Politics & Power Quote by Leslie Fiedler

American class warfare rarely announces itself with bayonets; it shows up in the shopping cart. Fiedler’s little list - blue jeans, ready-made clothes, Coca-Cola - is doing the sly work of a cultural critic: reducing a gigantic national fantasy to three mass-produced objects. The intent isn’t to praise consumer goods as democratic miracles so much as to expose how America likes to imagine equality as a style choice. Put on the jeans, drink the Coke, and you can cosplay classlessness.

The subtext is double-edged. On one hand, these items really did blur visible status markers: standardized sizing, ubiquitous branding, the same sweet fizz in every town. They offered a portable sameness that made old-world hierarchies look fussy and brittle. On the other hand, Fiedler’s phrase “want to wipe” smuggles in suspicion: these things have an agenda. They don’t just reflect egalitarian ideals; they market them. Class distinction isn’t abolished - it’s re-coded. The logo becomes the new crest. Denim is “authentic” until it’s designer denim.

Context matters: mid-20th-century America was watching mass production reshape identity, with postwar affluence, advertising, and youth culture turning consumption into citizenship. Fiedler, steeped in the study of American myth, is pointing to a national habit of solving structural problems with symbolic gestures. If everyone can wear the uniform of the ordinary, the country can pretend the hierarchy has disappeared - even as wages, housing, education, and power keep sorting people with ruthless efficiency.