Americans are famous for a lot of things across the world. Things like being stupid, having large food portions, or having no healthcare. All the normal stuff. But one thing that Americans often don’t realize about themselves is that they are just awful at class analysis. Or, more specifically, realizing exactly what class we, as individuals, belong to.

No, I’m not talking about classes in a Marxist sense, because that’s not how average, everyday people understand class. I’m talking about classes like working (or lower), middle, and upper. American perceptions of how they stack up with the rest of the citizenry purely by socioeconomic status is terrible; sixty-eight percent of Americans considered themselves to be middle class in 2018, a time when just 52% of Americans could actually be considered “middle class.”

Where does this disconnect come from? Such a discrepancy doesn’t exist in other countries. And, more importantly, how are we so bad at everything?

It’s important to realize that “middle class” is a difficult term that should be taken with a grain of salt for multiple reasons, nebulosity being the primary one. But because the concept of the middle class is so ingrained in everyday class analysis and discourse, the potential applications of the concept absolutely cannot be ignored, however imperfect they may be. One of the biggest conclusions that we can draw from using this regular class analysis is that Americans don’t identify with the working class as much as they should, or as much as people from other countries do.

Ok, sure. But what does that mean? Well, fortunately, all the heavy lifting has already been done for me: famous American rhetorician Kenneth Burke has already given a speech on the topic. Burke says in Revolutionary Symbolism in America, a speech given to the Communist Party of the United States of America in 1935, that the American communist movement needs to stray away from using terms like “proletariat” and “worker” because Americans simply don’t identify with those terms, electing that we use more general terms like “the people” to unify Americans under one common goal instead.

Burke was booed off the stage for his speech, but is he not correct? The data didn’t exist in 1935, but sociological analysis has proved his sentiment right time and time again. How can we expect to build a powerful, bottom-up left-wing movement with language that doesn’t unify people?

I’m not saying all of this to tell my fellow socialists that they need to abandon their worldview and relational class view of society. I’m not advocating for adopting any view of class except a predominantly relational one, or a rhetorical shift to emphasizing nationality, race, or some other bogus metric over class. Hell, I think that maintaining a relational view of society is essential to radicalizing our peers. It’s important to realize that “worker” and “proletariat” speak to the hearts of those who have already achieved class consciousness, but what about regular, average, every day, disillusioned Americans? The same Americans who don’t feel spoken to when you call them “workers?”

So it’s important, when you’re talking to your friends who don’t know a whole lot about leftist politics, you don’t alienate them with your language. Don’t do what leftists are infamous for and cling to aesthetics and perfection when pragmatism and inclusiveness could get us so much further. We, as socialists, do stand for workers, but we stand for our fellow human beings above all else.