My post on Americans starting to recognize class realities has brought some predictable reactions, which I’d place under two headings: (1) “But they have cell phones!” and (2) it’s about how you behave, not how much money you have.

My answer to both of these would be to say that when we talk about being middle class, I’d argue that we have two crucial attributes of that status in mind: security and opportunity.

By security, I mean that you have enough resources and backup that the ordinary emergencies of life won’t plunge you into the abyss. This means having decent health insurance, reasonably stable employment, and enough financial assets that having to replace your car or your boiler isn’t a crisis.

By opportunity I mainly mean being able to get your children a good education and access to job prospects, not feeling that doors are shut because you just can’t afford to do the right thing.

If you don’t have these things, I would say that you don’t lead a middle-class life, even if you have a car and a few electronic gadgets that weren’t around during the era when most Americans really were middle class, and no matter how clean, sober, and prudent your behavior may be.

Now, according to that Pew survey (pdf), in early 2008 only 6 percent of Americans considered themselves lower class — far below the official poverty rate! — only 2 percent upper class, and 1 percent didn’t know. So 91 percent of Americans — roughly speaking, people with incomes between $15,000 and $250,000 — considered themselves middle class. And a large portion of these people were wrong.

Consider health insurance: many Americans with incomes significantly above the poverty line are, or were until very recently uninsured, and many more were at risk of losing coverage. That, to me, says that they weren’t middle class on that basis alone. Many, probably most, low-wage workers have hardly any financial assets, no retirement plan, etc.

What about opportunity? Public schools in America vary widely in quality, and lower-income families can’t afford to live in good districts. College education has become far less accessible as aid to public institutions falls. The chance of finishing college varies drastically with family income (pdf).

I could go on, but surely it’s obvious when you think about it (and if you have any sense of the realities of life). A lot of Americans — quite arguably a majority — just don’t have the prerequisites for middle-class life as we’ve always understood it.

What about the upper end? In 2008 19 percent of Americans considered themselves upper-middle class. Here I think we have problems with defining what the class means. Pretty clearly, life at $250,000 is significantly, qualitatively different from life at $100,000. Yet Americans making 250K don’t feel rich, because above them loom the steep slopes of the upper tail of the income distribution (mixed metaphor, but whatever). So I won’t try to sort this one out.

But back to the lower end: the point is that we could, if we chose, guarantee the essentials of middle-class existence for almost all Americans; other advanced countries do it. Universal health care is the norm; we’re finally making a partial move toward that norm, but the right is fighting that move hysterically. Universal good basic education and free or cheap college education are available in other advanced countries.

The sad thing is that our fetishization of the middle class, our pretense that we’re almost all members of that class, is a major reason so many of us actually aren’t. That’s why the growing appreciation of class realities on the part of the public is a good thing; it raises the chances that we’ll actually start creating the kind of society we only pretend to have.