The Scary New Rich

<i>The emerging bourgeoisie is a patchwork of contradictions: clamorous but rarely confrontational politically, supporters of globalization yet highly nationalistic, proud of their nations' upward mobility yet insecure and fearful they will fall back, fiercely individualistic but reliant on government subsidies, and often socially conservative.</i><p>This is pretty much <i>verbatim</i> what folks said about the rise of the United States. And, for that matter, the British before us. And, for that matter, Japan.<p>(Though foreign observers haven't frequently described Japanese as fiercely individualistic since, oh, the 1920s or so. Fun fact about changing perceptions of culture: Japanese people also used to be well-known as poorly educated slackers.)

I don't buy it. France's middle class already think and behave very differently from America's. The fact is though that in any society, people don't like corruption or being told what to think and the ones with a bit of money will vote with their wallets. That might not look the same as western democracy but I'm confident it will trend towards the rule of law and individual freedoms.

I try to steer clear of articles such as these but got fooled by the submission title. These attempts to paint the world in such broad strokes may seem to provide information in easily digestible forms but are useless, being just one step higher than black and white or good and evil.<p>No matter how appealing it may be to simplistically classify millions of people like that, the devil is in the details always. We can just begin to form some crude models with an in-depth study of the economies and sub-economies (and sub-sub) of the world (a humble attempt here: <a href="http://www.gapminder.org/" rel="nofollow">http://www.gapminder.org/</a> ), let alone their equally complex social and political data.<p>And despite the authors' beliefs, we are still evolving in all spheres - political, social and economic. Today's liberal views can yet be viewed as conservative in the future when better *cracies will form, very many of them from the so-called second and third worlds.

people who have to work pretty hard for everything they have tend to be conservative in the literal sense of the term. middle class in china have a 50% of income savings rate or so I've heard.

Welcome to the real world. Your country is nothing more than a really big corporation. If your big corporation can not control and predict the money flow, your big corporation will be susceptible to bankruptcy.<p>This article is just an erroneous generalization. The "middle class" culture and politics aren't the same in these countries.

The Cold War definitions of First, Second, and Third "worlds" are obsolete. Updated for 2010:<p>First World: politically liberal, transparent government, rich countries with universal healthcare and mandated vacation floors. Moderate to high economic growth. Poverty is virtually nonexistent; it's not tolerant. The major flaw of these countries comes from their strength-- although completely nonmilitant, they can be a bit insular and closed to outsiders.<p>Second World: politically conservative, high degree of corruption, overt elitism and stark class (and often race) discrepancies. Low degree of political freedom. Lots of poverty and economically-motivated crime. Usually, high economic growth. These are countries that are sacrificing freedom and quality of life in order to increase or maintain relative status.<p>Third World: persistently underdeveloped and poor countries-- often too corrupt and wartorn even to get off the ground-- that, absent substantial change, have grim economic futures.<p>This article is about the Second World mentality. First World includes most of the EU countries and Canada. Second World includes the BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) countries as well as the Arab oil states, most of Latin America, Singapore, Hong Kong and Dubai, and (to a large degree) the United States post-Reagan.<p>In fact, I'd argue that the main political tension in the US is between a First World (Blue States) and Second World (Red States) subnation that are emerging, and diverging, within one country. The post-2001 militancy is our Second World component expressing a willingness to sacrifice prosperity, lives, and political freedom for national dominance.