Those at the top, euphemistically called the "upper-middle class," have worries that the economically marginal would consider luxuries: How to get the kids into "hot" colleges, whether to drink Tanqueray or Bombay with your Schweppes, how to dispose of your salary on the things that best demonstrate your good taste. These people are better described as "Winners."

It's been a banner decade for the Winners. They saw their taxes slashed in 1982 and 1986, of course. But that wasn't the best part of it. The best part was that their position as Winners became increasingly stable and hereditary.

After holding the line fairly well during the inflationary 1970s, college tuition galloped ahead of inflation in every year of the 1980s. This was during the same decade that federal financial aid came under the Reagan budget axe.

By happy coincidence, the Winners saw a college education become a more prohibitive class barrier at exactly the same time that it became a near requisite for economic success.

The Winners may pay lip-service to equal opportunity, but in reality, they revel in the stacked-deck advantages of starting life as Winners. Competitive admissions to pre-school and the explosion of SAT coaching were strictly '80s phenomena for precisely this reason.

THE HISTORICAL significance of the 1980s is that the Winners, in the rush to defend their privileged positions, forgot that the rest of society existed. Granted, the Winners do a lot of agonizing about the plight of the ghetto "underclass." And then there is the