Politics & Power Quote by Anne Tyler

America loves a category that can pass as accidental. Race is debated, wealth is flaunted, but class is supposed to be the invisible thing we don`t have: an Old World problem solved by sneakers, first names, and the mythology of the self-made striver. Anne Tyler needles that national fiction with a quiet, novelist`s precision. She isn`t announcing a grand theory so much as pointing to a recurring plot device in American life: people insist the hierarchy isn`t there even as it organizes who gets listened to, who gets policed, who feels at home in which rooms.

The line works because of its double motion. "Very much a factor" is deliberately plain, almost bureaucratic, a phrase you`d use about interest rates or weather. That understatement is the point: class power in the U.S. is often most effective when it`s treated as mere background. Then comes the twist of "even though it`s not supposed to be" - a sly indictment of American innocence. Tyler is naming class not just as economics but as etiquette, accent, education, taste, and the subtle choreography of belonging. The "supposed to" hints at a collective agreement to misrecognize it: we perform egalitarianism while maintaining status boundaries.

Context matters: Tyler`s fiction has long lived in the domestic middle distances - Baltimore neighborhoods, family frictions, marriages, small humiliations. She`s attuned to how class shows up not as manifesto but as miscommunication, aspiration, and shame. Her interest is anthropological and moral: if a society won`t admit its ranking system, it can never argue honestly about it, and the people trapped by it get told their lives are just bad personal choices.