America didn't have a middle class, as we know it, until the mid 20th-century.

Which means that we of the middle class don't owe our success to the Constitution. The initial conditions it set up led, in the 19th century, to the traditional world divided into a wealthy aristocracy, the Robber Barons, and a peasantry, everybody else, scrambling to survive. We'd be living in that world today if something hadn't come along to alter American society and create the preconditions for the rise of a middle class.

It took a sustained period of collectivism to create the middle class, starting in the New Deal and peaking in the 1950s.

I remember, as a kid, learning about history, American ideals, and the structure of society, and it seemed as if America was oriented around the middle class. Around us. Everything was for our benefit, from education to subsidized mortgages to city parks and nice tidy suburbs. The wealthy were walk-on characters with occasional speaking parts, but they lived in our world, not we in theirs. (And in 1960, the wealthy had a marginal tax rate of above 90% to prove it.)

As I said, that world was created by a form of collectivism, in which the people, acting through their government, made its fundamental mission the elevation of as much of the population as possible into this newfangled "middle class". The rules of the game determine the winners and losers, and that game was rearranged to favor the broad middle.

It worked spectacularly well. But in the decades since the '60s, that well has been poisoned by the right's determined campaign of anti-government rhetoric. We now live in a time when a slight majority of the onetime middle class is demanding its own destruction by demanding removal of the government initiatives and safety nets that played a crucial role in creating their comfortable lives in the first place.

After several decades of deregulation, privatization, growing wealth inequality, offshoring and outsourcing, and destruction of unions, the middle class is shocked, just shocked!, to find itself an endangered species.

Just think, ER: You and I could witness the rise and the fall of the American middle class in our lifetimes.

We live in interesting times.