I want to come up with a definition of the middle class that has nothing to do with numbers. I want to do this for two reasons. The first is because I want to find a better explanation for the reasons why individuals do not seem to vote in their economic interests. The second is because I would like to understand what would happen to the Democratic Party’s economic agenda if the majority of individuals are actually part of the middle-class, despite the individuals’ salary, debt, or satisfaction of what appears to be society’s advertised necessities.

The definition I propose is that individuals belong to the middle-class when they have a few number of wants.

This definition is relative to the individual, naturally; for what one wants, another does not.

Does this describe the majority of individuals in America? Numbers will never tell us. It doesn’t matter how much people make or how many people live in debt. Life can grow accustomed to almost any salary, and debt does not have to effect the daily course of one’s day. This does not prevent low wages and debt from existing, nor from being a cause of tremendous suffering, but it does prevent them from being an objectively quantifiable measure of the middle class.

A woman who lives with a massive amount of debt can still have a roof over her head, food on her plate, and enough comfort and entertainment for her to possess a reasonably happy lifestyle. A man may not have any healthcare, but his enjoyment of exercise and his basic distrust of non-invasive medicine relaxes any intellectual concern he may have. A single-mother family may not be able to afford steaks at the fine dining restaurant in town, but it has cable and broadband Internet, a computer, a gaming console, a daughter at the state college, and a palette for frozen dinners. None of these people feel any major wants. Their lifestyle cannot be quantified by numbers.

The Democrat’s economic message focuses on the radical split between the wealthiest of our society and the rest of the us, but the Democrats may imagine a country of more wants than it may have. This is not to deny the existence of poverty in America, but to place poverty under an ethical argument, not an economic one.

When we remember that the word “economy” derives from the Greek oikonomia — household management — we remember that the focus must be on what happens in the individual’s household, and not what happens at the neighbor’s. Every personal relation outside the home is ethical (or should be), but in the home, where ethics is already presupposed (ideally), the relation is economic.

This is the downside of all the stats that the Democrats use. The fact that the income of African-American households fell 2.3 percent between 2001-2004 only hits home if the households truly felt that drop. Again, this is not to say that they did not, but it is to say it might not have had an effect on those households’ considerations of themselves as middle class, which, according to the definition I proposed above, means that they, as households, have very few wants. They still have food, shelter, sufficient transportation, and cable TV. They’re only poor if they feel that way.

I realize that this would seem to be an argument for the status quo. And in some ways, it is. I am trying to understand the status quo, which seems to result in the fact that individuals do not vote in their own apparent self-interest. This fact is examined in What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a book by Thomas Frank, which I haven’t read, but of which you can find a great review and author interview here. Frank writes:

[The Democrats' problem is] that by dropping the class language that once distinguished them sharply from Republicans, they have left themselves vulnerable to cultural wedge issues like guns and abortion and the rest whose hallucinatory appeal would ordinarily be overshadowed by material concerns. We are in an environment where Republicans talk constantly about class — in a coded way, to be sure — but where Democrats are afraid to bring it up.”

I am only trying to understand the status quo so that it can be improved.

The Democratic Party’s economic agenda is the following:

• Expanding economic opportunity. Democrats believe that the most effective means of increasing opportunity for our families is a high quality, good paying job. We are committed to expanding economic opportunity to all Americans and creating the new jobs of the future.

High-quality jobs demand high-quality educations, of course. Which leads to the Democratic Party’s education agenda, which is to provide our schools with the resources they need and to make colleges easier to afford; though there’s always a question about what the people who make low wages and aren’t interested in school are going to do. But back to the economic agenda:

• Fiscal responsibility. The Democratic Party believes in balanced budgets and paying down our national debt, while Republicans continue to put huge burdens on future generations by borrowing hundreds of billions of dollars from foreign nations.

Balanced budgets and paying down the debt are great, but how are they going to afford the necessarily massive education plan that their future economic growth is based on? The answer, of course, is the Democrats’ “tax the wealthy” mantra.

The problem is: there’s only two felt conceptions of economics: need and want. The balance between them are the economic classes we have today. But if a household has no needs and few wants, then the household does not consider itself anything less than almost wealthy — because while they may not be rich, they are definitely not poor. The “tax the wealthy” mantra, in that case, sounds a little too much like “tax you.”

Perhaps it was this that led Kerry to try to persuade America that he would only tax the “uber-wealthy.” In the economic understanding that I’ve been trying to develop here, the “uber-wealthy” could only be that class of people who have an ever-increasing number of wants despite their ability to satisfy them. Of course, he probably should have replaced “uber-wealthy” with greedy, but that would have cost him his donors. Then again, that was the Democratic solution two years ago. Maybe they’ll come up with something else next time. Back to the current economic agenda:

• Fair trade. Creating jobs at home means opening markets abroad. The Democratic Party supports fair trade agreements that raise standards for workers abroad while making American business more competitive. We will also fight for stronger enforcement of our existing trade agreements.

This step is again based on the notion that every American family can have a high quality, good paying job, which itself is based on a massive education plan that, at least two years ago, would be supported by increasing taxes only for the uber-wealthy.

This is not a bad agenda if we retain the concept that the majority of Americans consider themselves to be middle class. The importance, however, is to communicate the reasoning behind it. This reasoning should be communicated in ethical tones. By which I mean, it is not an economic argument. The argument for the economic agenda of the Democrats is not about making your household much better off than it is. You live a comfortable lifestyle, and while everyone could do a little better, and everyone’s life could be just a little bit easier, your lifestyle is not going to drastically change.

But your neighbor, who is getting a little bit on in her years, and needs to see the doctor more often than she used to, her life is going to be a little bit easier. And your other neighbor, the one with two kids in public school, she’s going to breathe a little easier when her children have a smaller class size. And the guy down the block, the one who actually cares about only drinking fair-trade coffee, not because it’s the trendy thing to do, but because he consciously considers the lives of the coffee-growers, he’s going to feel much better about the way his country does business with the world. When you vote for the Democratic economic agenda, you don’t vote to make your life better, but you vote to improve the lives of your neighbors.

This argument cuts across religious and secular lines. Caring about our neighbors is what makes us a society. Societies are not made up of classes that oppose each other, but of individuals who live with each other. With the Democratic economic agenda, we can live with each other once again.

The economic agenda that focuses on the neighbor’s household and not one’s own is the same agenda that preaches civil tolerance. To live with each other is not simply to live among each other, but to live among each other. This is the tolerance of live and let live, even when they want to live out loud. It is the protection of civil liberties, not because we need protection from our neighbors, but because our neighbors need protection from us.

This concept leads directly to the international economic agenda of fair trade, not free trade. We have seen what we are capable of. We have seen the sweatshops, the slave labor, and the complete disavowal of basic human rights. We have done these things. The international economic agenda of fair trade is to protect our neighbors from what we might do again.

That should be the Democratic Party’s economic argument. It’s an argument that counts on the basic goodness that exists in the majority of Americans. This goodness is not the utopian goodness that would have us share all our property, but the goodness that we feel when we wave hello across a fence.

But it’s an argument that begins only when we ignore the numbers that would count the middle class and remember the individuals who say they make it up.