classes? Aside from “since always”? (After all, when this country was founded, in most places only property-owning white men could vote.) Maybe since this is a country where the richest kids with the lowest test scores are more likely to finish college than the poorest kids with the highest test scores. Since in large chunks of the country, there’s a less than five percent chance that a child raised in the bottom fifth of the income distribution will rise to the top fifth, and almost nowhere is there more than a 20 percent chance it will happen. Since 50 percent of Americans had just 1.1 percent of the total net worth in 2010, down from 3 percent in 1989. That sure looks like America has classes, like people are “stuck in areas or defined places,” whether or not we call those areas classes.Santorum continued:

When Republicans get up and talk about ‘middle class’ we’re buying into their rhetoric of dividing America. Stop it. There’s no class in America. And call them on it. America’s a place where everybody has the opportunity to succeed. We believe in everybody. We are the party that values the dignity of every human life, not them.

Funny, here I thought that the prevalence of the term “middle class” was at base a strategy to erase class, to define the family scraping by on $25,000 a year and the family comfortably cushioned at $300,000 a year as the same, all just middle class rather than one working class and the other in the top two percent. But no, according to Santorum even that weaksauce invocation of class is to divisive. Even an America where one percent of the people take home 20 percent of the income and have nearly 35 percent of the wealth is still an America where we all have the same opportunity to succeed. Except it isn’t, as the facts clearly show. Just as the facts show that while Rick Santorum may well believe that every fertilized egg should be born, he doesn’t give a damn about the dignity of human life, not if the human in question isn’t part of a group he happens to favor.