their own well-being, a reminder, a warning, an affront, an imposition: "I worked hard for what I got . . . let them do like I did...

...The Ralph Naders and John Gardners, heroes of the New Class, hold no charm for the Newer Class...

...They do all of the things that those below them on the socioeconomic scale would do if they could, all of the things that those above them disdain...

...This property-less elite was educated to a degree beyond any comparable group in history, and since in that pre-Vietnam era it went without saying that education bred large-mindedness, I put the book down rather pleased by the prospect that informed, enlightened, broad-outlook men and women, just like you and me, were taking over the country...

...Oh, most of the Newer Class is likely to vote Democratic out of habit, but they are selective...

...A man who is trying to get a firm grip on respectability cannot be expected to go out of his way to identify himself with the disreputable...

...They are determined that their children will not fall back into the blue collar blues????but their ambitions do not go much higher, for they are nervous about losing the young to an unknown and suspect sort of life...

...They are united, however, in their resistance to the encroaching black, who comes on as a threat to their physical safety, their social position, their economic progress, their self-esteem, their hopes for their children, the cohesion of their neighborhoods, the whole shape of their lives...

...The Liberated Woman is not their woman...

...Some years ago, David Bazelon wrote an interesting book about what he called the New Class????the corporate middle managers, the technicians of industry who, since New Deal days, had been assuming substantial powers by virtue of their know-how and numbers...

...Berkeley, California, and Madison, Wisconsin, are strange, somewhat frightening places...

...they are spoilers...

...There is an inbuilt antipathy here...

...True, they can be persuaded to support causes like national health insurance, because many of them know from personal troubles what serious illness can do to a family's savings account????though even here corporate benefits have a way of diluting an employe's enthusiasm for social legislation...

...Indeed, the Italians of Newark, the Jews of Brooklyn, the Irish of Boston are rumored to make jokes about each other's ethnic peculiarities...

...the Liberated homosexual must not be allowed near their children...

...they serve cheese dips...

...Like floods, earthquakes and other calamities of nature, advancing blacks awaken instant solidarity among those they touch...

...Since they are at once anti-Establishment and fundamentally conservative (a definition of contemporary Populism), a George Wallace speaks to them in words they understand...

...Equal Time...

...They are the TV audience, albeit not for BBC imports...

...The combination of a deep uncertainty about themselves, an urge to appear respectable, an anxiousness to do the correct thing, a determination to defend what they have and what they are, a sense that their prospects are out of their control????All this invites political manipulation...

...They remain deeply suspicious of movements that promise to unsettle things, for they have put their hopes in an orderly progression from desk to desk, from title to title...

...Our Newer Class constituents are bound together by most of what goes under the heading of Lifestyle...

...There are not many members of the Civil Liberties Union among the Newer Class...

...The Newer Class is not poor enough to arouse an all-pardoning compassion, or distant enough to become the protagonists of liberal daydreams...

...They are bank tellers, insurance salesmen, low-level corporation "executives...

...As a substitute for a diploma, one has a business card with the company name on it, maybe in raised letters Because the Newer Class' hold on its position is still shaky, its members are made uneasy by people moving up behind them or alongside them...

...Their well-being and sense of status are linked in-eluctably to their companies, their departments, to the desks with a nameplate that they are gratified to be permitted to sit behind, and they are capable of hating those who might deprive them of their newfound place in the world...