I must be a glutton for punishment because I’ve read all of the New York Times’ series on “Class in America” so far, and I’m still at a loss what to make of it – other than that the Times is nostalgic for the good old days when class warfare offered the dominant paradigm.

Right up front, the Times concedes that the whole concept of class has gotten a bit “shadowy.” After all, “Americans of all sorts are awash in luxuries that would have dazzled their grandparents,” the paper confesses. Nothing daunted, however, the Times soldiers on in search of inequalities – much like Ahab in pursuit of his white whale.

Predictably some of the Times’ readers are cheering the effort on. Philip Walker of Santa Barbara, Calif., expostulates that “we must make a determined national effort to reach a national consensus on what constitutes the good life,” and calls for “a revived commitment to the ideal of a classless society.” Karl Marx would no doubt be pleased, though he probably would have also recommend that the super wealthy town in which Mr. Walker resides should be put to the torch.

So while the Times admits that “the contours of class have blurred; some say they have disappeared,” it detects a “half-seen hand that upon closer examination holds some Americans down while giving others a boost.”

If so, it’s a hand that only the Times seems able to discern. An accompanying poll shows that 40% of Americans believe the chance of moving up from one class to another has actually risen in the last three decades, while only 23% said it had dropped.

Moreover, Americans remain incorrigibly optimistic. Nearly 65% said told the Times’ pollsters they are likely to become wealthy in their lifetimes.

That could explain why half of all respondents in the poll support eliminating the ultimate in class warfare tax, the estate tax, a move the Times editorial page has long opposed on grounds that it gives an unfair advantage to the children of the wealthy.

The Times also informs us there has been an “extraordinary” jump in income inequality, noting that after-tax income of the top 1% of American households grew 139% from 1979 to 2001, after adjusting for inflation. Others have been bemoaning the same thing ever since Ronald Reagan came to town. Again, however, the Times is forced to concede that the incomes of the middle class and the poor also rose during that period, albeit at a much slower rate. In other words, the pie got a lot bigger – the very essence of the American dream.

The Times uses anecdote to try to show the workings of the half-seen hand. For example, it profiles a wealthy victim of a heart attack who gets first-class care and soon returns to the pink of health, while a working class woman is taken to a less well-equipped hospital after her coronary. Again, though, this hardly seems the stuff of revolution: the woman also survives – and immediately returns to her losing battle with fatty foods.

Likewise, the Times laments that the children of the wealthy tend to get better educations, thus perpetuating a “meritocratic” elite, an updated version of Marx’s class war that is particularly popular, oddly, among today’s professoriate. But the next day it offers up a lengthy profile of a young woman who grows up amidst desperate poverty in the “hollows” of Appalachia but, nonetheless, manages to get a law degree, marry well, and now lives the good life.

Her main complaint: “I couldn’t play Trivial Pursuit, because I had no general knowledge of the world.”

Is class a problem? Well, mainly if you’re inclined to consider life a problem. Inequality, after all, is a fact of life.

The reason, one suspects, that class differences can only be “half-seen” by the Times is that, for all its faults and occasional cruelties, the American system has produced a far more classless – and a far more compassionate – society than anything ever dreamed of by history’s class warriors. Let’s hope the Times has the courage to explore this possibility more fully in its coming installments. There is something more than passingly reactionary in the liberal fixation on class.

Mr. Bray is a Detroit News columnist.