One fascinating thing we learned from yesterday’s New York Times is that, in the class wars of the Bush era, Jennifer Lopez has apparently become the new Michael Harrington. Books are just so old school; the key text on class in 2003 is one line from J.Lo’s song "Jenny from the Block," which was quoted, in two slightly different forms, repetition and all, by both op-ed contributor David Brooks and film critic Caryn James in yesterday’s Times: "Don't be fooled by the rocks I got, I'm still, I'm still Jenny from the block" (James) / "Don't be fooled by the rocks that I got, I'm just, I'm just Jenny from the block" (Brooks).

The James essay kicks the Brooks essay’s butt. James makes the glaringly obvious point that J.Lo is telling us a "fairy tale," both in her song and in her new movie Maid in Manhattan. James also provides hard truths about social mobility that are nowhere to be found in Brooks’s piece:

…new studies show it takes an average of five or six generations to change a family's economic position, and that wealth tends to linger in families.… As [Princeton economist Alan B.] Krueger added in an interview, "Recent trends in income distribution have made upward mobility less likely" than it was even 20 years ago.

Brooks is a smart pop sociologist, but he’s also a lockstep right-wing apparatchik. He seems to accept at face value the assertion that the millionaire actress/singer/diva is still just a regular around-the-way girl from the old 'hood, and he thinks it’s kind of neat that ordinary Americans believe this nonsense, too. He revels in the fact that Americans are utterly delusional about class:

Nineteen percent of Americans say they are in the richest 1 percent and a further 20 percent expect to be someday. So right away you have 39 percent of Americans who thought that when Mr. Gore savaged a plan that favored the top 1 percent, he was taking a direct shot at them.

It's not hard to see why they think this way. Americans live in a culture of abundance. They have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley, with the next job or the next big thing. None of us is really poor; we're just pre-rich.

The vast majority of Americans who "have always had a sense that great opportunities lie just over the horizon, in the next valley," are living in a fantasy world if they think they’ll be able to cash in on those opportunities. To Brooks, that’s OK. People vote in Fantasy Land, and they vote GOP.