There has been a lot of discussion of vaccines these past few days. For some reason, all the potential 2016 presidential candidates have been asked if they think that measles vaccines cause autism. For the record, they don’t. If vaccines caused autism, someone would have noticed it a very long time ago and there would be no question. But whatever.

The Republicans have not done a good job in responding to these questions. There is Chris Christie who comes off as, I don’t know, a total hypocrite when he says that parents ought to be able to do anything they want, after he quarantined a nurse for clearly political purposes. But even worse was Doctor Rand Paul. He thinks generally that vaccines are a good thing. But parents shouldn’t be forced to give them to there kids because, you know, freedom. Or rather slavery:

The mind boggles. Paul, of course, is very much an anti-choice guy. So apparently, once a child is born, the parents own it. But before birth, the state owns it. Or it is a full citizen that must be protected. But not against measles.

But the smart people at The Washington Free Beacon thought it a good idea to protect their conservative heroes. So they launched a shot across the bow, When Hillary and Obama Gave Credence to Anti-Vaccine Theories. Back in 2008, it seems, both Clinton and Obama equivocated regarding vaccines. During his race for the White House, Obama said, “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it.” At the same time, Clinton said the much less provocative, “I am committed to make investments to find the causes of autism, including possible environmental causes like vaccines.”

And now they are both claiming the opposite. Obama recently said, “The science is, you know, pretty indisputable.” And Clinton tweeted:

And the conservative crowd goes wild!

But wait. There’s something different about these claims. Oh, I know: they are separated by seven years! I wonder if anything happened during those seven years that would move the thinking of a thoughtful person from “suspicious” to “indisputable”? Perhaps science? The suspicion about vaccines came from a 1998 Lancet article that linked autism to the MMR vaccine. In 2004, a major conflict of interest was discovered and most of the co-authors on the paper repudiated it. But it wasn’t until 2010 that the journal itself fully retracted it, calling it “utterly false.”

This is the way that science works. Or at least, it is the way that science is supposed to work. Obama and Clinton were acting responsibly based upon the facts that they knew. That’s not true of Chris Christie and Rand Paul. Science my change but their their opinions never will because their opinions were never based on science in the first place.

But there is something more. Remember Free Beacon quoted Obama as saying, “We’ve seen just a skyrocketing autism rate. Some people are suspicious that it’s connected to the vaccines. This person included. The science right now is inconclusive, but we have to research it”? Well, that’s a selective quote. Via PolitiFact, here is the full quote:

Who would have guessed that Obama would actually have been making a nuanced point like that? It is so unlike him! Clearly, the charlatans at The Washington Free Beacon knew exactly what they were doing. It must be hard to be a conservative. You have to spend all that time apologizing for evil idiots and pretending that your enemies are different than they are.

As Americans, we are not supposed to talk about class. I’m sure you’ve heard feel good nonsense like, “There are no poor Americans — only soon to be rich Americans!” The idea is that anyone can grow up to be rich in America — if only they try. But the truth is that among peer countries, the United States is the most class based. If your father was poor, you’ll be poor. If your father was rich, you’ll be rich. It doesn’t matter that some poor children will become rich. As a statistical matter, people are locked into their classes in America.

Consider Shakespeare. Through his financial wisdom and his abilities as a writer, he was able to move out of the middle class and into the aristocracy. Does that mean that Elizabethan England wasn’t a class based society? According to the modern conventional wisdom in the United States it wasn’t. But that is very clearly wrong. Similarly, Daymond John doesn’t prove that we aren’t a rigidly class based society. George W Bush proves that we are. Because if we actually lived in a meritocracy, Bush wouldn’t have president; he would be living in a halfway house somewhere.

It is important that we Americans put away childish things. And the most childish thing is our delusion that we live in the land of opportunity. We don’t. The last four decades have seen the power elite manipulate how resources are distributed. And like the spoiled the children that they are, the power elite have seen fit not to share anything with the rest of us. Rats are far more humane than our human “betters.” (For the record, I’m very fond of rats.)

In the following lecture by Richard Wolff, he goes over the reasons why we need to embrace class. Basically: we need to do it because it is the only way out of this trap. Accepting the framing that there is no class is exactly what the power elite want. It stops us from even questioning the morality of people having more money than they could ever spend while other people live without sanitation. It also allows the middle class to live their whole lives in fear that they will lose their jobs. It makes for an extremely compliant workforce as well as electorate.

I know the conservative response to this. It involves how the capitalist makes everyone richer and that the capitalist is doing all this important work by moving capital around to where it is most useful. This is all fine. But there are a number of problems. The biggest one is simply what Wolff shows: the capitalists have been making themselves richer over the last four decades, but none of this has gone to the worker. So why should the worker continue on with this system? We still have a democracy, right?

Another issue not brought up in the lecture is the fact that modern institutions and technologies allow the few to benefit in ways that they never could before. For example, without the interstate highway system and container ships, Sam Walton would not have been one-tenth as rich as he was. How is it moral to allow someone to make far more money simply because of other factors that he had no part in creating? Similarly, why should an actor make millions today with movies when the same actor would have made far less in the theater of a century and a half ago, when she would have had to work far more? There is nothing “natural” about this state of things.

The point of all of this is that we need to see the class structure that we have in this country. It doesn’t matter that some people manage to move from one class to another. That doesn’t mean the classes don’t exist. If we can see the classes clearly, we can make explicit decisions about the morality of our class based system. And I believe a close look will show that we’ve long ago abandoned any semblance of morality.