tzikeh:

“Class” in America is undefinable, since any given person’s definition of “class” depends entirely upon which version of “class” that person was born into, and each definition is circularly defined by the members of that class, but the definitions only hold true within that class. It is a collection of ouroboros, of signifiers and signified eating their own tails.

To put it another way: you’re lower class if you think class is defined by money. You’re middle class if you think class is defined by education. And you’re upper class if you think class is defined by taste. 

But each class’s definitions of the others are rife with separate descriptors which are given different weights. This is why the poorest Americans struggle in a ‘class war’ that remains a mystery to those born into the middle-class-defining middle class, and it is why the wealthiest know themselves to be taste-makers, while everyone else looks on in shock at the (lower- or middle-class-defined) tackiness, and wonders, how can someone with so much money have so little taste?