COLUMN ONE : ‘Class War’ Is Poor Politics : Signs emerge of a battle between income groups. Because of American attitudes and voting patterns, however, it may not make for good election strategy.

For generations, the United States has been the only major Western democracy whose political parties were not based on economic class.

Today, with the economy heading into recession and shouts of “tax the rich” echoing through the halls of Congress, is this American exception coming to an end? Is America finally in for class warfare after all?

At first blush, there are some signs that class skirmishing, at least, is already breaking out:

--In Iowa, populist Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin is blanketing his state’s airwaves with political advertisements featuring champagne pouring into a pyramid of glasses as a narrator describes his opponent’s votes to reduce taxes for the wealthy. “The choice is clear: More tax breaks for the rich or Tom Harkin fighting for us,” the narrator says as the glass pyramid crashes.

--In Vermont, President Bush spent Tuesday campaigning for the state’s at-large Republican congressman, Peter Smith, whose votes on the budget have put him in jeopardy against socialist Bernard Sanders, who is running as an independent.

--And in Kentucky, even Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell is airing commercials touting his willingness to raise taxes on the wealthy.

But according to academics and practicing politicians alike, there is less to this talk of class-based politics than meets the eye.

Clearly, the tone of American politics has changed--and changed quickly--during the years since Ronald Reagan ran for reelection with the slogan “Morning in America.” And they’ve changed even in the less-than-two-years since George Bush won the 1988 presidential election promising to carry on the Reagan program.

“The 1980s are being rung out as a decade more abruptly than any decade I can think of since the 1920s,” said University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. “There is a pent-up demand for payback time. ‘Morning in America’ has become the morning after in America.”

And on both sides of the political divide, Democrats--hopefully--and Republicans--anxiously--have begun contemplating what the politics of the 1990s might look like. The possibility they see is that economic issues may dominate the decade, rather than the social issues--ranging from crime in the streets and prayer in the schools to abortion--that so strongly aided the campaigns of Republican presidential candidates since Richard M. Nixon.

But if that change comes, the center of the debate will be the economic concerns of individuals, not of classes, political experts predict.

The two sets of concerns overlap at times, but often are far different. For example, individuals who believe that they may one day move to a different rung on the economic ladder may well support policies that require wealthier people to bear a heavy part of the burden of paying for government. But at the same time, they will tend to stop short of measures to redistribute wealth radically--just on the chance that they themselves become wealthy one day.

Slightly higher taxes may get support. Confiscatory taxes almost certainly will not.

The reasons go to the heart of how American politics works and how Americans view their society and economy.

Divided by Class

The United States is and always has been a society deeply divided by class. Take one statistic: The one-fifth of American families at the bottom of the economic ranking receives only about 7% of total U.S. income. The top fifth receives more than five times as much.

In spite of this, however, the nation remains largely without class consciousness.

“Americans don’t feel they belong to any class,” said labor leader Gus Tyler of the garment workers’ union. “You ask 80% of Americans (to describe their class), they will say ‘middle class.’ ”

Democratic strategist Paul Tully makes a similar point. “Buried in our culture is a whole history tied to renewal, reinventing yourself, second chance,” he said. “Class requires boundaries, the feeling of being hemmed in. You need the four walls jamming you” before you being to think in “class” terms.

Polls show Americans still cling to the Horatio Alger notion that any poor boy with pluck and luck can strike it rich--a belief that is fatal to class-based politics.

The belief is not without foundation. While children of the middle class and the wealthy do have strong advantages in society, class boundaries in the United States are far more breakable than in those European nations that have avowedly class-based parties.

From 1962 to 1985, the United States went through an “unprecedented” increase in the ability of the children of the working class to rise into the ranks of better-paid, higher-status professional and managerial jobs, largely because of the tremendous growth of public college systems, says UC Berkeley sociologist Michael Hout.

During roughly the same years, the 1960s and 1970s, inequality in American society--the gap between rich and poor--shrank.

Over the past few years, however, Americans have seen those trends change.

The improvement in equality stopped and then reversed itself during the 1980s--years of relative economic stagnation--notes University of Maryland economist Frank Levy.

And Hout’s research indicates that the increase in social mobility stopped in the mid-1980s, lagging a few years behind the growing inability of public higher education to accommodate all applicants. Downward mobility by middle-class children who do not attend college has continued apace.

Those changes may help explain why so many Americans tell pollsters that they fear their children’s lives will not be better than their own. But they have not led to any clear indications that large numbers of American voters have become resigned to the idea of being part of a rigidly determined class.

Moreover, any politician considering launching a class-based political fight--even assuming that politician could find campaign donors to fund the battle--would quickly run up against one of the central realities of American politics: By and large, the poor don’t vote.

When the Census Bureau asked people if they voted in 1988, only 35% of those with incomes below $5,000 said yes. Among people with incomes over $50,000 a year, 75% said they had voted.

Put differently, politicians know that more than half of all American households have yearly incomes below $30,000. But in a typical election, people with household incomes above $30,000 will make up well over half the electorate.

The best current example of the problem of adopting class concepts to American politics is the plight of New Jersey’s Democratic Gov. James J. Florio.

Shortly after taking office, in a campaign in which he spoke against tax increases, Florio offered a radical plan to cut off state aid to wealthy school districts and channel millions of dollars into poor ones.

To pay for the plan, Florio raised taxes. Families earning more than $150,000 and singles earning $75,000 and up would see their state taxes double. Lesser increases would hit all couples making more than $70,000 a year and individuals earning $35,000 or more.

People earning less than that were promised a tax cut through lower property taxes that are supposed to take effect next year, although they still will have to pay more at the market because of an increase in the state sales tax that now causes it to cover previously tax-exempt items such as toilet paper.

Florio insists that once all is said and done, only 17% of New Jersey residents will see a tax increase.

But whatever the statistics say, couples with incomes of $70,000 do not think of themselves as being part of the upper 17%, notes political analyst William Schneider of the American Enterprise Institute.

N.J. Struggle Watched

And the fact that taxes are going up even more on the wealthier residents of the state has done little to assuage the anger of suburban families who feel themselves squeezed by Florio’s tax program.

“It’s a real contest right now to see what people hate more--do they hate the rich or do they hate taxes?” Schneider said.

Meanwhile, the people who are the chief intended beneficiaries of Florio’s program--working-class and poor residents of New Jersey--are far less likely to vote than are those whose taxes will go up.

The result has been predictions of doom for the combative governor.

Florio’s fate has been carefully watched on Capitol Hill, and has helped give an odd twist to the “soak-the-rich” rhetoric of the past month. Far from being a battle over distributing wealth from the well-off to the poor, the argument has mostly been about the balance between the truly wealthy and the merely well-off.

As Schneider noted: “The operative definition of rich in this country is ‘not me.’ ” And congressional tax-writers have taken great care to propose measures that raise income taxes on very small numbers of people.

Democrats, for example, have pushed for a surtax on millionaires. The move is politically attractive in part because it would affect fewer than 65,000 individuals or couples, roughly 0.06 of 1% of the 102 million personal tax returns filed each year.

Similarly, proposals to raise the top tax rate for people earning more than $200,000 would increase taxes only on the top 0.4% of taxpayers.

But it is the low voter turnout among lower-income groups that has profoundly influenced the way the political system works, both in the ideas the system will accept and in the way it is structured, Burnham says.

‘Divided Government’

Voter turnout even helps explain the odd electoral phenomenon of “divided government”--the tendency of voters to elect relatively liberal, often Democratic, legislators and far more conservative, often Republican, governors and presidents.

Consider, for example, two California congressional districts, the predominately black and Latino 29th District, covering south and central Los Angeles--which has one of the lowest median incomes of any district in the state--and the predominately white, middle- and upper-income 35th District in San Bernardino County.

In 1984, when the two districts had roughly the same population, just over 100,000 people voted in the 29th District. More than 200,000 people voted in the wealthier 35th District.

Each district elects one member of the House of Representatives, and each is represented by the same number of state legislators in Sacramento because seats in the House, as in the Legislature, are divided up on the basis of total population.

But in presidential elections or in statewide races, the extra 100,000 voters who typically turn out in San Bernardino give that area far more weight.

The same pattern holds true in districts across the country. So, even if legislative bodies apportioned by population turn toward populist policies, the higher turnouts in more-conservative, upper-income districts help elect presidents, governors and members of the Senate who put a brake on the process.

Given those turnout figures, history has shown that in American politics, liberal policies win only through coalitions between the poor and the middle class. And the key factor in whether that sort of coalition can be formed in the 1990s is likely to be the economy.

“When the economy is booming, middle-class people say: ‘I’m making it. If those people can’t it’s their own fault,’ ” said AEI’s Schneider. “In a recession, when they begin to slip, the mood changes. It’s not ‘their fault,’ it is ‘the system is failing.’ ”

Staff writer Karen Tumulty contributed to this article.

THE RICHER THEY ARE, THE MORE THEY VOTE

One reason that class-warfare politics is unlikely in the United States is a fact known to all politicians, poor people vote less than the rest of the society. The follwing chart compares the income distribution of adult Americans with voter turnouts in the 1988 election, as measured by exit polls. Turnout by low-income voters is typically even less in non-presidential elections.

Percentage of Americans over the age 18, 168,850,000 (Census survey)

Percentage of voters (1988), 83,963,000

Household income: Under $10,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 17%

Percentage of voters (1988): 9%

Household income: $10,000-$20,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 20%

Percentage of voters (1988): 17%

Household income: $20,000-$30,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 17%

Percentage of voters (1988): 21%

Household income: $30,000-$40,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 14%

Percentage of voters (1988): 20%

Household income: $40,000-$50,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 10%

Percentage of voters (1988): 15%

Household income: Over $50,000

Percentage of Americans over the age 18: 21%

Percentage of voters (1988): 18%*

* Exit poll number probably understates percentage of turnout among voters with income over $50,000 because high-income respondents often underestimate their income or refuse to provide it to pollsters.

Source: Bureau of the Census, Los Angeles Times Poll