You can find conspicuous examples of the “peasantification” of the American middle class by observing the psychology of bartenders.

A few weeks ago, I was at a dive bar in a declining Midwestern rural town. I walked in on a sparse scene with a hunky bartender wearing a tank top and flaunting garish shoulder tattoos. The bartender detected something haughty in my manner and refused to serve me. I could tell she wasn’t ignoring me, but that she wanted me to know she was ignoring me. She checked in on the rough looking guy three seats away from me at least four times. She was trying to force me to aggressively haggle her down and demand service, a vulgarity I would never descend to. I left after twenty minutes without receiving a drink.

The experience made for an interesting psychological case. As BAP notes, it is the demand for respect, the demand for petty validation and acknowledgment of the emotional state of the instant, that most defines the nature of the peasant. This bartender wanted me to haggle her so she could give me a bitchy eye roll and assert her open disapproval of me to the rest of the bar. A great deal of service work is populated by these petty little peasant-tyrants.

Of course, many of these service workers weren’t actually born that way. The unbearable load of wounding encounters with peasant patrons produces this kind of psychological downward mobility. A great deal of service work in America requires the development of a crass, masculine vulgarity characteristic of a prison guard.

You can see this especially among young women for whom the degeneration is most evident. We've seen a boom in daughters of the suburban middle class going into service in the last 25 years, and it gives you an ideal window into the psychological destruction of the modern egalitarian meshworld. If you go to the same bar over the years, you can actually see the atrophy in the naive, bubbly-eyed hostess of nineteen morphing into the tattooed, rummaging cleavage monster of twenty-eight who could not have more contempt for her patrons if she dowsed them with gasoline.

Anyone who never worked in fast-paced night service can't quite understand that the after-close gossip and drinking is actually a necessary exhalation for the terrible pressure of eyes (especially drunk ones) in inescapable space. Any girl sufficiently refined who enters low-level bartending will be destroyed and spat out in short order. The coping options are to develop BPD, drink on the job or put on the mask of some manic disorder that can sustain a lucid high for the shift. The burlesquely pretty bartenders of those fast-moving clubs waste the fastest, because the necessity of absorbing the torrential cues of lust, envy, callousness and impatience is simply unsustainable for anyone but the densest peasant.

The institution of the tip was once a gracious glory of the nobility bestowed upon their retainers. But the tip in the hands of the vulgar has descended into a chaos of forced leverage (the man thinks the half-naked bartender might become a stripper at the right price), undignified haggling, unintentional insults and drunken moaning about how "expensive" things have gotten. Restaurants in America are starting to give up and price the tip in, surely a sad loss of one of the few noble holdovers from the better ages. The Europeans never understood tip culture in America, because they recognized that turning it into an obligation defeated its whole purpose. Of course, the true peasant never tips anyway because he can only think of money as a direct surrogate for material gain.

The bartering, petty, ravenous life of the “peasant” is unavoidable for a large segment of any population. The greatness of the historic Western bourgeois class was that it strove to hold itself above the yeast life of the “bazaar” in emulation of the aristocrats it destroyed. But the remnant classiness of the American bourgeoisie is dying. As the middle class declines economically it also declines psychologically. The life of the “middle” class in America is increasingly one of incessant social barbarism.