Vice President Joe Biden declares on the White House website, "A strong middle class equals a strong America. We can't have one without the other."

Biden created a task force "to get the middle class -- the backbone of this country -- up and running again."

Why is the middle class the "backbone" of America?

Since ancient Greece, the middle class has performed the indispensable role of moderating upper and lower classes. Concerning that role, Aristotle's 2,000-year-old perceptions prevail today throughout the Western world:

Aristotle wrote that neither the rich nor the poor would "tolerate a system under which either ruled in its turn: they have too little confidence in one another. A neutral arbitrator always gives the best ground for confidence; and 'the man in the middle' is such an arbitrator."

Why should the man in the middle be trusted?

Answer: the middle class "forms the mean," and "moderation and the mean are always best." Being moderate, those who occupy the middle "are the most ready to listen to reason."(1)

Because the middle class is the "best" class, it follows that "first, the best form of political society is one where power is vested in the middle class, and secondly that good government is attainable in those states where there is a large middle class . . ."(2)

Aristotle called that best political system a "polity" or "mixture of democracy and oligarchy . . . incline[d] more towards democracy . . ."(3)

Not only is the polity the best political system, it is also inherently stable:

"There is no risk, in such a case, of the rich uniting with the poor to oppose the middle class: neither will ever be willing to be the subject to the other; and if they try to find a constitution which is more in their common interest than the 'polity' is, they will fail to find one."(4)

Today, America's polity(5) is the major arena in which its middle class moderates other classes.

The mere mention of class moderation, however, raises a serious problem:

To many Americans, "class analysis" sounds off-key, a wrong note, Marxist, un-American. In reality, nothing is more American than class analysis, and it predates Karl Marx. In 1788, James Madison, fourth American President and a major architect of the United States Constitution, published an essay presenting his class analysis of society:

"A zeal for different opinions concerning religion, concerning government . . ., an attachment to different leaders . . . or to persons of other descriptions whose fortunes have been interesting to the human passions, have, in turn, divided mankind into parties, inflamed them with mutual animosity, and rendered them much more disposed to vex and oppress each other than to co-operate for their common good . . .

But the most common and durable source of factions has been the various and unequal distribution of property [sic]. Those who hold and those who are without property have ever formed distinct interests in society . . . A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views.

The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operations of government."(6)

"The principal task": no stronger words could possibly show that the regulation of class conflict was vital for Madison. Did he and his colleagues succeed? In 1835, Tocqueville summed up the Founding Fathers' creation this way: "It is a reconciler government . . ."(7)

In saying he wants the middle class to be up and running "again," Biden implies America's middle class is down but not out. True or false?

Answer: yes and no.

Aristotle gave indirectly two quantifiable terms for identifying a weakened middle class: where "the number of the members of the middle class outweighs that of both the other classes -- and even where it only outweighs that of one of the others -- a 'polity' can be permanently established."(8)

The first barrier fell in America in the 1980s. The United States Government published a summary of the national annual revenue by households, 1967 to 1999. Households were divided into three groups: (1) less than $24,999; (2) from $25,000 to $74,999; and (3) $75,000 and higher. If "middle class" is defined as group (2), the data show that between 1980 and 1990, that class declined from 51.7% to 49.7% of total households.

The turning point may have been the proverbial year 1984, when group (2) comprised 50.0% of all households. In 1985, the figure was 49.6%. It never again reached 50%.(9)

As for Aristotle's second benchmark, if the 2% rate of decline per decade continues, the middle class will slip below the 33.3% level in about 70 years.

But do we need to wait that long to see what would happen if the decline is not stopped? Jared Bernstein, executive director of Biden's task force and Biden's chief economist, correctly notes on the White House website that at the end of the 2000-2007 expansion in productivity of 19%, the middle class actually lost ground, and that there were more Americans living in poverty. The reason was the expansion mostly benefited the upper 1%.

Those developoments pose questions:

Does the billion-dollar grabfest of public money in 2008-2009 by the oligarchic constituent of our polity signal a major turning point?

Indeed, is our polity -- Aristotle's democracy/oligarchy hybrid -- already a thing of the past? Do we now have an oligarchy with only a hollow, ornamental shell of democracy?

Can the middle class continue to reconcile other classes? That is the question not just for Biden's task force but also for America.

FOOTNOTES

(1) Aristotle, "The Politics of Aristotle," translated and edited by Ernest Barker, Oxford University Press, New York, 1962, pp. 181, 186. (Book IV, Chapters XI, XII).
(2) Ibid., p. 182. (Book IV, Chapter XI).
(3) Ibid., p. 174. (Book IV, Chapter VIII).
(4) Ibid., p. 185. (Book IV, Chapter XII).
(5) For reasons to be explored in another article, it is taboo today to call a polity a polity, except in the generic sense of polity as a synonym of "political system." To my knowledge, that taboo has never been broken. Rather, the hybrid democracy/oligarchy polity must be called a "democracy," "representative democracy," or a "republican" form of government.
(6) James Madison, "Federalist Paper Number 10," in Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, "The Federalist Papers," New American Library, New York, New York, 1999, pp. 46-7.
(7) Alexis de Tocqueville, "De La Democratie en Amerique I," in Alexis de Tocqueville, "Oeuvres," Volume II, Bibliotheque de la Pleiade, Gallimard, Paris, 1992, p. 460. Apology to French purists: Internet format prohibits special characters.
(8) Aristotle, op.cit., p. 185. (Book IV, Chapter 12).
(9) United States Bureau of The Census, "Current Population Reports, Series P60-209, Money Income in the United States: 1999," Table B-2. Households by Total Money Income, Race, and Hispanic Origin of Householder: 1967 to 1999, Appendix B, B-3, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C., 2000.