If you want to get a definition of working class, maybe you asked very much the wrong person? Because your description seems to come from someone who has never actually talked to a blue collar worker.
I live in a very red area, moved out here because I wanted to live in an area where keeping horses was feasible. Don’t have horses any more but I am still here. I have lived here for a good while. What I see with people out here who consider themselves working class:
Most are NOT in a union, by a large margin.
Many are self-employed or employed by very small businesses, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters, pest control, grading companies, landscape companies, fencing companies, mechanics, welders
Others are police or firemen
Most are loosely associated with some type of house of worship, men often more through their spouses than personally, and they are respectful of religion even if not devout
Income levels are not the determining factor in what class they perceive themselves. Working with their hands and having a small business are. Some are out and out wealthy.
They are very attached to their specific community with ties of friendship and family and are not interested in moving for more income
Their safety net tends to be family and community resources rather than public programs
They often have outdoors oriented interests and hobbies that are negatively impacted by density, including hunting, fishing, camping, small scale agriculture, the last often on land long time owned by their family
Finally, yes, they have a very definite feeling of class consciousness, but it’s not at all an academic definition of class. That class consciousness is reflected in the music they enjoy, the movies and TV they choose, the comedians they find funny, and, more on point, the politicians they elect.
Policies targeted at unions and green energy thus don’t benefit most of the people I know who consider themselves working class. That’s probably why they are not moving the needle.
Yes, but that is a description of a red area. There are a lot of "working class" or poorer people living in cities (probably as many or more than live in semi-rural America). And they have a very different view of the world than the one you describe.
But somehow I rarely see them discussed - mostly ignored. And a lot of them didn't show up to vote in 2024 - probably because they don't see either party really helping them.
I’m from Michigan, with a branch of family in Western Pennsylvania, and this is absolutely spot on.
I think the “roots to specific community” and the emphasis on finding security in deep relationships and local continuity really gets to the heart of why “Red Americans,” for lack of a better term, are so impervious to progressive policy proposals - they see them as violating and degrading the things that give them security, not helping.
The attachment to the outdoors is also a big thing that paradoxically makes it harder to do green projects. Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
Progressives might find this frustrating and difficult to understand, especially if they are from a place, like many coastal suburbs, which aren’t really “homes” is the same way - they are well resourced communities that professionals move to when the first kid hits kindergarten and leave when the last graduates high school. I have lived in suburban Fairfield County, Connecticut, for over a decade. This is a place people come to - immigrants, former New Yorkers, highly educated professionals from somewhere else - and *use*. Then they leave. My husband was born here. His parents are immigrants. He has no emotional attachment to it.
It’s so foreign to me as a Michigander. I physically long for home. I literally turn on football on Saturdays just to hear the sound of Michigan Stadium and maybe catch a shot of the Dexter Cider Mill after a commercial break. My parents live right down the street from the Mill.
That love for home just aches when you are from a place like that. If they put up windmills all over rural Washtenaw County I think a part of my heart would die.
It’s not logical, but I think it’s a dynamic progressives need to understand better to speak to people.
I have been throughout the world and had lived in Europe for sometime. The people there are very attached to their country side as well . However, there is very little resistance to clean energy structures. I have seen windmills everywhere. Vienna, Greek Islands, all over pastoral France and Italy, and mountains in Switzerland. Ditto for solar. I talked to Greek island goat farmer who was delighted to have solar and also a place for his animals to graze and shade during summer. It is better than having smelly ugly oil refineries all over the island. These people would unquestionably die for their land and their countries at the drop of a hat. They already have done so numerous times. But they also see the land as belonging to all not just them. That is not true in the states. With all their victim-hood washing and not being adequately catered to complains ,rural Americans rally look down to the rest of the country. Urban areas (where pet-eating immigrants live) are inferior. The energy industry and the pollution derived from it should concentrate there with the dirty ones not in our pure meadows, despite the fact that rural areas need a lot of energy themselves that needs to travel a greater distance to get there. Their modern outdoorsy lifestyle is mostly sustained by the revenue from their large cities, not the other way around, but if you hear them all hard earned money gets taxed to feed urban no-gooders. As far as patriotism goes they sound more localist than patriotic. The reason why they think this way is the main problem our country has to deal with not only in politics, but as a threat of it's future existence.
That is really not at all an accurate description of the rural areas I am familiar with. It sounds more like the type of stereotype you get when you are imagining people you don’t understand.
I am actually quite familiar with. But go ahead, play the misunderstood card. It is a staple on the menu. Next please tell us how we are fake Americans and out of touch.
Really? Have you lived in rural areas in the US? How exactly have you become familiar? How much time have you personally spent in rural areas, and how many rural residents do you know well?
I am not “playing misunderstood.” I am saying, plainly, that what you describe sounds like stereotypes rather than personal experience.
I have good friends and relatives living in rural areas. I visit often even though it isn't my permanent address. They are very nice. Their neighbors were always treating my kids with fresh eggs and honey. They would stop and fix my flat tire if I was stuck on the road. They know me. they like me, me and mine are kooky but good people to them, but then, any time we talked about their small farm subsidies and how they are partially funded by SNAP they countered with "Nah, their subsidies are a pittance and their taxes pay to feed all those illegals downstate in NYC."are they bad people? no. Would they personally take in and feed an illegal family should it show up hungry at their door? 99.99 % of the ones I know yes, absolutely.
However, they have this "real Americans" thing. When I ask who are the "fake Americans" they laugh and say I don't understand. Wherever I traveled I have not seen such a disconnect between the way people perceive their community vs the rest of their country. Is not two-sided. The people I know in Brooklyn they might be condescending and engaging in stereotyping when they talk about rural America , but they never deem them not-real Americans.
One other comment - re the “misunderstood card” - I attended a very good university, work (remote) in tech at a very good job, my spouse was born and grew up in Brooklyn and is the son of two immigrants, and the only one of my niblings still in school is at Harvard.
I really do think you are misunderstanding where I am coming from, based on your responses.
I have not personally seen any organized opposition to windmills or to small scale solar. What green energy opposition I have seen is to large scale solar farms, often hundreds of acres, which actually are pretty unsightly and often involve clearcutting of large fields and woods.
The concern about rapid expansion of large scale solar is coming from rapid expansion of electrical demand due to data centers and electrification of fossil fuel uses and the VERY large amount of land being discussed.
I have heard zero comments about pet eating immigrants from actual rural dwellers I have met in real life. Zero. That appears to be a local dispute in a small Ohio city, not a rural dispute, although it’s interesting that you conflate that small city with rural areas.
The problem with small scale solar or wind is that it limits the number of people who benefit from it. A large grid can create more energy and support larger areas more equitably. However I can see how it seems counter productive to cut down trees in order to build solar. What I've seen in Europe is windmills at regular intervals installed in farm land and mountain ridges. I've seen solar installed in rocky dry semi-arid areas in Southern Europe, and in some places helped retain soil and provide shade so the local shrubbery can survive longer the very hot summers there. I can see some dry ecosystems like in Arizona or Texas benefit from it.
As for the eating pets issue it was a lie repeated over and over by the Trump campaign nationwide. I have friends in rural upstate NY and it was all over, along with stories about how illegals can punch you and nothing happens to them. Illegals come over and squatter in abandoned homes and you can't take them out and a zillion of this kinds of hogwash comments.. The population where you live might be either more enlightened , or just doesn't like to talk politics in public.
That's all well and good, but none of these things are economic and, therefore, are not a description of a class in any meaningful sense. You're just describing some completely different thing.
As for the physically longing for Michigan, I'm sorry but that's ridiculous rhetoric for any American community. The longest any family has lived in any of these places (outside of New England maybe) is three or four generations. You are not from a small town in England where your family was inscribed in the doomsday book. You are a recent immigrant who has become complacent and lost the drive that brought your grandparents or great grandparents to Michigan in the first place. The way you honor their memory is by chasing the work to the next boom.
Physical longing for the place you belong is not ridiculous. It’s a primary driving force for a LOT of people. Including me.
Your history is WAY off. My family has been in their part of Virginia for six generations in my lifetime, and were there for several generations before. They’re not recent migrants, and their culture is uniquely American, not that of their ancestral countries.
I have less than zero interest in chasing work to the next boom. I would gain nothing and lose what matters most to me.
I'm from MIchigan, still live here, and all of this is so true.
As far as the solar panels and wind farms go, I think if there were a push to put solar panels over urban freeways and wind farms in the middle of the Detroit river, not only would rural folks feel better about them but urban folks would get a taste of their aesthetic intrusion. Maybe we would all understand each other better.
(And the cider mill allusion is something non-midwesterners will never get, but it's such a deep, core memory. I just went the Franklin cider mill a couple of weeks ago and my entire childhood flooded back to me)
In China, many if not all cities require new commercial buildings to install solar panels on their roofs. Solar over parking lots is also becoming common. One of the problems in the US is that the electric market and grid management have no place for mid-size power suppliers. You can put panels on your home’s roof, and a utility can cover acres of good farmland with 200 MW of panels, but if you want to put 2 MW of panels on top of your strip mall, there’s no regulatory path for you to sell the excess power in the wholesale electric market. There are ideas for how to make that market work, but most grid operators would rather deal with a few big suppliers who cover up acres of farmland.
I went to U of M (class of 1971), and I, too appreciate the reference to the cider mill. I have a friend who grew up in Dexter, and every now and then I'd take a spin out the Huron River Drive to the Delhi Bridge, just to celebrate the quaint countryside of the Midwest.
But I grew up in one of those "placeless" suburbs -- as it happens, on Long Island: we moved out there in 1959 from a 3-room apartment in Brooklyn, in this instance along with a lot of other New York Jews.
I hung a poster-sized portrait of Thomas Jefferson in my bedroom and grew my own vegetables (and, later, weed) in the backyard. And just like those folks from Dexter, I have fond memories of the Jericho Cider Mill.
That's show biz! ;-)
PS: I felt that all I needed was a cute long-haired boy with whom to share life on the open road, and we'd live happily ever after in my vision of Americana.
Now I'm 75, still alone -- lamenting to my cat: "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
Just a quick note here, completely off topic for the “class” conversation:
“ Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
I live in a red midwestern state and, while I’ve moved into town, I’m from a farm family. My state is in the top ten in the nation for the share of electricity produced by wind. Farmers like it because it’s extra cash and the windmills don’t disrupt their farms. Plus, farmers can always use stable cash given the erratic nature of agriculture, aesthetics be damned.
With century-and-a-half farms on both sides, there is very much a deep sense of connection to the land and a willingness to do whatever is needed to keep it. There are still traumatic memories from the huge bankruptcies in the 1980s, and my grandparents certainly remembered the farm crisis due to the depression. And after all, the windmills can always come down later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not even really all progressives putting up windmills. In 2022 (last time I checked the numbers) the top five wind energy producing states as a share of electricity were all red, likely because it’s easier to build in them. Different for solar, where CA is in first place, but three of the top five states in solar production are also red—again, likely because of different permitting and environmental review processes.
> The attachment to the outdoors is also a big thing that paradoxically makes it harder to do green projects. Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
If the solar or wind farm wasn't built, the electricity demand would have to be fulfilled by gas, coal, hydro, or nuclear. Do people really prefer living next to those methods over wind/solar?
I guess I'm close enough to an urban progressive now, but I grew up in rural areas. I would've preferred a wind or solar farm coming to town over a fossil fuel plant any day of the week. I've just never really understood why people think renewables look worse than any other rural economic activity, but maybe I'm just weird like that.
When the community wants it, I am totally good with solar and wind. But community opposition is high enough that states like Michigan are now eliminating their right to oppose it.
I would be okay with nearby nuclear. We already have one not terribly far away (Lake Anna.)
"They are very attached to their specific community" - yes, this sense of "place" is something I have observed too, and find incomprehensible as a rootless liberal globalist :) I got out of my hometown as fast as I could, then one city for college, another for work, now in a suburban town for the schools for my kids, then we will likely retire to another city. The place you live is just real estate, to me. But to some of these people it's really their sense of community.
As an American (other than a Native American), we are all the descendants of rootless liberal globalists. It's why I didn't live in a small village in Ireland or Poland. Chasing economic opportunity to the next place *is* our great inheritance and tradition. It's the people who refuse to move out of dying towns that are betraying the American spirit.
I was one of the "rootless liberal globalists" you wrote about. However, now that I'm retired, I have moved back to Michigan where I grew up, as the "prodigal daughter."
Also,it used to be easier to move from one area to another in the US, or from the US to Europe (which I did in the 1970s.) . Noah and others have stated that people who lose their job can just move to where jobs are more plentiful. Now, that often would entail trying to sell a house in a depressed area such as the “rust belt” to buy/rent something in an area that’s booming. For example, my parents bought their house just outside of Detroit for $11,000 in 1952 and stayed there because of work. Its twin across the street sold for $11,000 in 2008. That amount wouldn’t even be enough for a down payment elsewhere.
I also suspect two-income families decrease geographical mobility. If I lose my job, the LAST thing we want to do is take a chance and move away from my wife's job! Intuitive and short-term correct, but perhaps not successful long-term unfortunately.
Agree, but how does that cash out in terms of what marginal tax rates ought to be, what skills and education should let you immigrate to the US, or how to reduce the vulnerability to imports of strategic goods from China?
Yes, this is my observation. Place is more important than class and it intersects with education.
I have a boardgame night I used to go to in a rural community in Colorado. The guys out there were religious or religion adjacent even if they didn't personally believe and worked with their hands or managed people who did.
I got pulled in through dating a girl that one of the guys at the house used to date who ended up working in tech after college and meeting me. So literally the church vs. university divide broke a bit through mutual dating and integrated us.
> They often have outdoors oriented interests and hobbies that are negatively impacted by density, including hunting, fishing, camping, small scale agriculture, the last often on land long time owned by their family
I grew up in rural areas, and seeing the forests and deserts of my childhood get built over by suburbia is the very reason I became "pro-density." While it's technically true that a subdivision is denser than a farm, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a "pro-density" person who is in favor of expanding suburbia. Rather, pro-density people want places that are already built-upon to get denser, and a major reason for that is to lessen development pressure on rural areas. Urbanists and rural people want the same things.
Problem with extremes of density is the isolation of people from the natural world.
Not being able to see the stars, birds, frogs, have a garden - it’s not much of a life for a lot of people and it seems to me to really shortchange kids.
With telecommuting so easy, why are we moving people instead of data?
We must be thinking of very different things by the opposite of "extremes of density," because I strongly disagree. Suburbia is, for me, more isolating from the natural world than anything else, because its lawns and parking lots don't really resemble nature. With "extremes of density," less land being dedicated to housing and commerce for a given number of people leaves more land available for conservation, farms, and forestry. That means quicker and easier access for more people to truly natural spaces.
I'll agree with you about telecommuting, though. I had hoped that we would've seen more small towns turn into telecommuting hubs than what actually happened.
I don’t know which suburbs located where you are thinking of, but the ones I lived in growing up had zero parking lots and an abundance of trees, gardens, room to play outdoors, and quite a decent smattering of wildlife. Living in a very dense setting, pretty much by definition, removes all that from childhood and from daily encounters. Many of my best childhood memories would literally have been impossible. Being able to drive to green space occasionally is not the same. IMHO dense city life is a terrible way to live. And what I am thinking of is specifically Brooklyn, my husband’s childhood home. Personally I prefer rural or exurbs, but IMHO suburban is still better than very dense living, assuming you are not commuting. At least you can have a garden, birds, and private outdoor space to sit, entertain, and have your kids play.
The Weldon Cooper Center at UVA does analyses of domestic migration patterns. Essentially, people already here are migrating out of cities and into exurbs, as remote work becomes ubiquitous and broadband is almost universal via Starlink. Not only are exurbs growing, including around small towns located well outside city centers, but they have been the fastest growing segment for domestic migration. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
When people can live in less dense areas, they tend to prefer it, and it revitalizes smaller areas, with most preferring areas that are pretty, have desirable natural features and recreation, or that are within an hour or two of larger population centers.
What they call "working class" seems what leftists will call "petite bourgeoisie".
Btw, controlling for location, "Most are loosely associated with some type of house of worship" is still true? In other words, in that place these manual workers and small businessmen are more religious than the local doctors and lawyers?
How much was the decline in private-sector unions a result of outsourcing destroying the huge monolithic employers of the past that were easy to unionize?
Moreover, this working class is the key voting constituency to win over. So far, Republicans are doing a much better job than Democrats.
The key to winning their vote is not Sanders-like class politics, but a focus on promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth and upward mobility. The party that does will dominate for the next generation:
We have a cottage in rural Michigan and yes, people there do think like that. There is genuine value in it, too, I would never denigrate it. However those same people are in a voting bloc with the folks who live in my suburb with none of those qualities at all (other than a devotion to the local schools).
Re the point that income (and wealth for that matter) is a continuous distribution - I think this is why the Occupy-era notion of "the 99%" never really took off. That's an insane way to divide up the population - there is no way in which people at the 1st and 98th percentiles of affluence have anything like the same material interests.
Americans may not identify themselves as working class, but they are certainly willing to identify themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, with little job security and a great deal of economic fear. It is this level of economic insecurity that the Democratic Party has failed to address. Pandemic measures like child tax credits and childcare subsidies helped, but they went bye bye. Chip factories may get built but they probably won't want people left behind American job skills.
Lots of people who claim to live paycheck to paycheck actually have high incomes, they just don’t have the discipline to save or invest their earnings, and spend it on second mortgages and BMW car loans; they aren’t struggling financially.
Right, would also add house equity and 401ks... You might be liquid only on a paycheck to paycheck basis, but if something truly required it, many of them could come up with $100k+
Well, they could be struggling financially, but it would be self-imposed. many a year ago, the Houston newspaper did a story on a guy who was about to lose his income because Enron had collapsed. The guy had no money to pay his mortgage for the next month. He asked, “Do you think I'm going to lose the house?”
This is where Bernie and populist Dem policy in general shines. Raising the minimum wage, for example, pushes up wages for all of the quintiles just above it, immeasurably improving QOL for many tens of millions.
But the GOP is dead set against raising the minimum wage--despite their protestations of being the party of Joe sixpack--as is the Blue-Dog wing of the Dems. Only the Dem Progressive wing is for it, and they'll never have the votes.
How would you respond to arguments that raising the minimum wage would render large swathes of economic activity unviable (especially in red states, where firms are mostly in commoditized sectors exposed to fierce global competition) while failing to do much for blue-state workers as their wage increases would be swallowed up by rent hikes?
Doesn’t this assume that nothing else changes? We are told that the free market’s flexibility and intelligence in the face of change leads to superior results. Why is it suddenly powerless to work around a slightly higher wage floor?
Improving the EITC and making it more of a wage subsidy would help more. Even if it "works," why tax the employer of the low-wage worker and their customers instead of more broadly?
The government has never addressed the issue that the income of the 40th percentile American has been stagnant for decades. College educated folks have simply ignored these people. And now they're getting their revenge by voting for Trump. He may not do anything for them, but at least they get the chance to stick it to the man.
There is a continuum along the average tax rate spectrum. Reducing the deficit is good for everyone, but those with the highest consumption should pay more to reduce it.
Did they not have a point in that the real enemy of ordinary people, are the oligarchs who are SO rich that they can bend the government to their will?
Partially, but the straight-up simplification of class politics into an oppressed-oppressor dichotomy is just so reductive as to be essentially false.
I find it particularly ironic, given their obsession with spectra elsewhere (gender, most obviously), that progressives decided to treat the one categorisation that really is a spectrum, where people move up and down the scale all the time, as though it is a rigid binary.
They should admittedly have stuck to the 0.1% or even just billionaires because a millionaire and a homeless man are about the same distance in wealth from a billionaire (most of whom are multi billionaires anyway)
This is why everyone hates some billionaire or other, be it Soros or Musk.
The marginal value of all that extra wealth that a billionaire has over a millionaire isn't very much in the broader scheme of things. The millionaire and the billionaire are closer to each other in the sense that both have more money than they could ever reasonably spend in a way that improves their own living standards. They are clearly more similar to each other than either of them is to the homeless guy.
Well, except being a millionaire by wealth these days might just mean having a nice suburban house and a 401k you've built up over decades. It's nowhere near passive income retirement territory.
<Partially, but the straight-up simplification of class politics into an oppressed-oppressor dichotomy is just so reductive as to be essentially false.>
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion, since it's not really apparent from your broader statement. Social class is, in most characterizations, a vertically-arranged hierarchy, and I find it hard to believe that there aren't exploitative power relations in that kind of relationship.
Also could we please ditch the whole "oppressor-oppressed" label? Nietzsche had it right the first time when he coined the "master-slave" dialectic and I don't see why we should have to reinvent the wheel in descriptive terms.
Okay, to put it more bluntly, the folk at the bottom are oppressed, the folk at the top are oppressors, but there are a large bunch of people in the middle who don't really fit into either category. I'm one of them! I find it absurd that I, and a homeless person, should be lumped together in the category of "the 99%"; government policy should be focused on getting the homeless person into a home, and leaving me alone.
Isn't that just populism? Trump's shtick is that cultural elites are oppressing the masses, while Bernie was all about the rich oppressing the masses.
Also the "99%" slogan was exactly that: a slogan. It's a simplified model attempting to explain some of the dynamics of modern society (something I thought economists/political scientists would understand). It's not meant to be precise; if you want precision go read Das Kapital.
<government policy should be focused on getting the homeless person into a home, and leaving me alone.>
That strikes me as rather naive. Who's gonna get the government focused on helping homeless people? The homeless don't vote, and all the policies that would favor the homeless (affordable housing, involuntary hospitalization, etc.) are either costly to implement or run against some entrenched group's economic interest (homeowners, nonprofit NGOs, etc.). The whole idea of getting "the 99%" to band together is that there's strength in numbers.
The thing about banding the 99% together, though, is that it encourages a one-size-fits-all approach to state support that fails the people at the very bottom who need it most.
I don't care if helping these people is expensive, or goes against some group's vested interests. It's morally right and we should do it anyway. You judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable.
Sort of. But I think Richard Reeves made a good case in The Dream Hoarders that the bigger divide is between the upper middle class (maybe the 80th-99th percentiles) and those both below and above. Because there is such low voter turnout overall (and particularly at the low end), this 20% of the population casts close to 40% of the votes, and because of campaign finance rules preventing billionaires from donating more, this segment of the population controls the vast majority of political donations.
This probably means that downscale college graduates are the only group with something resembling a traditional class consciousness. It’s the student loan forgiveness army. Probably the most active people on social media as well.
I am a therapist that spent the period from the Great Recession to Trump’s first election as a Career Counselor at a university in NYC. They hired mental health professionals to work in the career center as a kind of “front line” since so many students were coming to the center in genuine distress over their futures.
I had a sort of front row seat to the coming of age of the late millennials / early zoomers, along with the rise of the Great Awokening.
It was absolutely a case of not just Elite Overproduction, but Elite Overpromising, which made a lot of middle class American young people feel not just that they were downwardly mobile, but that they were being denied something that had been promised to them from birth.
And it was! I was born in 1980 - last of the Mohicans for Gen X. I distinctly remember the fall of 1987, when the first “Millennials” showed up in the school system. There were balloons and banners and hoopla, all declaring to these little 5 year olds, one of whom was my goober little brother, “Class of 2000 - You are going to Change the World!”
No one put up crap like that for our class when we came to kindergarten in 1985. It was “here’s an index card with your bus # and teacher’s name” pinned on the Osh Kosh overalls and off we went into the system. But in 1987 the inspiration posters went up, and the sports leagues and promises of future glory and the rest of it was not far behind.
When I worked in the career center I realized that what I was really doing was grief counseling. I watched 20 year olds come in the office in varying stages of “grief” - for the imaginary “World Changing” and amazing lives they were promised. There was a lot of denial at the nature of entry level and white collar work, lots of trying to negotiate with reality, lots of anger, etc. Some kids eventually reconciled with reality and accepted that the nature of their adult work and lives was not going to be quite as transformational as they had been promised it would be. Those are the ones that went on to become accountants and get married and live in Connecticut and are generally happy with life now.
But a lot young people from that time, especially young women, who in addition to the generic inspiration poster crap had “Girl Boss Power” shoved down their throats by their boomer mothers since birth, did not adjust to the reality that their lives would be pleasantly ordinary. Add in a shortage of marriageable, college educated guys? There is a reason specifically young, educated women got pissed off and started reacting histrionically to every political issue in the early 2010s.
Imagine you are a middle class American girl from a solid suburban home, born between 1982 and the early 90s. You’ve lived your life in rising, ever improving comfort. You came of age in a nation and probably a family whose 20th Century story is one of “coming up in the world.” You are told all your life how AMAZING you are, and what an apotheosis of your American family and feminism you will some day be, fully living the promise of Post-War America in the New Millennium.
And the New Millennium shows up, and you are 22 years old, finishing college in NYC. You have “done e everything right.” You listened to parents and teachers and counselors and followed the directions. And now that you are finishing college neither an exciting career nor a man wants you. Your adult life is full of degrading, go nowhere interviews and dates that seem to only turn into shitty jobs and temporary relationships at most.
Yeah, you’d be pissed and looking for explanations and someone to blame.
I was born in 1966 so I am an aunt to many of the young women that you supposedly describing. None of them or their friends took any of the hoopla that you are describing seriously. The majority of them have finished college and have careers, and husbands, and children. They didn't even have to convert to their future husband's religion to get married, even though one had her husband convert to hers.You might say that my experience is anecdotal ,but so is yours. However you mirthful glee in describing loveless, carer-less single women is a bit telling.
I graduated at the nadir of the Great Recession. I never thought I was God’s gift to the job market - and I certainly never had girlboss dreams, what are you talking about? - but I did expect to be able to work. At something. Somewhere. I applied to every job in the mall twice. The grocery store couldn’t have me either. I had a degree from a prestigious school.
And no man wanted us, eh? What on earth are you talking about?
Love this! I was there in those overalls in the 80s too! We were raised in simple Reagan-ism, that we could work hard, keep our heads down, and make a good living - and that was good enough.
But I'll note - GenX seems to have leaned hardest into the cranky "blame someone" Trump narrative, so apparently not all went smoothly...
Great to hear from someone who saw it unfold on the front line. In addition to this sense of shared grievance, these are mostly liberal arts majors who are already fully exposed to the bleeding edge left wing ideologies, which makes them a very solid base for Dems. The problem is that they are also so off putting on cultural issues to everyone else that they may very well generate more backlash than enthusiasm on the net.
Yes, and what is sad is that all the adults who were telling them all these lies were saying it because it made them feel good. They all knew that it was not true. It is fine to be emotionally supporting, but you have to have Honesty along the way.
Also a big part is that our educational system focuses so much on academic knowledge, most of which will never be used as an adult, while ignoring critical life skills like personal finance, physical fitness, job skills, etc.
but like so many revolutionaries before them (French Revolution, Iranian Revolution, etc) they mistakenly imagine the proletariat shares their social views and goals. As we see with Trumpy populism, the actual working class has a LOT of cultural conservatives and some outright barbarians with no concern for civilization. So these young downscale liberals plot to overturn the elite order, not realizing that order is the most liberal regime in the world. Sad.
One thing that's important in this conversation is that "downscale college graduates" are genuine something of a new phenomenon given the massive growth in the share of the population that has college degrees (going from like 10% to closer to 45% among working age people). You can't have 45% of the population in the top 25% of the income distribution because that's not how math works, so it is simply an unavoidable fact that very many college graduates now are middle-income people.
Downscale college graduates are youths, who have not gotten their act together enough to join the professional class. Most of them do, but it takes longer with each generation.
church vs. university as origin of values may be the biggest divide then (even if they're not actually disjoint). I think the data hints at this at least.
“ Whether you go to college makes a huge difference in your life — both in terms of future income and the kind of jobs available to you, and also in terms of health and other social outcomes.”
How do you think the correlation vs. causation breaks down on that? Presumably having the cognitive ability, consciousness, etc. to graduate from college would still manifest itself in terms of positive life outcomes, even if you didn’t actually go.
Look how fast new immigrants who finally have a chance to succeed in a free, open system rocket up. My father-in-law from Portugal has a fourth grade education at most, but is a multimillionaire just from working smart and hard.
His sons both have graduate degrees. (They are also, like almost all first generation Portuguese-American young men, an entire foot taller than their father.)
However, in contrast, I think that Americans who are already here were aggressively cognitively sorted in the mass-college trends of the late 20th / early 21st century.
Prior to the 80s, a lot of smart people were in trades and white collar work without a degree. College wasn’t seen as mandatory for success.
But in the Reagan Era, even non-college educated Americas started pushing their kids towards college. If you were of average or above intelligence in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s you were expected to go to college. Period. Didn’t matter if your dad was a doctor or factory guy. So we started associating college educations with “smartness.”
Never mind that the actual education being received was being radically dumbed down to accommodate the new mass of students, and many of the students, in reality, were just receiving elaborate job credentialing with a patina of academics - basically trade school with some poorly taught and frequently skipped “core classes”.
It’s a mess that really needs both a structural and cultural overhaul. This system has not been good for society, for academia, or for young people.
I suspect defining working class is only hard for those who definitively are not. Someone who...
"...physically hurts at the end of each day because of their occupational labor"
"...job makes them physically sweat"
"...works in a non-climate controlled environment"
"...labor causes physical pain in something other than their fingers or wrists"
"...work schedule significantly fluctuates week to week under a manager's control"
"...wears a uniform to work"
"...can't wear the same clothes 2 days in a row because they're too dirty after day 1"
If you meet more than half of these tests (and there are certainly others) most people would see you as working class. It's not about how MUCH money you make but about HOW you make it. Plumbers and electricians and machinists have 6 digit incomes, but they're all working class. Edge cases like teachers or retail workers I would probably lump in since they're physically on their feet all day, but others might disagree.
Economics wants a rigid definition derived from an easily accessible metric (like income). That's going to be elusive in this case -- "working class" is kind of like Justice Stewart's pornography. But that won't stop economists (who lack Noah's nuance) from measuring something mostly irrelevant (like income) and using it to derive theories utterly divorced from reality. Homo economicus strikes again.
As Noah hints at, once you leave the income frame, in terms of social policy, there is a distinct class divide driven not directly by income but by degree level. University graduates are overwhelmingly more likely to have drunk at the postmodernist well, water which looks brackish to the working class.
The working class are those who put a significant amount of wear on their body doing their job functions over the course of a career. Nearly all these people enter retirement with some sort of nagging physical condition.
Yes. I like that. Someone else here said that "if your boss says you have to work Christmas or else..." you're probably working class. I like that one too.
Yours is particularly good because it captures class across a lifetime instead of at a single point, thus alleviating Noah's (accurate) comments about American economic mobility.
This is my favorite, knowledge economy vs. blue collar work. There's a divide between "being reliant on your body" and "being reliant on your mind" to make a living.
Immigration as the dividing issue also makes sense. If you're a knowledge economy worker you're already in some sense competing with knowledge workers outside the country if your job can be outsourced (and you're probably happy having more Uber drivers, cheaper plumbers, etc.). If you're working with your hands why would you want other people here that are willing to do your job for less money?
Certainly the terms are treated as synonyms. But elementary school teacher isn't a blue-collar occupation, nor is home-health aide, but I personally would categorize the second as working class and likely the first as well, particularly if for a private school.
Blue collar likely captures about 80% of it though. (Although I doubt Noah wears a white collar when he's writing.)
I don’t necessarily disagree with you on it being how you make a living, but I think there are some simple demographic characteristics that help us make the cut.
Moreover, this working class is the key voting constituency to win over. So far, Republicans are doing a much better job than Democrats.
The key to winning their vote is not Sanders-like class politics, but a focus on promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth and upward mobility. The party that does will dominate for the next generation:
This is right but I often get in response to this that "we just need to educate people" which is not the right lesson here, especially if by that you mean schooling them.
We are talking about people that are often underprivileged when it comes to aptitude for higher education (it's extremely difficult to talk about this without being condescending, which is why opaque euphemisms like "working class" and "the people" are often used). But it needs to be understood. Otherwise you get the educated elite denigrating populism, punching down on the underprivileged class instead of trying to help them.
It's important to creating a society that is inclusive of the non academically educated. That has a path for a successful respected life for everyone.
We have spent 100 years increasingly the level of cognitive ability required to be economically successful. AI might finally work that in reverse, but it's too soon to tell. (It might also just become a tool for the smarter to further entrench their own advantage.)
The bell curve is real for essentially all human traits. It is the reason attempts to engineer equal outcomes always end in blood: there's a limit to how far you can raise the bottom end of the distribution (for intelligence or empathy or assertiveness or beauty for example) but no limit on how far you can bring down the top. I give my students the Vonnegut short story Harrison Bergeron to illustrate this. Anyone who hasn't read it: https://ia803002.us.archive.org/25/items/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron.pdf
I hear this complaint on the left about politics as well. If only people were more educated, Trumpism wouldn't succeed. It's true that many of Trump's policy proposals are absurd, but if you think winning elections depends on a majority of the population understanding the effects of tariffs, good luck with that.
That’s a provocative argument, but for once, I am not convinced by something Noah has written. An anecdote from a clueless acquaintance and the fact that income distribution is monomodal is not quite sufficient for me.
Certain cities, due to density, force you to rub shoulders with the working class more than others. I live in New York, and when I think of the working class, I think of all the people I rub shoulders with all day long who work various jobs relatively low on wages and prestige - the guy who delivers my packages, the guy who drives the bus, the waiter at my restaurant, the nail salon workers, the mechanic, the security guard, the cashier, the construction worker, etc.
What makes the class divide real is that, despite rubbing shoulders with these people literally all day long every day, they live social, economic, and cultural lives *entirely different from mine* and all of my college educated, privileged friends. I will literally never see any of them at any social gathering I or my children attend. The class divide is real.
Is it that Noah is nit-picking on the label ‘working class’ which is being used as a stand-in for people that don’t work jobs that require a university degree? In effect more of an educational divide even if there are cases where degree holders end up working in non-degree requiring jobs.
I'm an interesting case study. Economically I'm now upper-class but my lifestyle is firmly blue-collar and my values don't fit into any class well. After graduating my career path meant I made a lower-middle-class income from internships and contract positions with months of unemployment in between (I never applied for assistance). I went to grad school to improve my opportunities afterwards and it worked - I got longer contracts, a middle-class salary, more generous benefits and I finally got my first full-time permanent semi-normal job at the age of 32. I even made my first adult friends there. But I got laid off after 2 years and I'm starting a contract project overseas with housing provided and a six-digit income. I'm still working with my hands outdoors (but with college-level knowledge and skills) and moving every 1-2 years and don't have any social opportunities or stability. Politically I've long resented the elite and professional class and their philosophical foundations (ever since grad school when I learned what people in social science really believe), but I'm just as anti-MAGA as them. You might call me a rationalist.
So what class am I? How do I improve my lot in life? The 2024 election upended every way I thought you persuade people and win elections. I agree, Noah, that class is not an objective concept in America and I also have no idea what the best framework is to understand American politics. Unfortunately, for my Vulcan mindset, it may be appealing to the politics of fantasy, as illustrated by Kurt Andersen.
And yet, this most recent election, having clearly been primarily a victory for aggrieved white people bound by identity markers like xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, Christian nationalism, and aggressive and unapologetic stupidity, was, ipso facto, a victory for identity politics -- which you claim has failed. Sure, the idiots bound by these identity markers would deny that they were engaging in "identity politics," but it's precisely that denial that, ipso facto, allows them to be identified as idiots.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump voters would happily sacrifice material well-being for the warm, fuzzy feeling they get knowing that, somewhere in Bumfuqistan, Ohio, a trans girl is being outed, humiliated and prevented from playing women's high school soccer. If that ain't "identity politics" at work, I don't know what is.
Noah has laid out in great detail in 3 posts that this is hogwash.
The groups that broke for Trump in 2024 (vs for Biden in 2020) were Latinos, Asians, and the young. White people did not appreciably change. Men shifted slightly toward Trump but so did women, thus destroying your misogyny argument.
However, as a conservative, I'm happy if you keep telling your friends that you lost because racist white men can't handle a black woman as President. Feel free to double down on the politics of racial and sexual grievance over and over.
Yeah, because large numbers of Trump voters are reading this blog . . . .
Newsflash: Tens of millions of poor and middle-income people of all "races" and ethnicities managed to figure out that Trump is a vile deranged POS whose first, and perhaps only, order of business will be to fuck them over -- materially -- in every imaginable way, and managed to realized that, whatever the failings of the Democratic Party and its candidate, it's the only party that, for nearly 100 years, has consistently sought, in myriad ways, to address their needs and desires as poor and working people.
That claim seems a little bizarre since Harris did *better* among white people than Biden did, and Trump did better among non-white people than he did last time. Or maybe I'm mis-reading you and you don't mean that the *bulk* of white people are aggrieved, but rather than the aggrieved minority of white people helped Trump to victory. But I haven't seen any data to back that.
Ok, an experiment: Would every reader of this blog who considers themselves a member of the (non-existent) working please raise your hands? And raise both hands if my 'rant' persuaded you to "vote" (retro-actively??) for Trump.
Rhetoric like that over the last 8 years created millions of new Trump voters of all classes. At some point, you are going to have to understand the effect such rhetoric has on other people. They do the opposite of what you want.
Oh, right. I'm sure the creation of all those new Trump voters had nothing whatsoever to do with stupid people being whipped into a deranged frenzy by 8 years of psychotic hysteria about Central Americans raping and pillaging their way across America, or drag queens making kids gay, or Haitians eating pets, or that one trans girl in Bumfuqistan destroying women's sports by being allowed to play girls' soccer.
Noah is out of touch with the actual world. These people would benefit from Democrat policies. A good percentage of them already support Democrats. Why not try to engage them in a helping way? They just feel like Democrats only care about racial minorities and trans people and Republicans manipulate whatever degree of resentment that causes.
oh I guess you were responding to the other girl. Yeah, that doesn’t help, is what I said. I don’t understand why people are conservative at all. Kind of a weird thing to say, but true
By the traditional definition ("one who seeks to preserve the status quo") the most conservative party is now (weirdly) the Democrats. That's what happens when the revolutionaries end up winning and becoming the establishment: they go conservative. However, almost all of American politics is really postliberal.
The Left has been there for a while, asserting not Lockean procedural neutrality but the pursuit of righteous outcomes (as they define it.) In that sense, the Left is now as theological as the Christian Right used to be: defining "good" and willing to use power to make it happen.
This election firmly entrenched the Right there as well, as writers like Amari and Deneen and Dreher have helped rediscover the language of Edmund Burke from 300+ years ago. It's doubtful Trump can articulate this, but Vance doesn't hesitate to pursue "good" (by his definition) even at the expense of procedural neutrality.
You likely prefer the Left's definition to the Right's, but they're both doing the same thing. In that sense, our politicians are all Nietzschean ubermenschen now.
One thing is clear: Lockean liberalism is dead. Noah and Bari Weiss and David French are going to play Weekend at Bernie's with it for a few years, but no one under 30 cares. Politics is about to get more interesting (and consequential) than it's been for 100 years.
"More interesting" as in more chaotic, stupid, psychotic and nihilistic? Yeah, sure.
Fortunately, you and Jordan Peterson will be around to blame this all on Lockean liberals failing to fully reckon with the profound and timeless truths set forth in Genesis 2-3.
I agree with you that the source of Locke is Judeo-Christianity. One of my first civics lectures every year is that "all men are created equal" is nonsensical without "man made in the image of God".
But my society is actively running away from God, and I see no possible way to sustain Locke without Him. So even though I prefer a Judeo-Christian / Lockean world, I live in a Nietzschean one. Find me the Liberal-Christian party and I will support is wholeheartedly, but until then, I have to settle for voting against postmodernism.
"working class" is a misleading term in today's world. The real "class" issue is workers vs large oligopoly corporations. That is where the balance of power has shifted so strongly. And "workers" includes college educated and non college-educated, tech workers and hotel maids.
So many areas of the American economy are now controlled by a small set of companies - giving effective monopoly power (and monopsony power). This is where Khan's antitrust work matters and where unions matter, etc... And where Bernie Sanders is coming from as well.
That viewpoint does give the Dems a real ideology that can matter (IMO) - although I doubt they will embrace it - too tied to corporate money anymore.
But that just doesn’t sound right. Large oligopoly corporations do plenty of things to make the lives of the middle class and upper middle class easier. And it’s the upper middle class who control the school boards and zoning commissions and other things that hold the poor down - the corporations would love the poor to be better off so they could get more money from them.
I've had the chance to see a wide spectrum of companies, including a range from very big to very small, established to startup, and publicly owned, private equity owned, and family/founder owned.
By far, the worst working experiences I've seen are at smaller, family-owned businesses. It's not even close. And that distinction is true for everybody ranging from a C-level executive to a custodian or assembly worker on a factory floor. There are exceptions -- terrible big companies and amazing small businesses -- but the average is striking.
I think the tendency to lump tech workers and hotel maids into one class is the main reason we can't have a proper welfare state. Once you accept that someone on the upper end of the income distribution in one of the richest countries does not have a high enough standard of living, there's not enough to redistribute from.
I don't see any of it as a "class" - which is part of your point. It is a question of shared interests. Generally, neither party does a good job of representing the interests of workers rather than capital (the Dems did at one time - and Biden did some effective work, just horrible at promoting it).... The question is really one of whether the Democrats can put together a solid Narrative about being about labor these days instead of capital. Yes, different folks with different finances have some different interests, but most of them have experienced the power that large corporations have over them anymore (even tech workers these days).
Oddly, enough this is closer to the more classic meaning of "left" vs "right" than what we have today in America
The problem with this argument is that large corporations are far better employers than small businesses. Large corporations have higher wages, better benefits, more long-term stability and better career advancement.
That is why people want to work for them, not matter how much they complain.
OK, that was a long-winded comment I made - sigh - needed some dinner first ;-)
Basically my point isn't that large corporations are inherently bad - but that oligopolies are very bad and have a nasty effect on the "working class", basically on workers vs capital.
Now, in the current economy, there is a strong push in many industries (and has been for 40+ years) to consolidate, remove competition, and create oligopolies in many key areas of the economy. IMO, that is exactly what the Democrats need to tell the country is at the root of why workers haven't made it big while capital/corporations have.
You are welcome to believe that, but I guarantee you that this economic populist message is not going to resonate with the American working class. That type of messaging appeals to white college-educated liberals, who already vote Democratic. White college-educated liberals always think that they are going to appeal to the working class with that kind of message, but all they are doing is appealing to themselves.
Maybe it worked in the 1930s and 1940s, but not since.
The working class wants economic growth and to left alone.
Note that large corporations have a number of other effects on the "working class". The oligopoly has an effect on prices, Amazon's near monopoly has forced out a lot of small businesses and forced others to sell on Amazon with Amazon taking a big cut, etc. etc. Hospitals closed by hedge funds, doctors forced to sign on with big employers, etc..
So, yes, in the company town where there is one big employer - yep, that is the place to work - that is roughly what happens with oligopoly. And there is certainly evidence that has suppressed wages over time (I can't find the study right now -sorry). If large corporations were so great for workers, why have wages in those corporations risen more slowly than productivity gains?
I don't have a problem with the notion of a large company - just a giant problem with the squeezing out of competitors to reach heavy duty market consolidation. Which is the big story of the last 40+ years. (and the accompanying "enshittification" as Doctorow calls it).
So, yes, working for a large corporation can have benefits directly with indirect effects on others. It can also result in layoffs that are done specifically to jack up the stock price.
The majority of new jobs come from small businesses - frequently in the first years as they are getting established.
The effect on the "working class" isn't just on the immediate job benefits.
One last comment from the referenced article (I haven't read the book, so harder to respond) -
"economic policies, including taxation, regulation, and spending, are systemically biased in favor of small firms in most nations around the world" - definitely not true in the US - especially given that the large firms avoid taxation by moving "profits" to low tax countries.
And having worked in small companies and big companies - the notion the big ones are "more innovative" (on a per employee basis) is nonsense. Most big companies these days innovate by buying smaller companies.
There are several other things in that "review" that are quite dubious - but I won't comment further on that without reading the book.....
As I said, perhaps poorly, it isn't the existence of large corporations, rather the creation of oligopolies without free and fair competition. Even Adam Smith commented on this long ago.
Now, perhaps in our economic system, large corporations are always driven to try to create oligopolies and IF there is no counterbalance antitrust activity, they succeed at that - and we all pay a price for the lack of competition that comes with that.
The link is not a review. It is a summary, and it blows away the argument that small businesses are better than big businesses.
The main difference between a small corporation and a small one is decades of success. And no one is forced to work for a big corporations or sell on Amazon. They choose to do so because it benefits them.
Big corporations are the foundation of a successful economy because they thrive in international markets. They are also the foundation for many thriving small businesses because they inject wealth into the region via exports. The small businesses that have a big positive impact on society do so by growing into big corporations.
Very few big corporations are actually oligopolies because they must compete internationally. International markets are very competitive. Nations with big corporations are much wealthier than nations without big corporations.
Whether wages are growing faster than productivity is not relevant to big vs small.
I never said anything about company town.
“ large firms avoid taxation by moving "profits" to low tax countries” has nothing to do with US policy.
The US economy is a blend of hundreds of large corporations, tens of thousands of small local businesses, and a handful of gazelles that grow fast. Maybe a few can be defined as oligopolies, but the vast majority of big corporations are not. That is the blend that works.
I'll start with an apology - by using the term "large corporations" rather than oligopolies, I sent this discussion off in an odd direction. Mea culpa. Although see my note at the end about how large corps become oligopolies.
Again, I am not going to comment on a summary without reading the book - the summary represents whatever that person took from the book with their own inherent bias. Without reading the book and seeing actual data, it is hard to evaluate the truth of the book or the truth of the summary.
Oligopolies in food production, medical domains, online sales, music distribution, wireless carriers, airlines, pharma, search engines, app stores, etc.... I can find you a bunch more if I take the time. Even locally this happens - we have seen that most local housing markets are now controlled by a very small number of builders and that has been a change even in the last 10 years.
Yes, some of these compete internationally and some don't. BUT their pricing and control internationally is almost completely different. Do you see some foreign company coming in to compete with Amazon or Walmart - nope. In food production - nope. In pharma, perhaps, but they sell things at the prices driven by the US pharma (radically higher than the same drugs sold overseas). So international competition is no guarantee at all that oligopolies don't exist in the US.
Sorry, "no one is forced" to sell on Amazon - ha. Talk to any small business that wants to sell online. They have no choice in practice. Amazon is so dominant (for various reasons that are definitely monopolistic). Selling through their own sites is almost impossible and they are in fact restricted for selling for less than they sell for on Amazon (how is that for monopoly power).
And as you saw in the inflation spike, a lot of large companies in oligopolies were able to raise their price and hold it there (partly hidden with other inflation) - would they be able to do that if there was free and fair competition?
"Company town" is the term I used to indicate that when most of the jobs in a domain are controlled by a very small set of companies - of course, if you want to work in that field, you work for one of those companies.
And actually, the moving of profits is very much US policy - it is built into how our tax policy works. There is nothing that prevents the US from stopping that practice (and it has tried occasionally to do that). It is basically fraud masquerading as international business.
Lastly, as I said, wages growing slower than productivity is a function of oligopolies, not large vs small. Sorry that I used the term originally as "large corporations" as a short hand for oligopolies.
In practice, in the current US economy, large corporations push towards oligopoly if they can (of course, they would make more money, so reasonable). And without any countervailing effort - whether antitrust or others, that is the pattern we have seen and it has definite negative effects on consumers and workers.
The analyses of the election results are baffling to me. So it is not social/racial 'identify', not classes because class structure is lacking, it could be educational attainment, maybe relative wealth, or age...? What I see is a nation with a huge area and diversity. The 2-party system may not adequately work to satisfy this diversity. Elections are very tight (near 50/50 splits) and no one seems satisfied. Where is the leader with the vision that can resonant across our diverse population and who can lead one of our entrenched parties?
I also crunched the data for my students 2 weeks ago, and Musa's analysis (that Noah linked to last week) is spot on. Your comment about education is too. Universities have become our class divide.
In 2000, there was no partisan difference between those who had 4 year degrees and those who had never been to college. In 2024, the college partisan gap was 20 points. And the shift was gradual. I suspect what's going on is that universities are instilling a postmodernist thought process into graduates (many of whom don't even realize it) that is totally foreign to the non-college sect. If you work on a laptop all day, "reality is a social construction" starts to make sense; to a roofer in the hot sun, not so much. "Trans women are women" is utterly nonsensical outside of a postmodernist frame and thus hogwash to the non-college class, but broadly accepted by university graduates as self-evident and beyond question.
It wouldn't be wrong to say these two groups have completely rival theologies, not in a Christian sense, but in a sense of "what is sacred?" or "what is good?" Every human society defines collective answers to these questions, and radically divergent answers produce the kind of zero-sum, politics-as-war that we've seen in recent cycles.
Perhaps today’s working class is defined by the degree in which they feel they have little control over their job. They must show up for work or face getting fired: “My manager said I either work Christmas Eve or else…”. Little or no control over compensation, duties, etc.
They identify as working “for the man”. They hold resentment.
I see a higher degree of solidarity among these characteristics compared to education status, income, white collar vs blue collar, etc.
The difference to me is they feel a sense of control over their work, they have agency. They do not consider their work a dead end job with no decent alternatives. By and large , they are not resentful of other people’s jobs.
It's a nice thought, but there are too many edge cases. A software engineer making $300k at Substack (or any other website) is going to be on call this Christmas if the site goes down, while a union electrician is going to be able to relax with their family.
I posited a list of working class traits elsewhere on this thread, but I really like your: "my manager said I work Christmas or else...". As Kenny says, it's not perfect and there are edge cases, but overall it's a great test.
The problem is that many high-income professionals feel the same way. They resent corporations, rich people and anyone who makes more money or has higher status than them.
The “thing” that has defined America for its immigrants is mobility. This is why millions crawl through infested jungles, disease, and danger to get here.
There are service jobs for those who don’t want to spend the time learning a trade, going to college, or starting a small business. For example, a job you can also get health insurance besides a paycheck and tips is working at Starbucks.
Many blue states went on a binge with minimum wages over something called a living wage. It has made teen work almost unaffordable. Of course, what Democrats don’t take into account is that we don’t want anybody to aspire to a minimum-wage job. We want them to climb the ladder of success until they reach their level of accomplishment.
Bernie is stuck in a 1960s world of communism. I mean, who goes to Moscow for their honeymoon? Bernie is not President because most Americans know that everyone can become a millionaire in America. There are no barriers to invention, luck, or perseverance.
By and large, barriers have come down. If you walk into any coastal hospital in America, it looks like the United Nations. People working there are of every race, creed, and background. Look at the people you see at LA or Newark Airports, and I defy you to tell me what country you are in.
Bernie is stuck in the British form of class warfare that Marx and Lenin envisioned. Trump doesn’t talk like a patrician, does he? Sure, granted, the children of the uber-wealthy who grew up going to expensive Eastern schools, played pickleball and golf at the country club, and went to an Ivy League school don’t know what it would be like to help at McDonald's and work the fryer. Granted, but that is not most Americans. That is a small slice.
Yesterday on Bloomberg Radio, they discussed a Wall St. Journal article on the relative benefit of being a Dermatologist. How are med school students headed that way? Avg. pay over $500,000. No weekend calls and a better work-life balance. Perhaps in Bernie’s world, $500k is uber-wealthy unless you live in SF, Boston, or the NY area. Many med school grads are the sons and daughters of immigrants. They are willing to put in the work.
The well-off are a mixture and not a fixed class of children of the wealthy. It is far more likely that the children of the rich won’t amount to much or simply be average.
I agree with you regarding class, it is a difference without a distinction. Identity politics isn’t working anymore due to the integration of our country and the massive amount of immigration that has occurred since 1964. POC consider themselves ordinary Americans with one exception.
I could argue that the only thing holding back African Americans is that they have been told they are discriminated against, can’t learn, can’t succeed. Caught in a cycle of poverty as a group, they have learned the wrong lessons. Poverty is their issue, not the amount of melanin in their skin.
>I could argue that the only thing holding back African Americans is that they have been told they are discriminated against, can’t learn, can’t succeed. Caught in a cycle of poverty as a group, they have learned the wrong lessons. Poverty is their issue, not the amount of melanin in their skin.<
You could, but you'd still be wrong. Black communities were ground zero for deindustrialization in the 1960s and 70s; all the pathologies associated with the modern white underclass (drug overdoses, single-parent families, high crime levels) first hit the black working class in the waning days of the New Deal era. Of course the policy response was different in both cases: blacks got the "bootstraps" mentality of Reaganomics while whites got Trumpist pandering and vague attempts at protectionism.
I don’t think we can discount the negative effect of Jim Crow, nor the excuses that the poor of all stripes have fallen into.
Education is the only way to take part in the American dream. Education takes two. It takes an educational system that works, but it also takes the student's participation.
Every day, my 6th grade language arts teacher fights with children who have no interest in learning. They mistakenly believe school time is for talking to your friends in class and that disturbing the class is their prerogative. It hell in her suburban classroom, I cannot imagine what it must be like in an urban setting.
<Education is the only way to take part in the American dream. Education takes two. It takes an educational system that works, but it also takes the student's participation.>
"Education" as a macroeconomic growth is a fool's errand that we've been chasing for the past 30-40 years. Sure, a college degree (or a vocational apprenticeship) is a good investment: but there's a limited supply of "decent jobs" for either category. As the supply of skilled workers and college graduates grows, their expected wages will decline. Eventually going into the trades will no longer guarantee economic security, while universities will have to ramp up grade inflation to avoid failing the large number of students who, for better or worse, just don't do well academically. We need to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those who are good at taking tests or who are lucky enough to get a lucrative apprenticeship. Because frankly those people are in the minority.
No, the social pathologies started in the 1960s, while industrialization did not start until 1973. And global competition did not really start until the 1980s.
American manufacturing was dominant in the 1960s and unemployment was very low.
I agree, but when I took my 15 year old to Five Guys to apply, she didn’t no shit about being an employee. Personally I am fine with the states doing the minimum wage.
Salina KS is a very different place than Westchester NY. To set the wages in such different places is inane.
Yes, a national minimum wage makes no sense. There is too much variation in the cost of living. Even within states, there sizable differences between urban metros and rural areas.
Its not surprising that class identity in the US is so weak America. It never developed a prominent socialist/social democrat party led by trade unions (e.g. Labour, SPD, etc.) in the first place.
Mid 20th century psephologist would beg to disagree give how class polarised the Swedish, Norwegian and British electorates were. Just because the manual workers vote enmass for a reformist socialist party that is okay with the institution of private property doesn't make them not class conscious.
Many a working class brit at the time would argue that some dead foreign tyrant doesn't get to define their class interest.
I don’t know what a “ Mid 20th century psephologist” is.
By the way, my comment was partly a joke as this was a hugely controversial debate within the Marxist movement.
I am referencing Lenin’s argument in his famous 1903 book “What is to be done?” where he argued that only a dedicated vanguard of revolutionaries could create a working consciousness and lead the revolution.
Lenin was proven correct in the sense that he was able to achieve power and overthrow capitalism, but it is not all clear that class consciousness was an important factor.
Not sure overthrowing the government of a agrarian state truly counts as overthrowing capitalism. I'd argue Russia was probably more capitalist under the NEP than it was under the Tsar or the provisional government.
I have a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy, and I taught university-level courses in Campaigns and Elections, and I have never heard the term.
The NEP was just a temporary political retreat from Communism. The economy was in a state of total collapse and famine after the Russian Civil War, so it was more of a subsistence economy than a capitalist economy.
Yes NEP was supposed to temporary (though artels were still played a prominent role in the soviet economy until the 1960s) but that doesn't make it any less capitalist.
I'm not sure that was true: weren't the Bolsheviks a splinter from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which explicitly modelled itself on Germany's SPD, but adapted of course to operate as an underground resistance to the Tsarist regime?
Well, sort of, the Russian Social Democratic Party was modeled on the German SPD, but the Bolsheviks basically kicked out the real Russian Social Democrats (the Mensheviks) from the party. Both sides were underground movements.
My comment was partly a joke. I am referencing Lenin’s argument in his famous 1903 book “What is to be done?” where he argued that only a dedicated vanguard of revolutionaries could create a working consciousness and lead the revolution.
Unions were initially demonized for being a "foreign" import from Europe, and then later for being closeted communists/revolutionaries (even though most were not). It was only in the 20th century that organized labor became associated with organized crime, and that was in part due to the fact that unions relied on mob violence to protect themselves from employer violence.
If you want to get a definition of working class, maybe you asked very much the wrong person? Because your description seems to come from someone who has never actually talked to a blue collar worker.
I live in a very red area, moved out here because I wanted to live in an area where keeping horses was feasible. Don’t have horses any more but I am still here. I have lived here for a good while. What I see with people out here who consider themselves working class:
Most are NOT in a union, by a large margin.
Many are self-employed or employed by very small businesses, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters, pest control, grading companies, landscape companies, fencing companies, mechanics, welders
Others are police or firemen
Most are loosely associated with some type of house of worship, men often more through their spouses than personally, and they are respectful of religion even if not devout
Income levels are not the determining factor in what class they perceive themselves. Working with their hands and having a small business are. Some are out and out wealthy.
They are very attached to their specific community with ties of friendship and family and are not interested in moving for more income
Their safety net tends to be family and community resources rather than public programs
They often have outdoors oriented interests and hobbies that are negatively impacted by density, including hunting, fishing, camping, small scale agriculture, the last often on land long time owned by their family
Finally, yes, they have a very definite feeling of class consciousness, but it’s not at all an academic definition of class. That class consciousness is reflected in the music they enjoy, the movies and TV they choose, the comedians they find funny, and, more on point, the politicians they elect.
Policies targeted at unions and green energy thus don’t benefit most of the people I know who consider themselves working class. That’s probably why they are not moving the needle.
FWIW.
Yes, but that is a description of a red area. There are a lot of "working class" or poorer people living in cities (probably as many or more than live in semi-rural America). And they have a very different view of the world than the one you describe.
But somehow I rarely see them discussed - mostly ignored. And a lot of them didn't show up to vote in 2024 - probably because they don't see either party really helping them.
If you go by opinion surveys, there is significant overlap of viewpoints, and many of those voted for Republicans this time.
I’m from Michigan, with a branch of family in Western Pennsylvania, and this is absolutely spot on.
I think the “roots to specific community” and the emphasis on finding security in deep relationships and local continuity really gets to the heart of why “Red Americans,” for lack of a better term, are so impervious to progressive policy proposals - they see them as violating and degrading the things that give them security, not helping.
The attachment to the outdoors is also a big thing that paradoxically makes it harder to do green projects. Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
Progressives might find this frustrating and difficult to understand, especially if they are from a place, like many coastal suburbs, which aren’t really “homes” is the same way - they are well resourced communities that professionals move to when the first kid hits kindergarten and leave when the last graduates high school. I have lived in suburban Fairfield County, Connecticut, for over a decade. This is a place people come to - immigrants, former New Yorkers, highly educated professionals from somewhere else - and *use*. Then they leave. My husband was born here. His parents are immigrants. He has no emotional attachment to it.
It’s so foreign to me as a Michigander. I physically long for home. I literally turn on football on Saturdays just to hear the sound of Michigan Stadium and maybe catch a shot of the Dexter Cider Mill after a commercial break. My parents live right down the street from the Mill.
That love for home just aches when you are from a place like that. If they put up windmills all over rural Washtenaw County I think a part of my heart would die.
It’s not logical, but I think it’s a dynamic progressives need to understand better to speak to people.
I have been throughout the world and had lived in Europe for sometime. The people there are very attached to their country side as well . However, there is very little resistance to clean energy structures. I have seen windmills everywhere. Vienna, Greek Islands, all over pastoral France and Italy, and mountains in Switzerland. Ditto for solar. I talked to Greek island goat farmer who was delighted to have solar and also a place for his animals to graze and shade during summer. It is better than having smelly ugly oil refineries all over the island. These people would unquestionably die for their land and their countries at the drop of a hat. They already have done so numerous times. But they also see the land as belonging to all not just them. That is not true in the states. With all their victim-hood washing and not being adequately catered to complains ,rural Americans rally look down to the rest of the country. Urban areas (where pet-eating immigrants live) are inferior. The energy industry and the pollution derived from it should concentrate there with the dirty ones not in our pure meadows, despite the fact that rural areas need a lot of energy themselves that needs to travel a greater distance to get there. Their modern outdoorsy lifestyle is mostly sustained by the revenue from their large cities, not the other way around, but if you hear them all hard earned money gets taxed to feed urban no-gooders. As far as patriotism goes they sound more localist than patriotic. The reason why they think this way is the main problem our country has to deal with not only in politics, but as a threat of it's future existence.
That is really not at all an accurate description of the rural areas I am familiar with. It sounds more like the type of stereotype you get when you are imagining people you don’t understand.
I am actually quite familiar with. But go ahead, play the misunderstood card. It is a staple on the menu. Next please tell us how we are fake Americans and out of touch.
Really? Have you lived in rural areas in the US? How exactly have you become familiar? How much time have you personally spent in rural areas, and how many rural residents do you know well?
I am not “playing misunderstood.” I am saying, plainly, that what you describe sounds like stereotypes rather than personal experience.
I have good friends and relatives living in rural areas. I visit often even though it isn't my permanent address. They are very nice. Their neighbors were always treating my kids with fresh eggs and honey. They would stop and fix my flat tire if I was stuck on the road. They know me. they like me, me and mine are kooky but good people to them, but then, any time we talked about their small farm subsidies and how they are partially funded by SNAP they countered with "Nah, their subsidies are a pittance and their taxes pay to feed all those illegals downstate in NYC."are they bad people? no. Would they personally take in and feed an illegal family should it show up hungry at their door? 99.99 % of the ones I know yes, absolutely.
However, they have this "real Americans" thing. When I ask who are the "fake Americans" they laugh and say I don't understand. Wherever I traveled I have not seen such a disconnect between the way people perceive their community vs the rest of their country. Is not two-sided. The people I know in Brooklyn they might be condescending and engaging in stereotyping when they talk about rural America , but they never deem them not-real Americans.
One other comment - re the “misunderstood card” - I attended a very good university, work (remote) in tech at a very good job, my spouse was born and grew up in Brooklyn and is the son of two immigrants, and the only one of my niblings still in school is at Harvard.
I really do think you are misunderstanding where I am coming from, based on your responses.
I have not personally seen any organized opposition to windmills or to small scale solar. What green energy opposition I have seen is to large scale solar farms, often hundreds of acres, which actually are pretty unsightly and often involve clearcutting of large fields and woods.
The concern about rapid expansion of large scale solar is coming from rapid expansion of electrical demand due to data centers and electrification of fossil fuel uses and the VERY large amount of land being discussed.
I have heard zero comments about pet eating immigrants from actual rural dwellers I have met in real life. Zero. That appears to be a local dispute in a small Ohio city, not a rural dispute, although it’s interesting that you conflate that small city with rural areas.
The problem with small scale solar or wind is that it limits the number of people who benefit from it. A large grid can create more energy and support larger areas more equitably. However I can see how it seems counter productive to cut down trees in order to build solar. What I've seen in Europe is windmills at regular intervals installed in farm land and mountain ridges. I've seen solar installed in rocky dry semi-arid areas in Southern Europe, and in some places helped retain soil and provide shade so the local shrubbery can survive longer the very hot summers there. I can see some dry ecosystems like in Arizona or Texas benefit from it.
As for the eating pets issue it was a lie repeated over and over by the Trump campaign nationwide. I have friends in rural upstate NY and it was all over, along with stories about how illegals can punch you and nothing happens to them. Illegals come over and squatter in abandoned homes and you can't take them out and a zillion of this kinds of hogwash comments.. The population where you live might be either more enlightened , or just doesn't like to talk politics in public.
That's all well and good, but none of these things are economic and, therefore, are not a description of a class in any meaningful sense. You're just describing some completely different thing.
As for the physically longing for Michigan, I'm sorry but that's ridiculous rhetoric for any American community. The longest any family has lived in any of these places (outside of New England maybe) is three or four generations. You are not from a small town in England where your family was inscribed in the doomsday book. You are a recent immigrant who has become complacent and lost the drive that brought your grandparents or great grandparents to Michigan in the first place. The way you honor their memory is by chasing the work to the next boom.
Class is actually primarily social, not economic.
Physical longing for the place you belong is not ridiculous. It’s a primary driving force for a LOT of people. Including me.
Your history is WAY off. My family has been in their part of Virginia for six generations in my lifetime, and were there for several generations before. They’re not recent migrants, and their culture is uniquely American, not that of their ancestral countries.
I have less than zero interest in chasing work to the next boom. I would gain nothing and lose what matters most to me.
I'm from MIchigan, still live here, and all of this is so true.
As far as the solar panels and wind farms go, I think if there were a push to put solar panels over urban freeways and wind farms in the middle of the Detroit river, not only would rural folks feel better about them but urban folks would get a taste of their aesthetic intrusion. Maybe we would all understand each other better.
(And the cider mill allusion is something non-midwesterners will never get, but it's such a deep, core memory. I just went the Franklin cider mill a couple of weeks ago and my entire childhood flooded back to me)
In China, many if not all cities require new commercial buildings to install solar panels on their roofs. Solar over parking lots is also becoming common. One of the problems in the US is that the electric market and grid management have no place for mid-size power suppliers. You can put panels on your home’s roof, and a utility can cover acres of good farmland with 200 MW of panels, but if you want to put 2 MW of panels on top of your strip mall, there’s no regulatory path for you to sell the excess power in the wholesale electric market. There are ideas for how to make that market work, but most grid operators would rather deal with a few big suppliers who cover up acres of farmland.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/qmt13o/in_south_korea_the_solar_panels_in_the_middle_of/
I would like the United States to do this.
I went to U of M (class of 1971), and I, too appreciate the reference to the cider mill. I have a friend who grew up in Dexter, and every now and then I'd take a spin out the Huron River Drive to the Delhi Bridge, just to celebrate the quaint countryside of the Midwest.
But I grew up in one of those "placeless" suburbs -- as it happens, on Long Island: we moved out there in 1959 from a 3-room apartment in Brooklyn, in this instance along with a lot of other New York Jews.
I hung a poster-sized portrait of Thomas Jefferson in my bedroom and grew my own vegetables (and, later, weed) in the backyard. And just like those folks from Dexter, I have fond memories of the Jericho Cider Mill.
That's show biz! ;-)
PS: I felt that all I needed was a cute long-haired boy with whom to share life on the open road, and we'd live happily ever after in my vision of Americana.
Now I'm 75, still alone -- lamenting to my cat: "Lucy, I don't think we're in Woodstock anymore."
Just a quick note here, completely off topic for the “class” conversation:
“ Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
I live in a red midwestern state and, while I’ve moved into town, I’m from a farm family. My state is in the top ten in the nation for the share of electricity produced by wind. Farmers like it because it’s extra cash and the windmills don’t disrupt their farms. Plus, farmers can always use stable cash given the erratic nature of agriculture, aesthetics be damned.
With century-and-a-half farms on both sides, there is very much a deep sense of connection to the land and a willingness to do whatever is needed to keep it. There are still traumatic memories from the huge bankruptcies in the 1980s, and my grandparents certainly remembered the farm crisis due to the depression. And after all, the windmills can always come down later ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It’s not even really all progressives putting up windmills. In 2022 (last time I checked the numbers) the top five wind energy producing states as a share of electricity were all red, likely because it’s easier to build in them. Different for solar, where CA is in first place, but three of the top five states in solar production are also red—again, likely because of different permitting and environmental review processes.
A large part of that geopolitical distribution is a matter of climate: wind out on the plains, and solar in the sun belt.
The way you feel about Michigan is the way I feel about New York City, my hometown, but if I express that, then I’m not a True American.
> The attachment to the outdoors is also a big thing that paradoxically makes it harder to do green projects. Urban progressives fill a meadow with windmills and solar panels and think of it in the abstract as “saving the planet.” But to the people who have lived near that meadow their entire lives it’s an eyesore that has “ruined our home.”
If the solar or wind farm wasn't built, the electricity demand would have to be fulfilled by gas, coal, hydro, or nuclear. Do people really prefer living next to those methods over wind/solar?
I guess I'm close enough to an urban progressive now, but I grew up in rural areas. I would've preferred a wind or solar farm coming to town over a fossil fuel plant any day of the week. I've just never really understood why people think renewables look worse than any other rural economic activity, but maybe I'm just weird like that.
When the community wants it, I am totally good with solar and wind. But community opposition is high enough that states like Michigan are now eliminating their right to oppose it.
I would be okay with nearby nuclear. We already have one not terribly far away (Lake Anna.)
Very well said and I agree.
"They are very attached to their specific community" - yes, this sense of "place" is something I have observed too, and find incomprehensible as a rootless liberal globalist :) I got out of my hometown as fast as I could, then one city for college, another for work, now in a suburban town for the schools for my kids, then we will likely retire to another city. The place you live is just real estate, to me. But to some of these people it's really their sense of community.
As an American (other than a Native American), we are all the descendants of rootless liberal globalists. It's why I didn't live in a small village in Ireland or Poland. Chasing economic opportunity to the next place *is* our great inheritance and tradition. It's the people who refuse to move out of dying towns that are betraying the American spirit.
well and there's the descendants of the, umm, involuntary immigrants. But yes I love this point.
And doesn't "involuntary migrants" include not just black slaves, but also (for example) Irish people fleeing from famine?
To me those were still people chasing opportunity. They traveled HERE deliberately because they saw it as their best choice.
I was one of the "rootless liberal globalists" you wrote about. However, now that I'm retired, I have moved back to Michigan where I grew up, as the "prodigal daughter."
Also,it used to be easier to move from one area to another in the US, or from the US to Europe (which I did in the 1970s.) . Noah and others have stated that people who lose their job can just move to where jobs are more plentiful. Now, that often would entail trying to sell a house in a depressed area such as the “rust belt” to buy/rent something in an area that’s booming. For example, my parents bought their house just outside of Detroit for $11,000 in 1952 and stayed there because of work. Its twin across the street sold for $11,000 in 2008. That amount wouldn’t even be enough for a down payment elsewhere.
I also suspect two-income families decrease geographical mobility. If I lose my job, the LAST thing we want to do is take a chance and move away from my wife's job! Intuitive and short-term correct, but perhaps not successful long-term unfortunately.
And with telecommuting and e commerce, moving is often not necessary nowadays.
The idea that economic migration is an American particular strikes me as very silly.
No, it’s really not.
Most people live within a VERY small distance from where they are born. Their community and family are a major part of who they are.
With modern telecommunications, there are very few towns that intrinsically need to die. It’s foolish to push people to move needlessly.
Agree, but how does that cash out in terms of what marginal tax rates ought to be, what skills and education should let you immigrate to the US, or how to reduce the vulnerability to imports of strategic goods from China?
Yes, this is my observation. Place is more important than class and it intersects with education.
I have a boardgame night I used to go to in a rural community in Colorado. The guys out there were religious or religion adjacent even if they didn't personally believe and worked with their hands or managed people who did.
I got pulled in through dating a girl that one of the guys at the house used to date who ended up working in tech after college and meeting me. So literally the church vs. university divide broke a bit through mutual dating and integrated us.
> They often have outdoors oriented interests and hobbies that are negatively impacted by density, including hunting, fishing, camping, small scale agriculture, the last often on land long time owned by their family
I grew up in rural areas, and seeing the forests and deserts of my childhood get built over by suburbia is the very reason I became "pro-density." While it's technically true that a subdivision is denser than a farm, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find a "pro-density" person who is in favor of expanding suburbia. Rather, pro-density people want places that are already built-upon to get denser, and a major reason for that is to lessen development pressure on rural areas. Urbanists and rural people want the same things.
Problem with extremes of density is the isolation of people from the natural world.
Not being able to see the stars, birds, frogs, have a garden - it’s not much of a life for a lot of people and it seems to me to really shortchange kids.
With telecommuting so easy, why are we moving people instead of data?
We must be thinking of very different things by the opposite of "extremes of density," because I strongly disagree. Suburbia is, for me, more isolating from the natural world than anything else, because its lawns and parking lots don't really resemble nature. With "extremes of density," less land being dedicated to housing and commerce for a given number of people leaves more land available for conservation, farms, and forestry. That means quicker and easier access for more people to truly natural spaces.
I'll agree with you about telecommuting, though. I had hoped that we would've seen more small towns turn into telecommuting hubs than what actually happened.
I don’t know which suburbs located where you are thinking of, but the ones I lived in growing up had zero parking lots and an abundance of trees, gardens, room to play outdoors, and quite a decent smattering of wildlife. Living in a very dense setting, pretty much by definition, removes all that from childhood and from daily encounters. Many of my best childhood memories would literally have been impossible. Being able to drive to green space occasionally is not the same. IMHO dense city life is a terrible way to live. And what I am thinking of is specifically Brooklyn, my husband’s childhood home. Personally I prefer rural or exurbs, but IMHO suburban is still better than very dense living, assuming you are not commuting. At least you can have a garden, birds, and private outdoor space to sit, entertain, and have your kids play.
The Weldon Cooper Center at UVA does analyses of domestic migration patterns. Essentially, people already here are migrating out of cities and into exurbs, as remote work becomes ubiquitous and broadband is almost universal via Starlink. Not only are exurbs growing, including around small towns located well outside city centers, but they have been the fastest growing segment for domestic migration. See https://www.coopercenter.org/research/remote-work-persists-migration-continues-rural-america
When people can live in less dense areas, they tend to prefer it, and it revitalizes smaller areas, with most preferring areas that are pretty, have desirable natural features and recreation, or that are within an hour or two of larger population centers.
Bu the urbanist asks: Who needs ducks in the country when you can watch hipsters and flaneurs doing the"walkable waddle" on "vibrant" sidewalks?
What they call "working class" seems what leftists will call "petite bourgeoisie".
Btw, controlling for location, "Most are loosely associated with some type of house of worship" is still true? In other words, in that place these manual workers and small businessmen are more religious than the local doctors and lawyers?
Plenty of local doctors and lawyers would fall in this. My doctor’s husband is a farmer. My vet literally owns a farm.
Loosely associated with a religious tradition is more describing “observant of holidays and respectful of religion” rather than conspicuously devout.
How much was the decline in private-sector unions a result of outsourcing destroying the huge monolithic employers of the past that were easy to unionize?
This is my take on the subject: I think that there is a working class, we just like to pretend they do not exist. It is best defined by:
30-64 years of age
High school grad but no 4-year college degree
Married
At least one full-time worker in the family
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-class-in-american-society
Moreover, this working class is the key voting constituency to win over. So far, Republicans are doing a much better job than Democrats.
The key to winning their vote is not Sanders-like class politics, but a focus on promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth and upward mobility. The party that does will dominate for the next generation:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-both-the-left-and-right-should
I think it includes a LOT of college graduates.
I think the importance of sense of place is a key factor.
FWIW.
Well said.
I think those policies are designed to pay off donors and please activists and virtue signalers. Very transactional.
We have a cottage in rural Michigan and yes, people there do think like that. There is genuine value in it, too, I would never denigrate it. However those same people are in a voting bloc with the folks who live in my suburb with none of those qualities at all (other than a devotion to the local schools).
Re the point that income (and wealth for that matter) is a continuous distribution - I think this is why the Occupy-era notion of "the 99%" never really took off. That's an insane way to divide up the population - there is no way in which people at the 1st and 98th percentiles of affluence have anything like the same material interests.
Yep, agreed.
Americans may not identify themselves as working class, but they are certainly willing to identify themselves as living paycheck to paycheck, with little job security and a great deal of economic fear. It is this level of economic insecurity that the Democratic Party has failed to address. Pandemic measures like child tax credits and childcare subsidies helped, but they went bye bye. Chip factories may get built but they probably won't want people left behind American job skills.
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/dems-can-win-by-selling-one-big-idea
https://kathleenweber.substack.com/p/vanished-into-thin-air-where-did
Lots of people who claim to live paycheck to paycheck actually have high incomes, they just don’t have the discipline to save or invest their earnings, and spend it on second mortgages and BMW car loans; they aren’t struggling financially.
Right, would also add house equity and 401ks... You might be liquid only on a paycheck to paycheck basis, but if something truly required it, many of them could come up with $100k+
Well, they could be struggling financially, but it would be self-imposed. many a year ago, the Houston newspaper did a story on a guy who was about to lose his income because Enron had collapsed. The guy had no money to pay his mortgage for the next month. He asked, “Do you think I'm going to lose the house?”
.
This is where Bernie and populist Dem policy in general shines. Raising the minimum wage, for example, pushes up wages for all of the quintiles just above it, immeasurably improving QOL for many tens of millions.
But the GOP is dead set against raising the minimum wage--despite their protestations of being the party of Joe sixpack--as is the Blue-Dog wing of the Dems. Only the Dem Progressive wing is for it, and they'll never have the votes.
How would you respond to arguments that raising the minimum wage would render large swathes of economic activity unviable (especially in red states, where firms are mostly in commoditized sectors exposed to fierce global competition) while failing to do much for blue-state workers as their wage increases would be swallowed up by rent hikes?
Doesn’t this assume that nothing else changes? We are told that the free market’s flexibility and intelligence in the face of change leads to superior results. Why is it suddenly powerless to work around a slightly higher wage floor?
The problem is that the free market's solution to a higher wage floor would likely be to close down and reopen in a lower-wage country.
Improving the EITC and making it more of a wage subsidy would help more. Even if it "works," why tax the employer of the low-wage worker and their customers instead of more broadly?
the issue with addressing those issues is that they are mostly fake. so when you 'address' them, nothing actually happens.
The government has never addressed the issue that the income of the 40th percentile American has been stagnant for decades. College educated folks have simply ignored these people. And now they're getting their revenge by voting for Trump. He may not do anything for them, but at least they get the chance to stick it to the man.
There is a continuum along the average tax rate spectrum. Reducing the deficit is good for everyone, but those with the highest consumption should pay more to reduce it.
And that’s why we need a VAT.
Did they not have a point in that the real enemy of ordinary people, are the oligarchs who are SO rich that they can bend the government to their will?
Partially, but the straight-up simplification of class politics into an oppressed-oppressor dichotomy is just so reductive as to be essentially false.
I find it particularly ironic, given their obsession with spectra elsewhere (gender, most obviously), that progressives decided to treat the one categorisation that really is a spectrum, where people move up and down the scale all the time, as though it is a rigid binary.
They should admittedly have stuck to the 0.1% or even just billionaires because a millionaire and a homeless man are about the same distance in wealth from a billionaire (most of whom are multi billionaires anyway)
This is why everyone hates some billionaire or other, be it Soros or Musk.
The marginal value of all that extra wealth that a billionaire has over a millionaire isn't very much in the broader scheme of things. The millionaire and the billionaire are closer to each other in the sense that both have more money than they could ever reasonably spend in a way that improves their own living standards. They are clearly more similar to each other than either of them is to the homeless guy.
Well, except being a millionaire by wealth these days might just mean having a nice suburban house and a 401k you've built up over decades. It's nowhere near passive income retirement territory.
The clear difference between a billionaire and a single-digit millionaire is POWER rather than living standards.
True. But living standards are the principal thing voters care about!
<Partially, but the straight-up simplification of class politics into an oppressed-oppressor dichotomy is just so reductive as to be essentially false.>
I'm curious how you came to this conclusion, since it's not really apparent from your broader statement. Social class is, in most characterizations, a vertically-arranged hierarchy, and I find it hard to believe that there aren't exploitative power relations in that kind of relationship.
Also could we please ditch the whole "oppressor-oppressed" label? Nietzsche had it right the first time when he coined the "master-slave" dialectic and I don't see why we should have to reinvent the wheel in descriptive terms.
Okay, to put it more bluntly, the folk at the bottom are oppressed, the folk at the top are oppressors, but there are a large bunch of people in the middle who don't really fit into either category. I'm one of them! I find it absurd that I, and a homeless person, should be lumped together in the category of "the 99%"; government policy should be focused on getting the homeless person into a home, and leaving me alone.
Isn't that just populism? Trump's shtick is that cultural elites are oppressing the masses, while Bernie was all about the rich oppressing the masses.
Also the "99%" slogan was exactly that: a slogan. It's a simplified model attempting to explain some of the dynamics of modern society (something I thought economists/political scientists would understand). It's not meant to be precise; if you want precision go read Das Kapital.
<government policy should be focused on getting the homeless person into a home, and leaving me alone.>
That strikes me as rather naive. Who's gonna get the government focused on helping homeless people? The homeless don't vote, and all the policies that would favor the homeless (affordable housing, involuntary hospitalization, etc.) are either costly to implement or run against some entrenched group's economic interest (homeowners, nonprofit NGOs, etc.). The whole idea of getting "the 99%" to band together is that there's strength in numbers.
The thing about banding the 99% together, though, is that it encourages a one-size-fits-all approach to state support that fails the people at the very bottom who need it most.
I don't care if helping these people is expensive, or goes against some group's vested interests. It's morally right and we should do it anyway. You judge a society by how it treats the most vulnerable.
Sort of. But I think Richard Reeves made a good case in The Dream Hoarders that the bigger divide is between the upper middle class (maybe the 80th-99th percentiles) and those both below and above. Because there is such low voter turnout overall (and particularly at the low end), this 20% of the population casts close to 40% of the votes, and because of campaign finance rules preventing billionaires from donating more, this segment of the population controls the vast majority of political donations.
Please note that we "elites" are in a separate catergory: We are the upper 9.9%, which is separate from the 1% and the lower 90%
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/?gift=fkpSmRscVlFKVQGx6d54XkHAXaF6Q1arGkTT7dkYsyE&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
I agree the Top 1% slogan was never based on reality.
I do, however, believe that there is a working class, we just like to pretend they do not exist. It is best defined by:
30-64 years of age
High school grad but no 4-year college degree
Married
At least one full-time worker in the family
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-class-in-american-society
This probably means that downscale college graduates are the only group with something resembling a traditional class consciousness. It’s the student loan forgiveness army. Probably the most active people on social media as well.
I am a therapist that spent the period from the Great Recession to Trump’s first election as a Career Counselor at a university in NYC. They hired mental health professionals to work in the career center as a kind of “front line” since so many students were coming to the center in genuine distress over their futures.
I had a sort of front row seat to the coming of age of the late millennials / early zoomers, along with the rise of the Great Awokening.
It was absolutely a case of not just Elite Overproduction, but Elite Overpromising, which made a lot of middle class American young people feel not just that they were downwardly mobile, but that they were being denied something that had been promised to them from birth.
And it was! I was born in 1980 - last of the Mohicans for Gen X. I distinctly remember the fall of 1987, when the first “Millennials” showed up in the school system. There were balloons and banners and hoopla, all declaring to these little 5 year olds, one of whom was my goober little brother, “Class of 2000 - You are going to Change the World!”
No one put up crap like that for our class when we came to kindergarten in 1985. It was “here’s an index card with your bus # and teacher’s name” pinned on the Osh Kosh overalls and off we went into the system. But in 1987 the inspiration posters went up, and the sports leagues and promises of future glory and the rest of it was not far behind.
When I worked in the career center I realized that what I was really doing was grief counseling. I watched 20 year olds come in the office in varying stages of “grief” - for the imaginary “World Changing” and amazing lives they were promised. There was a lot of denial at the nature of entry level and white collar work, lots of trying to negotiate with reality, lots of anger, etc. Some kids eventually reconciled with reality and accepted that the nature of their adult work and lives was not going to be quite as transformational as they had been promised it would be. Those are the ones that went on to become accountants and get married and live in Connecticut and are generally happy with life now.
But a lot young people from that time, especially young women, who in addition to the generic inspiration poster crap had “Girl Boss Power” shoved down their throats by their boomer mothers since birth, did not adjust to the reality that their lives would be pleasantly ordinary. Add in a shortage of marriageable, college educated guys? There is a reason specifically young, educated women got pissed off and started reacting histrionically to every political issue in the early 2010s.
Imagine you are a middle class American girl from a solid suburban home, born between 1982 and the early 90s. You’ve lived your life in rising, ever improving comfort. You came of age in a nation and probably a family whose 20th Century story is one of “coming up in the world.” You are told all your life how AMAZING you are, and what an apotheosis of your American family and feminism you will some day be, fully living the promise of Post-War America in the New Millennium.
And the New Millennium shows up, and you are 22 years old, finishing college in NYC. You have “done e everything right.” You listened to parents and teachers and counselors and followed the directions. And now that you are finishing college neither an exciting career nor a man wants you. Your adult life is full of degrading, go nowhere interviews and dates that seem to only turn into shitty jobs and temporary relationships at most.
Yeah, you’d be pissed and looking for explanations and someone to blame.
Hello, ideology.
.
I was born in 1966 so I am an aunt to many of the young women that you supposedly describing. None of them or their friends took any of the hoopla that you are describing seriously. The majority of them have finished college and have careers, and husbands, and children. They didn't even have to convert to their future husband's religion to get married, even though one had her husband convert to hers.You might say that my experience is anecdotal ,but so is yours. However you mirthful glee in describing loveless, carer-less single women is a bit telling.
I graduated at the nadir of the Great Recession. I never thought I was God’s gift to the job market - and I certainly never had girlboss dreams, what are you talking about? - but I did expect to be able to work. At something. Somewhere. I applied to every job in the mall twice. The grocery store couldn’t have me either. I had a degree from a prestigious school.
And no man wanted us, eh? What on earth are you talking about?
Love this! I was there in those overalls in the 80s too! We were raised in simple Reagan-ism, that we could work hard, keep our heads down, and make a good living - and that was good enough.
But I'll note - GenX seems to have leaned hardest into the cranky "blame someone" Trump narrative, so apparently not all went smoothly...
Great to hear from someone who saw it unfold on the front line. In addition to this sense of shared grievance, these are mostly liberal arts majors who are already fully exposed to the bleeding edge left wing ideologies, which makes them a very solid base for Dems. The problem is that they are also so off putting on cultural issues to everyone else that they may very well generate more backlash than enthusiasm on the net.
Yes, and what is sad is that all the adults who were telling them all these lies were saying it because it made them feel good. They all knew that it was not true. It is fine to be emotionally supporting, but you have to have Honesty along the way.
Also a big part is that our educational system focuses so much on academic knowledge, most of which will never be used as an adult, while ignoring critical life skills like personal finance, physical fitness, job skills, etc.
but like so many revolutionaries before them (French Revolution, Iranian Revolution, etc) they mistakenly imagine the proletariat shares their social views and goals. As we see with Trumpy populism, the actual working class has a LOT of cultural conservatives and some outright barbarians with no concern for civilization. So these young downscale liberals plot to overturn the elite order, not realizing that order is the most liberal regime in the world. Sad.
One thing that's important in this conversation is that "downscale college graduates" are genuine something of a new phenomenon given the massive growth in the share of the population that has college degrees (going from like 10% to closer to 45% among working age people). You can't have 45% of the population in the top 25% of the income distribution because that's not how math works, so it is simply an unavoidable fact that very many college graduates now are middle-income people.
Downscale college graduates are youths, who have not gotten their act together enough to join the professional class. Most of them do, but it takes longer with each generation.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-class-in-american-society
church vs. university as origin of values may be the biggest divide then (even if they're not actually disjoint). I think the data hints at this at least.
“ Whether you go to college makes a huge difference in your life — both in terms of future income and the kind of jobs available to you, and also in terms of health and other social outcomes.”
How do you think the correlation vs. causation breaks down on that? Presumably having the cognitive ability, consciousness, etc. to graduate from college would still manifest itself in terms of positive life outcomes, even if you didn’t actually go.
Yes.
Look how fast new immigrants who finally have a chance to succeed in a free, open system rocket up. My father-in-law from Portugal has a fourth grade education at most, but is a multimillionaire just from working smart and hard.
His sons both have graduate degrees. (They are also, like almost all first generation Portuguese-American young men, an entire foot taller than their father.)
However, in contrast, I think that Americans who are already here were aggressively cognitively sorted in the mass-college trends of the late 20th / early 21st century.
Prior to the 80s, a lot of smart people were in trades and white collar work without a degree. College wasn’t seen as mandatory for success.
But in the Reagan Era, even non-college educated Americas started pushing their kids towards college. If you were of average or above intelligence in the 80s, 90s, and 2000s you were expected to go to college. Period. Didn’t matter if your dad was a doctor or factory guy. So we started associating college educations with “smartness.”
Never mind that the actual education being received was being radically dumbed down to accommodate the new mass of students, and many of the students, in reality, were just receiving elaborate job credentialing with a patina of academics - basically trade school with some poorly taught and frequently skipped “core classes”.
It’s a mess that really needs both a structural and cultural overhaul. This system has not been good for society, for academia, or for young people.
I suspect defining working class is only hard for those who definitively are not. Someone who...
"...physically hurts at the end of each day because of their occupational labor"
"...job makes them physically sweat"
"...works in a non-climate controlled environment"
"...labor causes physical pain in something other than their fingers or wrists"
"...work schedule significantly fluctuates week to week under a manager's control"
"...wears a uniform to work"
"...can't wear the same clothes 2 days in a row because they're too dirty after day 1"
If you meet more than half of these tests (and there are certainly others) most people would see you as working class. It's not about how MUCH money you make but about HOW you make it. Plumbers and electricians and machinists have 6 digit incomes, but they're all working class. Edge cases like teachers or retail workers I would probably lump in since they're physically on their feet all day, but others might disagree.
Economics wants a rigid definition derived from an easily accessible metric (like income). That's going to be elusive in this case -- "working class" is kind of like Justice Stewart's pornography. But that won't stop economists (who lack Noah's nuance) from measuring something mostly irrelevant (like income) and using it to derive theories utterly divorced from reality. Homo economicus strikes again.
As Noah hints at, once you leave the income frame, in terms of social policy, there is a distinct class divide driven not directly by income but by degree level. University graduates are overwhelmingly more likely to have drunk at the postmodernist well, water which looks brackish to the working class.
The working class are those who put a significant amount of wear on their body doing their job functions over the course of a career. Nearly all these people enter retirement with some sort of nagging physical condition.
Yes. I like that. Someone else here said that "if your boss says you have to work Christmas or else..." you're probably working class. I like that one too.
Yours is particularly good because it captures class across a lifetime instead of at a single point, thus alleviating Noah's (accurate) comments about American economic mobility.
"f your boss says you have to work Christmas or else..." you're probably working class"
Or an associate at a "prestigious" law firm ...
This is my favorite, knowledge economy vs. blue collar work. There's a divide between "being reliant on your body" and "being reliant on your mind" to make a living.
Immigration as the dividing issue also makes sense. If you're a knowledge economy worker you're already in some sense competing with knowledge workers outside the country if your job can be outsourced (and you're probably happy having more Uber drivers, cheaper plumbers, etc.). If you're working with your hands why would you want other people here that are willing to do your job for less money?
So, “working class” = “blue collar,” for short? All those criteria you listed read as “blue collar “ to me.
Certainly the terms are treated as synonyms. But elementary school teacher isn't a blue-collar occupation, nor is home-health aide, but I personally would categorize the second as working class and likely the first as well, particularly if for a private school.
Blue collar likely captures about 80% of it though. (Although I doubt Noah wears a white collar when he's writing.)
This list would also include many surgeons! Also NFL players. But your point still stands.
I don’t necessarily disagree with you on it being how you make a living, but I think there are some simple demographic characteristics that help us make the cut.
The working class is best defined by:
30-64 years of age
High school grad but no 4-year college degree
Married
At least one full-time worker in the family
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/understanding-class-in-american-society
Moreover, this working class is the key voting constituency to win over. So far, Republicans are doing a much better job than Democrats.
The key to winning their vote is not Sanders-like class politics, but a focus on promoting long-term widely-shared economic growth and upward mobility. The party that does will dominate for the next generation:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-both-the-left-and-right-should
This is right but I often get in response to this that "we just need to educate people" which is not the right lesson here, especially if by that you mean schooling them.
We are talking about people that are often underprivileged when it comes to aptitude for higher education (it's extremely difficult to talk about this without being condescending, which is why opaque euphemisms like "working class" and "the people" are often used). But it needs to be understood. Otherwise you get the educated elite denigrating populism, punching down on the underprivileged class instead of trying to help them.
It's important to creating a society that is inclusive of the non academically educated. That has a path for a successful respected life for everyone.
We have spent 100 years increasingly the level of cognitive ability required to be economically successful. AI might finally work that in reverse, but it's too soon to tell. (It might also just become a tool for the smarter to further entrench their own advantage.)
The bell curve is real for essentially all human traits. It is the reason attempts to engineer equal outcomes always end in blood: there's a limit to how far you can raise the bottom end of the distribution (for intelligence or empathy or assertiveness or beauty for example) but no limit on how far you can bring down the top. I give my students the Vonnegut short story Harrison Bergeron to illustrate this. Anyone who hasn't read it: https://ia803002.us.archive.org/25/items/HarrisonBergeron/Harrison%20Bergeron.pdf
I agree completely. I think we need to shift from “just go to college” to rebuilding vocational education:
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/why-we-need-more-vocational-education
I hear this complaint on the left about politics as well. If only people were more educated, Trumpism wouldn't succeed. It's true that many of Trump's policy proposals are absurd, but if you think winning elections depends on a majority of the population understanding the effects of tariffs, good luck with that.
That’s a provocative argument, but for once, I am not convinced by something Noah has written. An anecdote from a clueless acquaintance and the fact that income distribution is monomodal is not quite sufficient for me.
Certain cities, due to density, force you to rub shoulders with the working class more than others. I live in New York, and when I think of the working class, I think of all the people I rub shoulders with all day long who work various jobs relatively low on wages and prestige - the guy who delivers my packages, the guy who drives the bus, the waiter at my restaurant, the nail salon workers, the mechanic, the security guard, the cashier, the construction worker, etc.
What makes the class divide real is that, despite rubbing shoulders with these people literally all day long every day, they live social, economic, and cultural lives *entirely different from mine* and all of my college educated, privileged friends. I will literally never see any of them at any social gathering I or my children attend. The class divide is real.
Is it that Noah is nit-picking on the label ‘working class’ which is being used as a stand-in for people that don’t work jobs that require a university degree? In effect more of an educational divide even if there are cases where degree holders end up working in non-degree requiring jobs.
I'm an interesting case study. Economically I'm now upper-class but my lifestyle is firmly blue-collar and my values don't fit into any class well. After graduating my career path meant I made a lower-middle-class income from internships and contract positions with months of unemployment in between (I never applied for assistance). I went to grad school to improve my opportunities afterwards and it worked - I got longer contracts, a middle-class salary, more generous benefits and I finally got my first full-time permanent semi-normal job at the age of 32. I even made my first adult friends there. But I got laid off after 2 years and I'm starting a contract project overseas with housing provided and a six-digit income. I'm still working with my hands outdoors (but with college-level knowledge and skills) and moving every 1-2 years and don't have any social opportunities or stability. Politically I've long resented the elite and professional class and their philosophical foundations (ever since grad school when I learned what people in social science really believe), but I'm just as anti-MAGA as them. You might call me a rationalist.
So what class am I? How do I improve my lot in life? The 2024 election upended every way I thought you persuade people and win elections. I agree, Noah, that class is not an objective concept in America and I also have no idea what the best framework is to understand American politics. Unfortunately, for my Vulcan mindset, it may be appealing to the politics of fantasy, as illustrated by Kurt Andersen.
And yet, this most recent election, having clearly been primarily a victory for aggrieved white people bound by identity markers like xenophobia, transphobia, homophobia, Christian nationalism, and aggressive and unapologetic stupidity, was, ipso facto, a victory for identity politics -- which you claim has failed. Sure, the idiots bound by these identity markers would deny that they were engaging in "identity politics," but it's precisely that denial that, ipso facto, allows them to be identified as idiots.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: Trump voters would happily sacrifice material well-being for the warm, fuzzy feeling they get knowing that, somewhere in Bumfuqistan, Ohio, a trans girl is being outed, humiliated and prevented from playing women's high school soccer. If that ain't "identity politics" at work, I don't know what is.
Noah has laid out in great detail in 3 posts that this is hogwash.
The groups that broke for Trump in 2024 (vs for Biden in 2020) were Latinos, Asians, and the young. White people did not appreciably change. Men shifted slightly toward Trump but so did women, thus destroying your misogyny argument.
However, as a conservative, I'm happy if you keep telling your friends that you lost because racist white men can't handle a black woman as President. Feel free to double down on the politics of racial and sexual grievance over and over.
Regarding, “Feel free to double down on the politics of racial and sexual grievance over and over.”
Oh, you sneaky dog,🐶 I see what you did there…
this is what drives people away. there are a great number of poor white people who just want to be included as people of struggle
Yeah, because large numbers of Trump voters are reading this blog . . . .
Newsflash: Tens of millions of poor and middle-income people of all "races" and ethnicities managed to figure out that Trump is a vile deranged POS whose first, and perhaps only, order of business will be to fuck them over -- materially -- in every imaginable way, and managed to realized that, whatever the failings of the Democratic Party and its candidate, it's the only party that, for nearly 100 years, has consistently sought, in myriad ways, to address their needs and desires as poor and working people.
That claim seems a little bizarre since Harris did *better* among white people than Biden did, and Trump did better among non-white people than he did last time. Or maybe I'm mis-reading you and you don't mean that the *bulk* of white people are aggrieved, but rather than the aggrieved minority of white people helped Trump to victory. But I haven't seen any data to back that.
That rant just earned Trump another 10 working-class votes!
Ok, an experiment: Would every reader of this blog who considers themselves a member of the (non-existent) working please raise your hands? And raise both hands if my 'rant' persuaded you to "vote" (retro-actively??) for Trump.
OK, then let me rephrase:
Rhetoric like that over the last 8 years created millions of new Trump voters of all classes. At some point, you are going to have to understand the effect such rhetoric has on other people. They do the opposite of what you want.
Oh, right. I'm sure the creation of all those new Trump voters had nothing whatsoever to do with stupid people being whipped into a deranged frenzy by 8 years of psychotic hysteria about Central Americans raping and pillaging their way across America, or drag queens making kids gay, or Haitians eating pets, or that one trans girl in Bumfuqistan destroying women's sports by being allowed to play girls' soccer.
Uh-huh. Yup. Nothing whatsoever.
LOL
That's about what I would have expected.
Noah is out of touch with the actual world. These people would benefit from Democrat policies. A good percentage of them already support Democrats. Why not try to engage them in a helping way? They just feel like Democrats only care about racial minorities and trans people and Republicans manipulate whatever degree of resentment that causes.
oh I guess you were responding to the other girl. Yeah, that doesn’t help, is what I said. I don’t understand why people are conservative at all. Kind of a weird thing to say, but true
By the traditional definition ("one who seeks to preserve the status quo") the most conservative party is now (weirdly) the Democrats. That's what happens when the revolutionaries end up winning and becoming the establishment: they go conservative. However, almost all of American politics is really postliberal.
The Left has been there for a while, asserting not Lockean procedural neutrality but the pursuit of righteous outcomes (as they define it.) In that sense, the Left is now as theological as the Christian Right used to be: defining "good" and willing to use power to make it happen.
This election firmly entrenched the Right there as well, as writers like Amari and Deneen and Dreher have helped rediscover the language of Edmund Burke from 300+ years ago. It's doubtful Trump can articulate this, but Vance doesn't hesitate to pursue "good" (by his definition) even at the expense of procedural neutrality.
You likely prefer the Left's definition to the Right's, but they're both doing the same thing. In that sense, our politicians are all Nietzschean ubermenschen now.
One thing is clear: Lockean liberalism is dead. Noah and Bari Weiss and David French are going to play Weekend at Bernie's with it for a few years, but no one under 30 cares. Politics is about to get more interesting (and consequential) than it's been for 100 years.
"More interesting" as in more chaotic, stupid, psychotic and nihilistic? Yeah, sure.
Fortunately, you and Jordan Peterson will be around to blame this all on Lockean liberals failing to fully reckon with the profound and timeless truths set forth in Genesis 2-3.
I agree with you that the source of Locke is Judeo-Christianity. One of my first civics lectures every year is that "all men are created equal" is nonsensical without "man made in the image of God".
But my society is actively running away from God, and I see no possible way to sustain Locke without Him. So even though I prefer a Judeo-Christian / Lockean world, I live in a Nietzschean one. Find me the Liberal-Christian party and I will support is wholeheartedly, but until then, I have to settle for voting against postmodernism.
"working class" is a misleading term in today's world. The real "class" issue is workers vs large oligopoly corporations. That is where the balance of power has shifted so strongly. And "workers" includes college educated and non college-educated, tech workers and hotel maids.
So many areas of the American economy are now controlled by a small set of companies - giving effective monopoly power (and monopsony power). This is where Khan's antitrust work matters and where unions matter, etc... And where Bernie Sanders is coming from as well.
That viewpoint does give the Dems a real ideology that can matter (IMO) - although I doubt they will embrace it - too tied to corporate money anymore.
But that just doesn’t sound right. Large oligopoly corporations do plenty of things to make the lives of the middle class and upper middle class easier. And it’s the upper middle class who control the school boards and zoning commissions and other things that hold the poor down - the corporations would love the poor to be better off so they could get more money from them.
I've had the chance to see a wide spectrum of companies, including a range from very big to very small, established to startup, and publicly owned, private equity owned, and family/founder owned.
By far, the worst working experiences I've seen are at smaller, family-owned businesses. It's not even close. And that distinction is true for everybody ranging from a C-level executive to a custodian or assembly worker on a factory floor. There are exceptions -- terrible big companies and amazing small businesses -- but the average is striking.
You are absolutely correct, and your personal experiences is supported by research:
That is why people want to work for big corporations, not matter how much they complain.
https://techratchet.com/2021/04/26/book-summary-big-is-beautiful-debunking-the-myth-of-small-business-by-atkinson-and-lind/
I think the tendency to lump tech workers and hotel maids into one class is the main reason we can't have a proper welfare state. Once you accept that someone on the upper end of the income distribution in one of the richest countries does not have a high enough standard of living, there's not enough to redistribute from.
I don't see any of it as a "class" - which is part of your point. It is a question of shared interests. Generally, neither party does a good job of representing the interests of workers rather than capital (the Dems did at one time - and Biden did some effective work, just horrible at promoting it).... The question is really one of whether the Democrats can put together a solid Narrative about being about labor these days instead of capital. Yes, different folks with different finances have some different interests, but most of them have experienced the power that large corporations have over them anymore (even tech workers these days).
Oddly, enough this is closer to the more classic meaning of "left" vs "right" than what we have today in America
The problem with this argument is that large corporations are far better employers than small businesses. Large corporations have higher wages, better benefits, more long-term stability and better career advancement.
That is why people want to work for them, not matter how much they complain.
https://techratchet.com/2021/04/26/book-summary-big-is-beautiful-debunking-the-myth-of-small-business-by-atkinson-and-lind/
OK, that was a long-winded comment I made - sigh - needed some dinner first ;-)
Basically my point isn't that large corporations are inherently bad - but that oligopolies are very bad and have a nasty effect on the "working class", basically on workers vs capital.
Now, in the current economy, there is a strong push in many industries (and has been for 40+ years) to consolidate, remove competition, and create oligopolies in many key areas of the economy. IMO, that is exactly what the Democrats need to tell the country is at the root of why workers haven't made it big while capital/corporations have.
You are welcome to believe that, but I guarantee you that this economic populist message is not going to resonate with the American working class. That type of messaging appeals to white college-educated liberals, who already vote Democratic. White college-educated liberals always think that they are going to appeal to the working class with that kind of message, but all they are doing is appealing to themselves.
Maybe it worked in the 1930s and 1940s, but not since.
The working class wants economic growth and to left alone.
Note that large corporations have a number of other effects on the "working class". The oligopoly has an effect on prices, Amazon's near monopoly has forced out a lot of small businesses and forced others to sell on Amazon with Amazon taking a big cut, etc. etc. Hospitals closed by hedge funds, doctors forced to sign on with big employers, etc..
So, yes, in the company town where there is one big employer - yep, that is the place to work - that is roughly what happens with oligopoly. And there is certainly evidence that has suppressed wages over time (I can't find the study right now -sorry). If large corporations were so great for workers, why have wages in those corporations risen more slowly than productivity gains?
I don't have a problem with the notion of a large company - just a giant problem with the squeezing out of competitors to reach heavy duty market consolidation. Which is the big story of the last 40+ years. (and the accompanying "enshittification" as Doctorow calls it).
So, yes, working for a large corporation can have benefits directly with indirect effects on others. It can also result in layoffs that are done specifically to jack up the stock price.
The majority of new jobs come from small businesses - frequently in the first years as they are getting established.
The effect on the "working class" isn't just on the immediate job benefits.
One last comment from the referenced article (I haven't read the book, so harder to respond) -
"economic policies, including taxation, regulation, and spending, are systemically biased in favor of small firms in most nations around the world" - definitely not true in the US - especially given that the large firms avoid taxation by moving "profits" to low tax countries.
And having worked in small companies and big companies - the notion the big ones are "more innovative" (on a per employee basis) is nonsense. Most big companies these days innovate by buying smaller companies.
There are several other things in that "review" that are quite dubious - but I won't comment further on that without reading the book.....
Can you name a single successful economy without large corporations (regardless of whether you deem them “oligopolies?”)
I can name hundreds of impoverished societies without large corporations?
As I said, perhaps poorly, it isn't the existence of large corporations, rather the creation of oligopolies without free and fair competition. Even Adam Smith commented on this long ago.
Now, perhaps in our economic system, large corporations are always driven to try to create oligopolies and IF there is no counterbalance antitrust activity, they succeed at that - and we all pay a price for the lack of competition that comes with that.
The link is not a review. It is a summary, and it blows away the argument that small businesses are better than big businesses.
The main difference between a small corporation and a small one is decades of success. And no one is forced to work for a big corporations or sell on Amazon. They choose to do so because it benefits them.
Big corporations are the foundation of a successful economy because they thrive in international markets. They are also the foundation for many thriving small businesses because they inject wealth into the region via exports. The small businesses that have a big positive impact on society do so by growing into big corporations.
Very few big corporations are actually oligopolies because they must compete internationally. International markets are very competitive. Nations with big corporations are much wealthier than nations without big corporations.
Whether wages are growing faster than productivity is not relevant to big vs small.
I never said anything about company town.
“ large firms avoid taxation by moving "profits" to low tax countries” has nothing to do with US policy.
The US economy is a blend of hundreds of large corporations, tens of thousands of small local businesses, and a handful of gazelles that grow fast. Maybe a few can be defined as oligopolies, but the vast majority of big corporations are not. That is the blend that works.
I'll start with an apology - by using the term "large corporations" rather than oligopolies, I sent this discussion off in an odd direction. Mea culpa. Although see my note at the end about how large corps become oligopolies.
Again, I am not going to comment on a summary without reading the book - the summary represents whatever that person took from the book with their own inherent bias. Without reading the book and seeing actual data, it is hard to evaluate the truth of the book or the truth of the summary.
Oligopolies in food production, medical domains, online sales, music distribution, wireless carriers, airlines, pharma, search engines, app stores, etc.... I can find you a bunch more if I take the time. Even locally this happens - we have seen that most local housing markets are now controlled by a very small number of builders and that has been a change even in the last 10 years.
Yes, some of these compete internationally and some don't. BUT their pricing and control internationally is almost completely different. Do you see some foreign company coming in to compete with Amazon or Walmart - nope. In food production - nope. In pharma, perhaps, but they sell things at the prices driven by the US pharma (radically higher than the same drugs sold overseas). So international competition is no guarantee at all that oligopolies don't exist in the US.
Sorry, "no one is forced" to sell on Amazon - ha. Talk to any small business that wants to sell online. They have no choice in practice. Amazon is so dominant (for various reasons that are definitely monopolistic). Selling through their own sites is almost impossible and they are in fact restricted for selling for less than they sell for on Amazon (how is that for monopoly power).
And as you saw in the inflation spike, a lot of large companies in oligopolies were able to raise their price and hold it there (partly hidden with other inflation) - would they be able to do that if there was free and fair competition?
"Company town" is the term I used to indicate that when most of the jobs in a domain are controlled by a very small set of companies - of course, if you want to work in that field, you work for one of those companies.
And actually, the moving of profits is very much US policy - it is built into how our tax policy works. There is nothing that prevents the US from stopping that practice (and it has tried occasionally to do that). It is basically fraud masquerading as international business.
Lastly, as I said, wages growing slower than productivity is a function of oligopolies, not large vs small. Sorry that I used the term originally as "large corporations" as a short hand for oligopolies.
In practice, in the current US economy, large corporations push towards oligopoly if they can (of course, they would make more money, so reasonable). And without any countervailing effort - whether antitrust or others, that is the pattern we have seen and it has definite negative effects on consumers and workers.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/10/17/economists-identify-an-unseen-force-holding-back-affordable-housing/
https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/14/the-price-is-wright/
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2021/jul/14/food-monopoly-meals-profits-data-investigation
The analyses of the election results are baffling to me. So it is not social/racial 'identify', not classes because class structure is lacking, it could be educational attainment, maybe relative wealth, or age...? What I see is a nation with a huge area and diversity. The 2-party system may not adequately work to satisfy this diversity. Elections are very tight (near 50/50 splits) and no one seems satisfied. Where is the leader with the vision that can resonant across our diverse population and who can lead one of our entrenched parties?
I also crunched the data for my students 2 weeks ago, and Musa's analysis (that Noah linked to last week) is spot on. Your comment about education is too. Universities have become our class divide.
In 2000, there was no partisan difference between those who had 4 year degrees and those who had never been to college. In 2024, the college partisan gap was 20 points. And the shift was gradual. I suspect what's going on is that universities are instilling a postmodernist thought process into graduates (many of whom don't even realize it) that is totally foreign to the non-college sect. If you work on a laptop all day, "reality is a social construction" starts to make sense; to a roofer in the hot sun, not so much. "Trans women are women" is utterly nonsensical outside of a postmodernist frame and thus hogwash to the non-college class, but broadly accepted by university graduates as self-evident and beyond question.
It wouldn't be wrong to say these two groups have completely rival theologies, not in a Christian sense, but in a sense of "what is sacred?" or "what is good?" Every human society defines collective answers to these questions, and radically divergent answers produce the kind of zero-sum, politics-as-war that we've seen in recent cycles.
Perhaps today’s working class is defined by the degree in which they feel they have little control over their job. They must show up for work or face getting fired: “My manager said I either work Christmas Eve or else…”. Little or no control over compensation, duties, etc.
They identify as working “for the man”. They hold resentment.
I see a higher degree of solidarity among these characteristics compared to education status, income, white collar vs blue collar, etc.
Where does an emergency room physician or a general or the president fit in on this? They all have to show up on Christmas Eve if something happens.
The difference to me is they feel a sense of control over their work, they have agency. They do not consider their work a dead end job with no decent alternatives. By and large , they are not resentful of other people’s jobs.
Prestige? The general or president have lots of prestige; the McDonald’s worker ordered to work a Christmas shift doesn’t.
It's a nice thought, but there are too many edge cases. A software engineer making $300k at Substack (or any other website) is going to be on call this Christmas if the site goes down, while a union electrician is going to be able to relax with their family.
I posited a list of working class traits elsewhere on this thread, but I really like your: "my manager said I work Christmas or else...". As Kenny says, it's not perfect and there are edge cases, but overall it's a great test.
The problem is that many high-income professionals feel the same way. They resent corporations, rich people and anyone who makes more money or has higher status than them.
Which is another reason why, as I've said before, to see the divide as what it was. in school: the Tough Kids versus the Smart Kids.
The “thing” that has defined America for its immigrants is mobility. This is why millions crawl through infested jungles, disease, and danger to get here.
There are service jobs for those who don’t want to spend the time learning a trade, going to college, or starting a small business. For example, a job you can also get health insurance besides a paycheck and tips is working at Starbucks.
Many blue states went on a binge with minimum wages over something called a living wage. It has made teen work almost unaffordable. Of course, what Democrats don’t take into account is that we don’t want anybody to aspire to a minimum-wage job. We want them to climb the ladder of success until they reach their level of accomplishment.
Bernie is stuck in a 1960s world of communism. I mean, who goes to Moscow for their honeymoon? Bernie is not President because most Americans know that everyone can become a millionaire in America. There are no barriers to invention, luck, or perseverance.
By and large, barriers have come down. If you walk into any coastal hospital in America, it looks like the United Nations. People working there are of every race, creed, and background. Look at the people you see at LA or Newark Airports, and I defy you to tell me what country you are in.
Bernie is stuck in the British form of class warfare that Marx and Lenin envisioned. Trump doesn’t talk like a patrician, does he? Sure, granted, the children of the uber-wealthy who grew up going to expensive Eastern schools, played pickleball and golf at the country club, and went to an Ivy League school don’t know what it would be like to help at McDonald's and work the fryer. Granted, but that is not most Americans. That is a small slice.
Yesterday on Bloomberg Radio, they discussed a Wall St. Journal article on the relative benefit of being a Dermatologist. How are med school students headed that way? Avg. pay over $500,000. No weekend calls and a better work-life balance. Perhaps in Bernie’s world, $500k is uber-wealthy unless you live in SF, Boston, or the NY area. Many med school grads are the sons and daughters of immigrants. They are willing to put in the work.
The well-off are a mixture and not a fixed class of children of the wealthy. It is far more likely that the children of the rich won’t amount to much or simply be average.
I agree with you regarding class, it is a difference without a distinction. Identity politics isn’t working anymore due to the integration of our country and the massive amount of immigration that has occurred since 1964. POC consider themselves ordinary Americans with one exception.
I could argue that the only thing holding back African Americans is that they have been told they are discriminated against, can’t learn, can’t succeed. Caught in a cycle of poverty as a group, they have learned the wrong lessons. Poverty is their issue, not the amount of melanin in their skin.
Indeed, they are now the descendants of the Jim Crown era and the Great Society. Our poverty programs are sustaining rather than eliminating poverty. Our failure is giving them crappy schools in crappy places and not educating them. https://www.illinoispolicy.org/press-releases/back-to-school-report-card-cps-failing-students-families/
Chicago is essentially a minority-run city, and it is failing their children. Whitey is not keeping anyone down in Chicago.
>I could argue that the only thing holding back African Americans is that they have been told they are discriminated against, can’t learn, can’t succeed. Caught in a cycle of poverty as a group, they have learned the wrong lessons. Poverty is their issue, not the amount of melanin in their skin.<
You could, but you'd still be wrong. Black communities were ground zero for deindustrialization in the 1960s and 70s; all the pathologies associated with the modern white underclass (drug overdoses, single-parent families, high crime levels) first hit the black working class in the waning days of the New Deal era. Of course the policy response was different in both cases: blacks got the "bootstraps" mentality of Reaganomics while whites got Trumpist pandering and vague attempts at protectionism.
I don’t think we can discount the negative effect of Jim Crow, nor the excuses that the poor of all stripes have fallen into.
Education is the only way to take part in the American dream. Education takes two. It takes an educational system that works, but it also takes the student's participation.
Every day, my 6th grade language arts teacher fights with children who have no interest in learning. They mistakenly believe school time is for talking to your friends in class and that disturbing the class is their prerogative. It hell in her suburban classroom, I cannot imagine what it must be like in an urban setting.
<Education is the only way to take part in the American dream. Education takes two. It takes an educational system that works, but it also takes the student's participation.>
"Education" as a macroeconomic growth is a fool's errand that we've been chasing for the past 30-40 years. Sure, a college degree (or a vocational apprenticeship) is a good investment: but there's a limited supply of "decent jobs" for either category. As the supply of skilled workers and college graduates grows, their expected wages will decline. Eventually going into the trades will no longer guarantee economic security, while universities will have to ramp up grade inflation to avoid failing the large number of students who, for better or worse, just don't do well academically. We need to build an economy that works for everyone, not just those who are good at taking tests or who are lucky enough to get a lucrative apprenticeship. Because frankly those people are in the minority.
No, the social pathologies started in the 1960s, while industrialization did not start until 1973. And global competition did not really start until the 1980s.
American manufacturing was dominant in the 1960s and unemployment was very low.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/oh-lbj-what-have-you-done-to-my-party
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/upward-mobility-in-the-usa-1947-1965
It is important to note that social welfare was very underdeveloped from 1947-73. That was when bootstraps dominated, not the 1980s.
was the Great Society and the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s that created the social pathologies. They just hit blacks earlier and harder.
I think to some extent the fact that minimum wage hasn't been pegged to inflation matters.
I agree, but when I took my 15 year old to Five Guys to apply, she didn’t no shit about being an employee. Personally I am fine with the states doing the minimum wage.
Salina KS is a very different place than Westchester NY. To set the wages in such different places is inane.
Yes, a national minimum wage makes no sense. There is too much variation in the cost of living. Even within states, there sizable differences between urban metros and rural areas.
Its not surprising that class identity in the US is so weak America. It never developed a prominent socialist/social democrat party led by trade unions (e.g. Labour, SPD, etc.) in the first place.
As Lenin said, Social Democratic parties and unions do not create class consciousness.
Mid 20th century psephologist would beg to disagree give how class polarised the Swedish, Norwegian and British electorates were. Just because the manual workers vote enmass for a reformist socialist party that is okay with the institution of private property doesn't make them not class conscious.
Many a working class brit at the time would argue that some dead foreign tyrant doesn't get to define their class interest.
I don’t know what a “ Mid 20th century psephologist” is.
By the way, my comment was partly a joke as this was a hugely controversial debate within the Marxist movement.
I am referencing Lenin’s argument in his famous 1903 book “What is to be done?” where he argued that only a dedicated vanguard of revolutionaries could create a working consciousness and lead the revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F
Lenin was proven correct in the sense that he was able to achieve power and overthrow capitalism, but it is not all clear that class consciousness was an important factor.
“Class consciousness” is a very slippery concept.
Psephology is the study of elections and voting.
Not sure overthrowing the government of a agrarian state truly counts as overthrowing capitalism. I'd argue Russia was probably more capitalist under the NEP than it was under the Tsar or the provisional government.
Well, Lenin clearly thought that Tsarist Russia and the provisional government were “capitalist” and the Soviet Union was not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Development_of_Capitalism_in_Russia
Lenin still clearly succeeded in overthrowing the government and achieving power. And he established War Communism:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_communism
Did you just make that term up?
I have a PhD in Political Science and Public Policy, and I taught university-level courses in Campaigns and Elections, and I have never heard the term.
The NEP was just a temporary political retreat from Communism. The economy was in a state of total collapse and famine after the Russian Civil War, so it was more of a subsistence economy than a capitalist economy.
Stalinism was the next step regardless.
That's very strange. It has its own Wikipedia page and is a term often used by election nerds in Britain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psephology
Yes NEP was supposed to temporary (though artels were still played a prominent role in the soviet economy until the 1960s) but that doesn't make it any less capitalist.
I'm not sure that was true: weren't the Bolsheviks a splinter from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, which explicitly modelled itself on Germany's SPD, but adapted of course to operate as an underground resistance to the Tsarist regime?
Well, sort of, the Russian Social Democratic Party was modeled on the German SPD, but the Bolsheviks basically kicked out the real Russian Social Democrats (the Mensheviks) from the party. Both sides were underground movements.
My comment was partly a joke. I am referencing Lenin’s argument in his famous 1903 book “What is to be done?” where he argued that only a dedicated vanguard of revolutionaries could create a working consciousness and lead the revolution.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_to_Be_Done%3F
I wonder if it was also down to US labor unions being especially easy to demonize because many of them had links to organized crime?
Unions were initially demonized for being a "foreign" import from Europe, and then later for being closeted communists/revolutionaries (even though most were not). It was only in the 20th century that organized labor became associated with organized crime, and that was in part due to the fact that unions relied on mob violence to protect themselves from employer violence.