"The integrating institutions that once pushed us together across class lines — church, the military, schools in mixed-income neighborhoods — have waned in importance."
Noah, I'm quite a bit older than you, 63, if I might give two huge integrating institutions in the 1960's and 70's; entertainment and news. In the 1970's almost everyone had a local newspaper subscription. You needed one well before then internet just to know the sports news and movie schedule, and local sales and coupons. But even if you had no interest in the news, you could not help but be exposed to reality based news just picking up the newspaper from your porch and seeing the headlines -- and it was pretty much all reality based. Almost no one got their news from Orwellian Republican sources. Whether you had The Detroit News, The Arizona Daily Register, or The Los Angeles Times, it was all reality based. We all shared the same basic facts, and that was also true whether you watched anchors Joe Glover and Robbie Timmons on ABC channel 7 in Detroit, or Walter Kronkite at the national CBS Evening News.
And we all watched the same three networks for TV shows. Almost Everyone watched the Fonz and Archie Bunker. Even music had just a very limited number of radio stations. People of an age group really shared that. It was not fractured into a hundred different boutique musics.
I never thought I'd read the name "Robbie Timmons" in a Noah comment section. She was my neighbor way back in the day, and of course a local celebrity.
I agree the newspapers and television shows had an integrative effect. Back then everybody read them and you could have a calm, non-confrontational discussion about the news of the day with everyone from the mailman to the local college professor.
Also, in Detroit, it was blue collar and white collar folks. I'm not sure if that's better in any sense than referring to folks as working class versus whatever the upper societal echelons are called now. Working class folks lived over in England, and were an entirely different thing.
Families were also class integrated. My dad and mom both had graduate degrees while only one of my grandparents even graduated from high school. My grandparents were definitely blue collar and my parents were white collar. We were far from the only family in the neighborhood that had that situation going on. My best friends dad was a lawyer, and his father had been a plumber with 12 kids. My first boyfriend's mom was the mayor of our city, and his grandfather had been an illiterate sewer worker. Those leaps took one generation. Not sure how often that stuff happens today.
My family was also "class integrated", or changing up and down per generation. My great grandmother was old southern aristocracy, married a mining engineer, upper class in 1900, but when her husband died around 1913 she bought some spring fed desert land in south Texas and when the well went salty, she was downward class shifting. Catarina is a ghost town now, but my grandmother was living there and married a highway construction foreman and moved into the somewhat middle class... her daughter finished high school, married an engineer and was middle-middle class raising me in a comparative "golden age" setting where I had college choices -- didn't take over silicon valley though -- still middle class at 68.
Today, with all the internet advertising working hard to farm the customers it's harder to save money. Here are some analogies for the situation:
internet advertiser company : customer
Aphid : garden plant
3 card monte dealer : Man or woman on 2nd Ave
Ponzi schemer : small investor
And very soon, we will have plenty of job loss for those without schooling from factories full of robots instead of union member workers.
Aren't most factories full of robots today? If you want the 1970's movie Koyaanisqatsi, it has scenes from TV assembly plants and car factory floors, and none of that stuff has been done manually for decades.
There is high probability of job losses in non-exportable product factories soon -- the products that are too heavy and low cost to ship around the world. Examples would be: factory farm, meat processing, food prep, yard work, house building.
Richard, I think you're describing something many people genuinely miss. I worked in traditional media myself, so I experienced firsthand how it gradually lost its place at the center of public attention—squeezed from one side by the rise of social media, and from the other by the expanding influence of state power.
But I also wonder whether nostalgia can become a filter. Every era has its own beauty and its own suffering. The age of centralized media gave many people a shared narrative, yet it also coexisted with a world in which much of humanity still struggled simply to get by, many voices remained invisible, and countless conflicts never entered that shared narrative at all.
Today I live in a foreign city with a large digital-nomad community. The more people I meet, the more strongly I realize how similar the human condition can be. Whether someone is American, Iranian, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, or from a small and often overlooked country like Cape Verde—which much of the world may notice only when its football team nearly defeats Argentina—we often end up describing remarkably similar frustrations.
We usually interpret those frustrations through the language of class or nation. But I increasingly suspect that the deeper pattern is something else: people everywhere are navigating different versions of the same power pyramid, and those structures often produce the same Kafkaesque experience regardless of where we were born or where we stand in the social hierarchy.
Perhaps that is why I find it increasingly difficult to think of any of us primarily as members of one class or one country. We are also participants in the same civilization. Rather than idealizing the past, perhaps we should face the difficulties of the present and search for their roots at that larger scale.
"It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur — like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows. "
-- Alfred North Whitehead, 1927, partially quoted by Eric Kleptone
Or as people say these days, "the only way out is through." We're not going to be able to restore a supposed golden age by looking backwards. We have some unique challenges -- automation of a lot of manufacturing jobs and processes, AI based on wholesale theft of the world's intellectual property which is nevertheless both sometimes useful and at the same time very buggy.
The Whitehead quote resonates with me. Perhaps every major civilizational advance destabilizes the institutions built for an earlier stage. What seems less inevitable is not the transition itself, but how power reorganizes during it. Sometimes societies adapt. Sometimes they persecute. That difference may depend less on the technology than on the structures of power that emerge around it.
My concern isn't that AI is becoming more powerful. It's that power is becoming more powerful through AI.
Indeed. It looks to me that AI really does take intellectual property from huge numbers of people and repackage it in a way that greatly reduces the value of the IP to the original authors. The AI folks claim this is "fair use," but any reading of copyright law tells you one of the main criteria for use to qualify as 'fair' is not reducing the value of the IP to the originator.
And the way that AI is structured right now, the benefit indeed is going to the very wealthiest members of society. It's a very ugly situation.
That’s precisely why I keep coming back to the power question. The concentration of wealth may be one consequence, but I suspect it is downstream from something deeper: the concentration of power.
We often treat wealth and power as if they occupy the same position in society, but they are not quite symmetrical. Wealth usually needs power to secure and protect its position. Power, on the other hand, can often survive without wealth. In the presence of concentrated power, even great fortunes can prove surprisingly fragile.
I suspect one reason we overlook this is that wealth is visible and easy to measure, while power is often opaque and difficult to quantify. Yet it is frequently power that determines how wealth is created, distributed, protected, or taken away.
That’s also why AI concerns me less as a technology than as a force multiplier. If the benefits of AI are already flowing disproportionately toward those who hold the most wealth, the deeper question is whether they are also flowing toward those who hold the most power. History suggests that when new technologies become deeply intertwined with existing power structures, the consequences can extend far beyond economics.
What puzzles me is that we routinely measure societies through indicators of wealth inequality, yet rarely ask how unequal power itself has become. Perhaps that is because wealth is easier to count. But if power ultimately determines who writes the rules, who enforces them, and who can change them, then power inequality may have an even greater impact on human lives than wealth inequality. I wonder why we spend so much time measuring one, and so little time measuring the other.
Another apologist for the Fake News media. If Haitian illegals are eating law-abiding American cats and dogs, then the citizens of this country have a right to know the truth.
But seriously, as a democracy, we are in an acute need of a new "Truth in Media" law, that at the very least raises the bar for any media content calling itself "news." Opinion is one thing--and protected by the 1st Amendment. But actual journalistic standards need to apply to actual news. Multiple corroborative sources, timely retractions, and all that other Woodward and Bernstein stuff.
I think we can easily see the downside of a Truth-in-Media Amendment by noting that our current president and his DOJ treat mainstream news as fake and subject to government constraint, while celebrating Newsmax, etc.
We are not going to be able to legislate our way out of the pit we've fallen into. (I don't mean to suggest I have an alternative to offer.) The loss of shared social institutions (thinking here of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and studies flowing from that analysis) is not something for which there is an obvious antidote. We (by which I suppose I mean the ~95% of Americans younger than I) are going to have to spot opportunities offered in a world transformed by the technology that destroyed the old one.
I agree that technology transformed the old institutions, but I'm not sure technology itself is the deepest explanation.
I worked in traditional media myself, so I watched newspapers and broadcast media lose their central position. Yet I don't feel nostalgic about that decline. Like the recording industry before it, centralized media belonged to a particular stage of technological evolution. It was never destined to remain the permanent center of public attention.
Social media amplified disagreement, but I don't think it created those disagreements. More often, it revealed conflicts that had long existed beneath centralized narratives.
AI seems to be producing a similar double effect. Throughout history, major technological transitions have repeatedly expanded humanity's capacity for large-scale cooperation while also amplifying division and conflict. Neither outcome is new.
What worries me most isn't the technology itself, but what societies do during these transitions. Periods of rapid technological and social change have often ended in wars, revolutions, or large-scale persecution. Preventing that, rather than restoring older institutions, seems to me the more urgent challenge.
And that danger is global. It doesn't threaten only Americans, whether citizens, documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, or people whose status is suddenly called into question. It reaches ordinary people in every corner of the world: an asylum seeker waiting at the U.S. border, a mother in Gaza, a fisherman in Haiti, a shopkeeper in Tel Aviv, a nurse in Havana, a farmer in Ukraine, an Ivy League graduate, a Silicon Valley AI researcher. Different nations, different classes, different paychecks, the same vulnerability.
Persecution rarely stays confined to the group it first targets. It spreads until no one, anywhere, is truly exempt.
That's the question I keep coming back to, and the one I hope more of us will take seriously: not how to restore the institutions of the last century, but how to keep this transition from becoming another chapter in humanity's long history of persecution.
This is completely correct. I’d add to it that talk radio (especially Rush Limbaugh) really deserves a shout out for helping drive the fracturing. It was the point where some of my relatives began listening less to the mainstream news.
I read both left and right leaning news sources, and one of the most fascinating things is that the bias often isn’t primarily driven by biased writing, but by story selection. I first noticed it with the Benghazi story, which was wall to wall on right leaning news versus one and done in left leaning news. That was what caused me to consciously consume center left and center right news.
Anyway, it’s fascinating how our society has run full speed to remove all of our unifying cultural influences while simultaneously replacing them with nothing unifying. How could that ever go wrong?
All that wall-to-wall Benghazi coverage for 2+ years by FOX News is probably a key factor in why that godless Communist, Hillary Clinton, lost to the divinely anointed, very stable genius Donald Trump in '16.
Reality based with regard to the basic facts, not necessarily the interpretation of those facts, but with rare exception those facts were not fabricated, and there was professional care in getting them right.
Point taken!... but then again, there's still the question of what facts are considered relevant (or even worth reporting), and how the "relevant" questions are framed.
In THAT regard, the "gatekeepers" have a job to do, and they know who's signing their checks.
In the old days, the entire system was impenetrable (which is not to say that what we have now is any better, or that our "truths" are any truer). You were either in or out, "professional" or not. There was no equivalent to Substack. ;-)
Great article; i found myself perfectly described. I think it is (past) time for Democrats to stop grouping people by class, just like Republicans have rejected (if somewhat hypocritically) grouping people by race. Democrats should be campaigning on their namesake: democracy — their view of the purpose and basis of government. That is legitimate, classless, raceless, and foundational for our country. It means our focus should be on teaching, explaining, and promoting those ideas, and the voters will follow. The DNC should be the marketing agency for democracy.
Sadly, focusing on preserving democracy is what HASN’T worked for Biden and Harris - though I wish it had. Democrats should focus on making people’s lives materially better (yes, affordability) and stop talking about identity and race. This should unite all potential Democrats and independents. Imagine if your housing costs were 25% less? Your health costs 25% less?
Exactly! Put "preserving Democracy" on the back burner. Along with critiquing the ruling GOP's love of racism, misogyny and homophobia.
It's the economy; and the GOP's mismanagement thereof. We need the boring--but competent--party back in power before the boneheads running the country make poor everyone not named Trump.
As an Indian- American, with a very thick Indian accent ( a veritable challenge, if you are an attorney at law in the state of Iowa). I do not care about racism at all. Please do not fight my battles if somebody offends me as an Officer of the Court and member of the bar in the state of Minnesota and Iowa in good standing I can stand for myself. Take care of the economy, that is something that I am helpless at preserving.
"Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits…"
In the interest of full disclosure, the government benefits described are $60,000 a year in disability compensation from Platner's 4 tours of combat duty.
I'd like to know how he is working full time, campaigning for the senate, and still finding time for a little fun SA on the side all while being too disabled to work.
Very common among military vets because VA benefits can be extremely generous. That’s how you end up with deadbeats like Platner mooching off of society.
It's interesting, you describe a situation similar to mine. Your grandparents pulled themselves into solid middle-classdom, but YOUR folks still had to wait for careers and savings to blossom before it happened to them. My experience was perhaps an even more drastic example of this.
Both of my grandfathers were tenured professors at the same university. One of them was a civil engineer who designed several bridges across TN, consulted for DARPA on guided weapons, and even had a part in Skylab iirc. I dunno exactly how much money he had, but he retired at 55 and has been spending lavishly the last 30 years (dozens of cars). My other grandfather leveraged some real estate stuff to invest in the Reagan recovery, and then again rode the dot com bubble. He likely had 10s of millions when he died.
Despite this, growing up, we were of fairly meager means. Food came from a can or a box, except the one time a month I got to choose between Burger King or Pizza Hut. When I was around 11-12 my dad's career had blossomed enough that we finally ascended to middle class proper, if on the austere side still. You would barely know our previous generation were so loaded excepting for the lavish gifts at xmas time.
I wonder if this was a superior system. I don't want to valorize struggle and maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems like the failson rate went up drastically as society moved away from this previous model to the one we have now where middle-class or rich parents pay their kids way pretty much completely at least through college, if not further. I would never advocate for a parent to let their kid go hungry, obviously bail them out if shit goes sideways, but maybe there's something crucial about a default state of learning to marshal your own resources and build a life a d we've lost that with this new norm where parental support for young adults is a given.
What you are describing seems poor today but was most definitely “middle class” back then, though maybe not “comfortable”. Most of the people I knew lived like this.
I agree that there is much to be said for making it on your own and realizing that luxuries aren’t necessary for fun nor for love nor for family nor for meaning.
Real estate is the biggest problem today and the prior generation with real estate wealth feels they must use it to help the younger generation. Same with education expenses and sometimes healthcare.
When it comes to food and clothing and basic essentials, these are relatively cheaper (as a percent of income) than they were back then.
Health care is fixable with obvious insurance reforms -- a public option, Medicare for all or just bigger O'care subsidies.
Housing needs more ... housing; since I've been a kid, I've seen the population odometer roll over twice, to 200M and then to 300M.
I have no idea what educational expenses even are these days; although list prices at private universities are out of control, you can get an excellent education at a public university, and I have no idea how many people pay list anywhere, for that matter.
Ironically the sectors most linked to government subsidies have had the highest inflation, so one needs to be cautious about government intervention.
Stop inflating home prices via handouts to homeowners like mortgage deductions and property tax deductions.
There is nothing wrong with renting - the problem is the cost of renting or owning relative to incomes.Streamlining the permitting process (and many of the other “abundance” ideas NS has covered here ) are worth a try.
The problem with healthcare is the costs of hospitals and their incentives (to pad costs, add admin and add physical plant)- who and how we pay matters much less than getting overhead costs down. Academia has a similar issue.
Local hospitals and their employees and unions and universities and their admin and academics are major sources of support for the Dems- there will never be cost cutting nor an undermining of the current model under a Dem regime.. Obamacare strengthened hospital monopolies and undercut competition, limiting the ability for insurers to negotiate on price. As far as Repubs go, I haven’t seen any ideas or changes / except taxing endowments of the wealthiest colleges, which is wise.
Solvable, yes, but I’m not hopeful our current parties and pols are the ones to solve it. More completion (and AI) might be a catalyst.
On housing the problem is supply, full stop. We need to allow more construction on the metro areas with economic growth. It seems like we are making progress on this front, albeit slowly.
On healthcare costs - not the full solution - but one idea that seems to work in other countries is a clearer delineation between market-based goods and those that are insurance/government provided. We can see this with things like the costs of elective procedures, OTC medicine and veterinary practice, even dental to certain extent. If we can leverage the power of markets to operate, we can drive down costs and accessibility. We are starting to go down that route with telehealths and big corporate clinics that operate more outside of the broader insurance system. For non-critical care we should have a free market (regulate the safety aspect of it, not the pricing side of things) and then just provide coverage on the more catastrophic side of things. This does interfere a bit with incentivising preventative care, but even then there are plenty of thing to try, one of them increasingly being providing FSA/HSA funds to be used on whatever the customer wants, or requiring certain numbers of checkups to maintain pricing discounts (like good driver discounts with auto). Regardless of how subsidized we make the acute/life-threatening side of the equation, better opening up the market on the other side should help with plenty of the market dynamics.
There are obvious problems with renting -- homeowners invest much more in their own properties than in rentals, where they could be forced to leave.
The problems in healthcare are probably mostly due to hospital chain mergers combined with medical associations limiting the number of doctors produced each year, to maintain higher salaries.
Your statement about Democrats never trying to limit healthcare costs is pretty much evidence-free. The only folks who are likely to work against monopolistic behavior on the part of doctors or hospitals are going to be Democrats, not free market Republicans.
Hospitals are the biggest driver of healthcare cost inflation and the biggest share of total costs and the Dems focus on….pharma? Which is 15 pct of costs.
Obamacare deliberately strengthened hospital monopolies and pricing power and eliminated competition. Actually outlawed it (from MD-owned private clinics) in some cases.
Have you heard of the SEIU?
Substandard city hospitals are huge employers. And doesn’t everyone love that what used to be your local doctors office is now hospital-run and charges “facility fees” which alone are 2x what a doctors visit there cost pre-Obamacare,
Feel free to go educate yourself on the subject, or just comfort yourself with the “evidence free” mantra….and have a lollipop.
Hospital chains buying up local doctors' offices is precisely the type of monopolistic behavior I was arguing against, so we don't disagree there.
Banning (really, locking them out of Medicare and Medicaid) MD-owned hospitals was done to avoid the conflict of interest where doctors would send the best insured people to hospitals they own a financial interest in.
Can't really argue about the focus on drug costs, but I still don't see any chance of Republicans pushing back against high hospital costs.
The inflation of the 70’s followed by the low rates of the latter 80’s generated lots of real estate wealth.
I think my parents bought their house for $40k in 1970 and by 1985-6 it was worth $400k in a NY suburb. 10x.
In the last 40 years it has about doubled - last sold in 2023 for $780k
Of course we thought a 2500 sq ft house for a family of 6 was a mansion back then (small bedrooms, small windows,), and it was. Today not so much. School district still good and safe in that town and anyone buying it today is much better off relative to anyone in 1985
Of course, $40k in the SP500 back in 1970 would look much better. In many states and towns real estate has underpermrd inflation (and well underperformed markets) over the last 30-40 years
Issue is people want to live on the peninsula or Boston burbs where houses are very expensive z. Also people don’t want to live in small dark houses, but if we are now families of 3 or 4 instead of families of 6 then 2000 sq ft is ample.
Prob is you can’t buy a 2000 sq ft house for 1 or 1.5x one salary like you could in 1970.
A lot of that damage happened in the 70’s and 80’s though
So since 1990s it is up 6x over 30-35 years. Close to 6 percent price inflation since then, well ahead of wages though lagging stock prices. Probably a desirable area in terms of jobs, though?
Asset price inflation has been mostly the government policy since 2008, of course.
Great piece. Fundamentally nobody seems to want to understand this delineation of class. I complain about the impact of being low class/caste often, but nobody gets it due to my present income being “ok”. What they don’t understand is that the potential for low caste/low class students that didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford is very low, and after we hit some natural peak as I feel like I have the most rational thing to do is exit the gene pool.
Sadly, there’s no hope for people of my class stature whatsoever.
Anybody who looks down on you because you didn’t have the connections, wealth and scores to get into Stanford or Harvard is a fool.
Did your school teachers go to Stanford? Your nurses? Your attorney? Local business people? Even your doctors more likely went to state school as did most corporate CEOs.
Build a good life- family, friends, religion, books, enjoy the outdoors. Decades ago people didn’t have fancy cars, big houses or take foreign vacations and yet we enjoyed life and expanded the gene pool. The hamster wheel of elite production (and even more so, maintenance of elite status) is a stressful and often empty place. Career isn’t everything - more often a means to an end.
We should all try not to get caught up in all the aspirational “personal branding” that displays real (or faux) wealth.
This long predates Instagram. I remember watching 70’s/80’s sitcoms where the supposed working class characters had nicer apartments than I had ever seen.
Far cry from “The Honeymooners” or even “I Love Lucy” (who were rich).
I do wish there were pols who focused on American high school grads or community college students and forced or encouraged/incented companies to get involved in training, technical certification, apprenticeships. We should not leave these kids dangling.
I had hoped Trump would do something like this (for every H1B there should be 5x Americans in training or whatever), but no.
The Dems won’t do it because the unions don’t like apprenticeships or interns or training unless they can control it and skim from it- and high school grads aren’t their base.
Anyway, I see it. I have a kid embarrassed to take a non-elite job because his friends have elite jobs and feels life is less meaningful if he can’t spend like them (and he certainly can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley or Manhattan suburbs).
I have other relatives who are not embarrassed by their non-elite status and are enjoying life but who are more envious of the rich and get angry that the game is rigged. They told their kids from a young age they would never go to Harvard (untrue - one of them could have if he encouraged them academically, but he’s going to Clemson which is awesome).
Anyway there is a lot of stress and angst out there but if I take away the stuff that is excessively self-conscious (worried about what others think) and the stuff that is external (outward displays of wealth and spending power) are our lives really more stressful than the middle class of yore who had no savings, an old car, a small house and maybe a one week vacation a year somewhere close by? We’ve placed, or misplaced heavy expectations on ourselves.
It is shocking how much the right degree from the right school opens up doors. Not necessarily because it teaches you relevant things. Or even because it connects you to the "right people". It's just allows you to pass various implicit/explicit filters that have been put in place for various professional/social roles.
Speaking from personal before/after experience of getting a masters degree from a name-brand university.
What they don’t understand is that the potential for low caste/low class students that didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford is very low
"
BS.
The house I was born in, literally didn't have electricity or running water. Later bean burritos was by far the most saying we ever ate. Because it was cheap.
I went into the army and got in trouble there for having more fun than the law allows.
Then I turned it all around, got my degree at a UC, my CPA, and later MBA. And now doing just fine.
If you work hard and make good choices, you can still have a fine life.
You don't need to go to one of those ivy league schools
I'm sorry, but you definitely don't need to get into Harvard or Stanford to move into the middle class. I know far more people who went to various State U's who've done well in computer software, hardware and systems engineering than those who went to any Ivy, even throwing in MIT and Stanford into that bucket.
I never said middle class, I’m middle class today. But I’m not in the same caste or class as anybody that got into or went to Harvard or Stanford or MIT or Yale
You wrote "there's no hope for people of my class stature whatsoever" compared to someone who went to MIT, Stanford, Yale or Harvard.
This is nonsense. My wife's brother went to Harvard, and their grandparents were an immigrant junkman, and an immigrant who died young and left a wife who spoke no English and couldn't work. I went to MIT and my mother was the daughter of a dry good salesman, and my father came here from Turkey speaking no English and with $100 in his pocket. My oldest went to Yale Law.
There *is* a relatively small social class who send their kids off to Ivy feeder prep schools and expect that their kids will get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Trust me, these are not people to envy or emulate.
Sounds like I’m far behind you and have no hope of catching up because I have no potential then. You’re falling into the same trap as Noah mentioned- over indexing in the past.
Ultimately people that get into elite schools are so far superior in every way to people like me that I can’t even begin to understand them much less be in the same social strata. I’m like an ant looking up at a human
I went to a state U. The typical grad in my class worked and currently works at Cisco. The typical MIT or Yale grad is making millions at Anthropic or “just” is a staff engineer at Facebook making $800k. Just completely different worlds.
First, I hate the term working class, as if those professors you mention don't work, and often 50-100 hours per week. White collar professionals usually work very hard, if I had to guess, at least as many hours as blue collar, if not many more. Very insulting and misleading term. The middle manager who puts in an often stressful 50 hours per week is not living a life of lazy leisure.
And, yes, even though I have an MBA from Noah's alma mater, the University of Michigan, I can list some blue collar bonafides too, newspaper delivery boy, pizza Maker at Checker BBQ, Oak Park, Michigan, as a skinny 15 year old, Ace Hardware tool clerk, and shoveling snow in the freezing Detroit winters of the 1970's. Personally, I enjoyed all of those jobs.
I just commented on this above; it's only recently that I've seen the term "working class" bandied about so much. When I was growing up it was white collar and blue collar which delineated the type of job you had, and probably said a lot about social class, too.
There is another shift though - career vs non-career. The blue collar worker of prior generations probably was employee for longer stretches of time by the same employer. They might work their way up a bit. But the "service economy" of switching between gig work, short term retail, restaurant, and fulfillment center job is not a career. This is one reason the "trades" get promoted - it is blue collar but also a career. Regardless of the degree/non-degree divide the career/non-career divide is increasingly strong. The socialized upswing is actually underpinned by a big group of degree-holding non-career folks.
I wonder if much of the problem is English not having a trabalhador/operário distinction like Portuguese and other Romance languages ("trabalhador" could depend of the context, but usually means "person who works for a living"; "operário" is "manual worker with th exception of servants")
"Manual labo(u)rer" is also closer in meaning, if we want to include factory workers and exclude office workers.
The Marxian notion of the working class was a contrast to capitalists and landlords -- it includes anyone who must work for pay rather than live off rents or profits, so it would include, for instance, a physician whose salary is in the top 5% of the population. (My father, a surgeon, likes to joke that he qualifies as a manual laborer because he can't work without his hands, but obviously he's not what we mean when we speak of "manual laborers" or the "working class." I could exclude him with a term that specifies modest income and social status, but it would be unfamiliar and cumbersome.)
A manual laborer is one who can be replaced by a robot (soon including surgeons) whereas an information worker is one who can be replaced by an AI agent.
It's useful for certain kinds of analysis whether a person's income depends on their own labor or someone else's -- e.g. if there's a new labor-displacing technology, it's bad for the people whose labor it displaces but not for their employers who use the technology.
What complicates this is that there are many different specialties of labor whose wages and working conditions are different, and that many people earn some mix of "labor" and "rent or capital" incomes -- so instead of the binary categories, maybe you need to ask what kind of labor someone does, what their labor income is, what their non-labor income is, etc.
Or simplify it again into something like the categories familiar to most Americans, where you're grouped into one of a few classes based on your opportunities, occupational category, resultant lifestyle, etc.
Exactly! Most of us are (or should be) a mixture of working and rentier income, but thumbs have been placed on the scales between working income and rentier income. Check out Better Markets for more details
Doesn't it make more sense to say that "working and rentier" are two classes of *income* rather than two classes of people in society? If you want to categorize people, your analysis is still complicated by different types of labor, how much of each type of income people have, what their lifestyle is like, their potential, their family background etc. "Income from your own labor" and "income not from your own labor" are useful ways to categorize income (I've seen it in economics classrooms to model labor supply), but they answer a different question than "does Evan Mackay belong to the same segment of society as a Ford assembly line worker?"
This isn't a particularly useful distinction. First, everyone who's retired is a 'rentier.' Second, most rentiers got there by saving money from working (note I said 'most' not 'the wealthiest'). A class distinction with 100% class mobility isn't interesting.
I can understand that basic distinction, but it ignores the real differences of a PMC family that works and has a comfortable life with a family that works hard but is always behind on bills, can’t afford vacations, and knows that they can’t send kids to college to have a chance at a better life.
I would disagree on not being able to afford to send their children to college for a better life. Even today, there is enough college aid that it can be done by anyone without that much difficulty. At the very least you could join the military, and then go with your military benefits. That is not an excuse for not going to college.
But that’s the reverse sentiment to the article. I would put most workers, intellectual or blue collar or whatever, into the working class category. That’s what Noah is denying though.
Yes-it's the transfer of existing wealth and purchasing power to the top over the past 50 years that has impoverished a majority of Americans by now. This occurred through regulatory capture. Examination of the New Deal reforms and their erosion is in order to clarify the analysis.
There are two highly disturbing thoughts in this essay
One, that anybody who is educated in America would believe Socialism is a viable economic model. A model that has killed millions, led to shortages and a sclerotic system where only party elites benefit.
Two, that a college education separated people from each other.
As for number two let’s blame a college system that has promoted radicals who want to fundamentally change America.
America and its systems has raise the economic health of Americans and people all around the world.
Has capitalism left some behind, of course but no more than any other system of economics. That educated elites have never read a book about deep flaws of Marx and Engels is depressing.
"One, that anybody who is educated in America would believe Socialism is a viable economic model."
Given how many American educators are socialists, and given that the US has never experienced socialist economy in practice (and by that I mean actual collective ownership of means of production, not just European-style social democracy behind which US socialists love to hide), I am not surprised at all. There is just not enough visceral knowledge of all the queues and empty shelves that inevitably came with it, from Berlin to Vladivostok.
Immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua are probably the only American voting blocs that are a) numerous enough, b) experienced enough to push back. The question is how many of them vote Democrat.
Central/Eastern Europeans just aren't a force in US politics.
You certainly would never win any seat in Southern Florida espousing fealty to socialism. They have seen the ugly face of it. Yes, the generous social welfare systems in Europe do not mean that they are socialist countries. They are, in fact, capitalist or, perhaps more bluntly, state capitalist. They are also one other thing: they are heavily taxed. This may be why their economies have fallen so far behind the US.
They are nowhere near state capitalist either. In fact the EU prohibits state aid. They are capitalist countries with social welfare. The communist countries were state capitalist - it was a term devised to condemn them by other more puritan communists.
On the other hand the people who disclaim communism or socialism as a filed ideology tend to put China in the capitalist camp, at least in regard to its economy, but it does have large state involvement. And is fairly successful.
Our language itself has been corrupted. Terms like "socialism" and "capitalism" are meaningless absent a detailed definition of what the speaker intends. Advertising (pace Lippman) culture has driven us to the "meme", where communication has become fishing for an emotive trigger noticed by the maximum number of people, who attribute the meaning to a myriad of dissimilar personal experiences. We must clean up our language!
The idea of future earning potential, of long term cumulative income Is very important - and in America, much more so than in Europe, people are - at least up until today - very optimistic (and unrealistic) about how they and their family will do long term. Because that is how it has been for generations in this country. Working people, earning a lower class income now, want to vote for a party that will support their families growth upwards, not make them more comfortable today. They want to vote for a candidate who understands this, who has shown that they apprecate the situation of the hard working optimist. They want support for their dreams. They would like some help now of course, but not if it comes at the expense of their future imagined life.
The so-called "Reagan Revolution" started America down this road, rewarding the rentier class above all working people. The capital gains tax v. income tax was the beginning.
To be honest this whole debate is an American usage (and misunderstanding in my view) of class. When the term working class was invented there was a large and rich idle class which, in Britain and Europe, didn’t work and looked down on work. Nothing really similar applied in the US. Bertie Wooster etc.
The middle class were not the people in the middle of the income level, but the top 5-10% or so. Obviously not rich but comfortable and capable of employing servants, having some land. However they were clearly not upper class.
The working class were and are the class that works for someone else, and have to work to continue to enjoy their standard of living.
It’s pretty odd to see well paid workers as not working class, they are subject to the same relationships to their employers as anybody who is employed. They can be laid off as easily as anybody else, with some cushioning from savings which. (Anticipating a rebuttal - Managers who own more stock than wages fall out of this category because of their compensation being in the stock)
The supposed rich who consider themselves “middle class” are absolutely right, by the 19thC definition of top 5-10%.
The term super rich has always annoyed me, it needs normalisation. Once you redefine a billionaire as rich then a millionaire isn’t rich.
The term has no practical meaning if you put a doctor making $500K in the same bucket as a McDonalds worker. I don't really care about the definition of class in 1800s Europe because it is 2026 and I am not in Europe. And once you define a millionaire as not rich you have lost the plot.
> The term has no practical meaning if you put a doctor making $500K in the same bucket as a McDonalds worker. I
The doctor would be self employed in the US. So that is not the same category as the working class. They were middle class in 19C Britain as well. As I said.
As for the 19th C jibe, what has changed? If you work for a capitalist then you are in the same class as anybody who would lose his status, maybe house and lifestyle if fired.
It’s a relationship comparative to other economic relationships to property, like being a renter. Income and education doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the rental classes and it doesn’t mean you aren’t part of the working class.
The kind of people who rebel against this generally have no problem calling themselves workers. It’s just weird.
Yes-there are only 2 classes: working and rentier. The 1985 book which summarized the ideas animating Maggie Thatcher's reforms was "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit": https://archive.org/details/englishculturede0000wien
What is the point of making these classifications anyway? Most people have never met a billionaire ( I actually met Elon Musk once, but I was richer than him at that point ) but here are some famous ones, see if you think they belong in the same class: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Larry Page, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, Beyoncé, Rupert Murdoch, Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, Mohammed Bin Salman, King Charles, Rhianna, Masayoshi Son, Warren Buffet, Laurene Jobs, Peter Jackson, Vladimir Putin.
Dad worked shifts until a chemical plant explosion disabled him. At 14 on 1967, I became a HS janitor. Worked us off of vital food stamps. Put myself thru the best university ranked in the world in Cambridge. Obviously not Harvard.
I was the 1st person in my 250 years of American lineage to get a college degree.
Grew businesses for BigCorp and others over a billion dollars. Sold a company. Founded a company.
Yet I don't see or value class. I value work. Integrity.
I've lectured with Heisenberg. Dined with Jack Welch. Got my Eagle from Chuck Yeager.
I delivered Domino's Pizza last year as a bridge to financial retirement..Love the teamwork and love the customers.
I suspect that fertility decline is connected to folks Fear of the Future.
I grew up crawling under desks for of Hydrogen bombs. I suspect young folks fear the future more now.
Your post made me think of Engels visiting America in 1888 and being thoroughly depressed at the lack of proper class-consciousness. How rude of American workers not to fit more neatly into Marxist ideology! He found many fathers for this "failure": American prosperity resulting in complacent workers; racial divisions preventing class unity; a two-party system that was stacked against new organizations like the socialists, etc. Curiously, Engels found American socialists to be overly dogmatic and urged them to adopt a more practical, hands-on approach that business-minded Americans would favor instead of beating workers over the head with copies of Das Kapital. Today's DSA influencer class would actually benefit from that lesson.
There is also the annual wringing of the hands within the Democratic Party about why the party keeps failing to attract the working class vote. There was a Post article recently on this about how the Dems identified people who rose up from humble circumstances and yet weren't quite hitting the right notes with that target audience (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/09/can-working-class-roots-help-democrats-win-back-working-class-voters/). Some of it has to do with the candidates having risen out of the working class and so no longer coming off as being a current member, while others just lacked the proper vibes. Speaking of which, our politics seem very vibes-based. Maybe because we're a new country where different cultural backgrounds are thrown together, we have to make a lot of snap judgments about whether someone is a friend or foe. (There's a theory that Americans smile more than others for this very reason...I may not understand your language or your cultural assumptions, so let me just look friendly at all times.) As a result, people like Plattner and Fetterman can be "working class" while Deb Haaland, a single mother who needed Medicaid and food stamps, isn't necessarily seen as such (having been a cabinet secretary). I think gender plays a role too as "working class" can be intertwined with traditional social mores. Working-class voters may shy away from backing female candidates as they still hold on to the view that women should be at home.
Great piece. The phenomenon of the activist left being dominated by middle-class (or even upper-class) graduates seems something of a catch-22. They (or I should probably say we) are people who have a good education, usually a liberal upbringing, and some time and resources on their hands. They tend to be more perceptive to inequality and various injustices of American society, and will typically feel some level of guilt about their own situation, and a desire to 'do something'. So, inevitably, in their youth at least, they will often be drawn to left-wing ideas.
However, their own social background will always delegitimise their attempts to some extent, and their style of politics will reflect that background, miscalibrated to the realities of the actual lower and working classes in the US. This type of left will typically be beaten by the (far-)right, because the Right's messaging is more effective at appealing to the lower middle and (to some extent) working classes. Worse, even if the 'graduate left' can occasionally win, its (redistributionist etc) policies, put into practice, seem not very popular with most of the electorate - and probably not very workable either.
I guess the solution could *theoretically* be upper/middle-class leftists taking a hard look at their own politics and investigate the extent to which they are emotionally driven and insular - based on the concerns and impulses of their own milieu - rather than aligned with what most of the American electorate apparently wants.
Well-off people SHOULD have a sense of noblesse oblige, it's literally how slavery ended and mass franchisment happened. But, too many well meaning libs are mislead by captured illiberal advocacy groups like ACLU or prison-abolishment weirdos, who end up inflicting lots of suffering on poor people, ironically.
“And yet Evan MacKay is really not in the same boat as people who stand on an assembly line, even if those people make more money than he does. He could, if he wanted, go work in private equity and live in a mansion on Cape Cod.”
Though I sort of agree with the spirit of the argument, I feel it assumes that all elite degrees are created equal and that windows of opportunity are indefinitely wide. The reality is MacKay (or other sociology phd students) can’t just decide to go work in private equity instead, nor can the adjuct professor recoup the years spent outside industry and shoot up the income ladder. Many of those high-paying jobs in finance or tech have specific paths and, if you don’t get into the escalator at the right time, it’s very hard to regain access. So I think both the present and future economic prospects of many academics (or other college-educated workers without a lot of marketable skills) are at least a bit more aligned with those of the "working class" than the article suggests.
The deeper source of tension, I think, lies less in present or future earnings potential than in past choices. Ending up as a sociology phd student after graduating from Harvard undergrad implies, in the overwhelming majority of cases, having turned down much more lucrative options to pursue a lower-paying job out of passion or conviction. The decision can be alienating to a group of voters who could not afford to treat income as secondary. DSA leaders may be fighting for goals important to blue-collar workers like higher pay and greater economic opportunity, but their own trajectories seemingly downplay the importance of those material gains. So I agree the jacket with the UAW logo obscures a fundamentally different relationship to risk, money, and work between MacKay and blue-collar workers in manufacturing. But I think that difference is less about where MacKay could still go than about what he could afford to turn down.
I wonder if people mean something else when they say working class - wage dependence. Whether you’re a $250,000 earning senior manager at a corporation, or an autoworker, your entire lifestyle is dependent on the whims of a political bureaucracy that is deeply impersonal and alien to you. That precarity is felt in the bones. As opposed to capital owners (wealthy people, business owners, entrepreneurs, owners of large equity portfolios), who have the ability to call their own shots more often or fall back on a cushion of wealth. This is true at the highest level of wage income - why so many investment bankers are trying to get into private equity - it’s not that bankers are poor, but private equity is an ownership business.
Yes, obviously world’s smallest violin. Obviously they’re not “working class”. But there seems to be definitely something to “ I’m limited to a narrow range of occupations and employers with little control over my own professional life in order to sustain the lifestyle that I believe my family is entitled to”.
No one is preventing wage dependent workers, especially those making over $250K, from saving and investing a good part of that income to escape that dependence. Maybe they are addicted to work.
Addicted yes - but likely to status and lifestyle more than work.
Beyond that though, there is not a practical way most wage work can allow you to save enough capital over anything other than a 15+ year horizon to buffet yourself from the shock of loss of work if you have relatively inflexible status / lifestyle expectations. You can save a lot, just not enough to escape precarity - for many people that is.
For someone making $250K they can invest $50k a year without cutting back expenses very much, and after 10 years if invested in an index fund would leave them with over $1,000,000 saved. There is no free lunch, so they would have to sacrifice some of their current lifestyle to build up wealth, but it would make life better for them in the future.
For example, where I grew in california, which is a cheaper part of california, it costs around six hundred thousand for a crappy 1960s starter track home that needs a bunch of work.
And again, this is one of the cheaper parts of california.And a lot of other places you could easily be spending over a million dollars.
If you are facing housing costs like that, then two hundred fifty grand a year doesn't get you very far
This is my point but spouse may be an edge case here who is definitely middle class but whose skills are adapted to maybe 2 or 3 companies that make military aircraft
"The integrating institutions that once pushed us together across class lines — church, the military, schools in mixed-income neighborhoods — have waned in importance."
Noah, I'm quite a bit older than you, 63, if I might give two huge integrating institutions in the 1960's and 70's; entertainment and news. In the 1970's almost everyone had a local newspaper subscription. You needed one well before then internet just to know the sports news and movie schedule, and local sales and coupons. But even if you had no interest in the news, you could not help but be exposed to reality based news just picking up the newspaper from your porch and seeing the headlines -- and it was pretty much all reality based. Almost no one got their news from Orwellian Republican sources. Whether you had The Detroit News, The Arizona Daily Register, or The Los Angeles Times, it was all reality based. We all shared the same basic facts, and that was also true whether you watched anchors Joe Glover and Robbie Timmons on ABC channel 7 in Detroit, or Walter Kronkite at the national CBS Evening News.
And we all watched the same three networks for TV shows. Almost Everyone watched the Fonz and Archie Bunker. Even music had just a very limited number of radio stations. People of an age group really shared that. It was not fractured into a hundred different boutique musics.
I never thought I'd read the name "Robbie Timmons" in a Noah comment section. She was my neighbor way back in the day, and of course a local celebrity.
I agree the newspapers and television shows had an integrative effect. Back then everybody read them and you could have a calm, non-confrontational discussion about the news of the day with everyone from the mailman to the local college professor.
Also, in Detroit, it was blue collar and white collar folks. I'm not sure if that's better in any sense than referring to folks as working class versus whatever the upper societal echelons are called now. Working class folks lived over in England, and were an entirely different thing.
Families were also class integrated. My dad and mom both had graduate degrees while only one of my grandparents even graduated from high school. My grandparents were definitely blue collar and my parents were white collar. We were far from the only family in the neighborhood that had that situation going on. My best friends dad was a lawyer, and his father had been a plumber with 12 kids. My first boyfriend's mom was the mayor of our city, and his grandfather had been an illiterate sewer worker. Those leaps took one generation. Not sure how often that stuff happens today.
My family was also "class integrated", or changing up and down per generation. My great grandmother was old southern aristocracy, married a mining engineer, upper class in 1900, but when her husband died around 1913 she bought some spring fed desert land in south Texas and when the well went salty, she was downward class shifting. Catarina is a ghost town now, but my grandmother was living there and married a highway construction foreman and moved into the somewhat middle class... her daughter finished high school, married an engineer and was middle-middle class raising me in a comparative "golden age" setting where I had college choices -- didn't take over silicon valley though -- still middle class at 68.
Today, with all the internet advertising working hard to farm the customers it's harder to save money. Here are some analogies for the situation:
internet advertiser company : customer
Aphid : garden plant
3 card monte dealer : Man or woman on 2nd Ave
Ponzi schemer : small investor
And very soon, we will have plenty of job loss for those without schooling from factories full of robots instead of union member workers.
Aren't most factories full of robots today? If you want the 1970's movie Koyaanisqatsi, it has scenes from TV assembly plants and car factory floors, and none of that stuff has been done manually for decades.
There is high probability of job losses in non-exportable product factories soon -- the products that are too heavy and low cost to ship around the world. Examples would be: factory farm, meat processing, food prep, yard work, house building.
Richard, I think you're describing something many people genuinely miss. I worked in traditional media myself, so I experienced firsthand how it gradually lost its place at the center of public attention—squeezed from one side by the rise of social media, and from the other by the expanding influence of state power.
But I also wonder whether nostalgia can become a filter. Every era has its own beauty and its own suffering. The age of centralized media gave many people a shared narrative, yet it also coexisted with a world in which much of humanity still struggled simply to get by, many voices remained invisible, and countless conflicts never entered that shared narrative at all.
Today I live in a foreign city with a large digital-nomad community. The more people I meet, the more strongly I realize how similar the human condition can be. Whether someone is American, Iranian, Ukrainian, Russian, Chinese, or from a small and often overlooked country like Cape Verde—which much of the world may notice only when its football team nearly defeats Argentina—we often end up describing remarkably similar frustrations.
We usually interpret those frustrations through the language of class or nation. But I increasingly suspect that the deeper pattern is something else: people everywhere are navigating different versions of the same power pyramid, and those structures often produce the same Kafkaesque experience regardless of where we were born or where we stand in the social hierarchy.
Perhaps that is why I find it increasingly difficult to think of any of us primarily as members of one class or one country. We are also participants in the same civilization. Rather than idealizing the past, perhaps we should face the difficulties of the present and search for their roots at that larger scale.
"It is the first step in sociological wisdom, to recognize that the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur — like unto an arrow in the hand of a child. The art of free society consists first in the maintenance of the symbolic code; and secondly in fearlessness of revision, to secure that the code serves those purposes which satisfy an enlightened reason. Those societies which cannot combine reverence to their symbols with freedom of revision, must ultimately decay either from anarchy, or from the slow atrophy of a life stifled by useless shadows. "
-- Alfred North Whitehead, 1927, partially quoted by Eric Kleptone
Or as people say these days, "the only way out is through." We're not going to be able to restore a supposed golden age by looking backwards. We have some unique challenges -- automation of a lot of manufacturing jobs and processes, AI based on wholesale theft of the world's intellectual property which is nevertheless both sometimes useful and at the same time very buggy.
The Whitehead quote resonates with me. Perhaps every major civilizational advance destabilizes the institutions built for an earlier stage. What seems less inevitable is not the transition itself, but how power reorganizes during it. Sometimes societies adapt. Sometimes they persecute. That difference may depend less on the technology than on the structures of power that emerge around it.
My concern isn't that AI is becoming more powerful. It's that power is becoming more powerful through AI.
Indeed. It looks to me that AI really does take intellectual property from huge numbers of people and repackage it in a way that greatly reduces the value of the IP to the original authors. The AI folks claim this is "fair use," but any reading of copyright law tells you one of the main criteria for use to qualify as 'fair' is not reducing the value of the IP to the originator.
And the way that AI is structured right now, the benefit indeed is going to the very wealthiest members of society. It's a very ugly situation.
That’s precisely why I keep coming back to the power question. The concentration of wealth may be one consequence, but I suspect it is downstream from something deeper: the concentration of power.
We often treat wealth and power as if they occupy the same position in society, but they are not quite symmetrical. Wealth usually needs power to secure and protect its position. Power, on the other hand, can often survive without wealth. In the presence of concentrated power, even great fortunes can prove surprisingly fragile.
I suspect one reason we overlook this is that wealth is visible and easy to measure, while power is often opaque and difficult to quantify. Yet it is frequently power that determines how wealth is created, distributed, protected, or taken away.
That’s also why AI concerns me less as a technology than as a force multiplier. If the benefits of AI are already flowing disproportionately toward those who hold the most wealth, the deeper question is whether they are also flowing toward those who hold the most power. History suggests that when new technologies become deeply intertwined with existing power structures, the consequences can extend far beyond economics.
What puzzles me is that we routinely measure societies through indicators of wealth inequality, yet rarely ask how unequal power itself has become. Perhaps that is because wealth is easier to count. But if power ultimately determines who writes the rules, who enforces them, and who can change them, then power inequality may have an even greater impact on human lives than wealth inequality. I wonder why we spend so much time measuring one, and so little time measuring the other.
Another apologist for the Fake News media. If Haitian illegals are eating law-abiding American cats and dogs, then the citizens of this country have a right to know the truth.
But seriously, as a democracy, we are in an acute need of a new "Truth in Media" law, that at the very least raises the bar for any media content calling itself "news." Opinion is one thing--and protected by the 1st Amendment. But actual journalistic standards need to apply to actual news. Multiple corroborative sources, timely retractions, and all that other Woodward and Bernstein stuff.
I think we can easily see the downside of a Truth-in-Media Amendment by noting that our current president and his DOJ treat mainstream news as fake and subject to government constraint, while celebrating Newsmax, etc.
We are not going to be able to legislate our way out of the pit we've fallen into. (I don't mean to suggest I have an alternative to offer.) The loss of shared social institutions (thinking here of Robert Putnam's "Bowling Alone" and studies flowing from that analysis) is not something for which there is an obvious antidote. We (by which I suppose I mean the ~95% of Americans younger than I) are going to have to spot opportunities offered in a world transformed by the technology that destroyed the old one.
I agree that technology transformed the old institutions, but I'm not sure technology itself is the deepest explanation.
I worked in traditional media myself, so I watched newspapers and broadcast media lose their central position. Yet I don't feel nostalgic about that decline. Like the recording industry before it, centralized media belonged to a particular stage of technological evolution. It was never destined to remain the permanent center of public attention.
Social media amplified disagreement, but I don't think it created those disagreements. More often, it revealed conflicts that had long existed beneath centralized narratives.
AI seems to be producing a similar double effect. Throughout history, major technological transitions have repeatedly expanded humanity's capacity for large-scale cooperation while also amplifying division and conflict. Neither outcome is new.
What worries me most isn't the technology itself, but what societies do during these transitions. Periods of rapid technological and social change have often ended in wars, revolutions, or large-scale persecution. Preventing that, rather than restoring older institutions, seems to me the more urgent challenge.
And that danger is global. It doesn't threaten only Americans, whether citizens, documented immigrants, undocumented immigrants, or people whose status is suddenly called into question. It reaches ordinary people in every corner of the world: an asylum seeker waiting at the U.S. border, a mother in Gaza, a fisherman in Haiti, a shopkeeper in Tel Aviv, a nurse in Havana, a farmer in Ukraine, an Ivy League graduate, a Silicon Valley AI researcher. Different nations, different classes, different paychecks, the same vulnerability.
Persecution rarely stays confined to the group it first targets. It spreads until no one, anywhere, is truly exempt.
That's the question I keep coming back to, and the one I hope more of us will take seriously: not how to restore the institutions of the last century, but how to keep this transition from becoming another chapter in humanity's long history of persecution.
This is completely correct. I’d add to it that talk radio (especially Rush Limbaugh) really deserves a shout out for helping drive the fracturing. It was the point where some of my relatives began listening less to the mainstream news.
I read both left and right leaning news sources, and one of the most fascinating things is that the bias often isn’t primarily driven by biased writing, but by story selection. I first noticed it with the Benghazi story, which was wall to wall on right leaning news versus one and done in left leaning news. That was what caused me to consciously consume center left and center right news.
Anyway, it’s fascinating how our society has run full speed to remove all of our unifying cultural influences while simultaneously replacing them with nothing unifying. How could that ever go wrong?
All that wall-to-wall Benghazi coverage for 2+ years by FOX News is probably a key factor in why that godless Communist, Hillary Clinton, lost to the divinely anointed, very stable genius Donald Trump in '16.
Is there a point here other than that you don’t like Trump? Because this just seems like a bizarre non-sequitur.
Richard, same age.... agree. Today, I think the retail experience is the great mixing point...walmart, post office, delivery folks....
"Reality-based," or (per Chomsky) manufactured consensus?
(Btw, check your spelling: It's Chronkite [haha]!)
Reality based with regard to the basic facts, not necessarily the interpretation of those facts, but with rare exception those facts were not fabricated, and there was professional care in getting them right.
Point taken!... but then again, there's still the question of what facts are considered relevant (or even worth reporting), and how the "relevant" questions are framed.
In THAT regard, the "gatekeepers" have a job to do, and they know who's signing their checks.
In the old days, the entire system was impenetrable (which is not to say that what we have now is any better, or that our "truths" are any truer). You were either in or out, "professional" or not. There was no equivalent to Substack. ;-)
(FWIW, I'm 76.)
Great article; i found myself perfectly described. I think it is (past) time for Democrats to stop grouping people by class, just like Republicans have rejected (if somewhat hypocritically) grouping people by race. Democrats should be campaigning on their namesake: democracy — their view of the purpose and basis of government. That is legitimate, classless, raceless, and foundational for our country. It means our focus should be on teaching, explaining, and promoting those ideas, and the voters will follow. The DNC should be the marketing agency for democracy.
Sadly, focusing on preserving democracy is what HASN’T worked for Biden and Harris - though I wish it had. Democrats should focus on making people’s lives materially better (yes, affordability) and stop talking about identity and race. This should unite all potential Democrats and independents. Imagine if your housing costs were 25% less? Your health costs 25% less?
Exactly! Put "preserving Democracy" on the back burner. Along with critiquing the ruling GOP's love of racism, misogyny and homophobia.
It's the economy; and the GOP's mismanagement thereof. We need the boring--but competent--party back in power before the boneheads running the country make poor everyone not named Trump.
As an Indian- American, with a very thick Indian accent ( a veritable challenge, if you are an attorney at law in the state of Iowa). I do not care about racism at all. Please do not fight my battles if somebody offends me as an Officer of the Court and member of the bar in the state of Minnesota and Iowa in good standing I can stand for myself. Take care of the economy, that is something that I am helpless at preserving.
A fun fact voters that said they were voting on democracy were more likely to vote for trump than harris
"Graham Platner, a little-known oyster farmer and Marine veteran who lived largely off government benefits…"
In the interest of full disclosure, the government benefits described are $60,000 a year in disability compensation from Platner's 4 tours of combat duty.
Here's a gift link:
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/15/us/politics/platner-maine-senate-working-class.html?smid=url-share
I'd like to know how he is working full time, campaigning for the senate, and still finding time for a little fun SA on the side all while being too disabled to work.
Very common among military vets because VA benefits can be extremely generous. That’s how you end up with deadbeats like Platner mooching off of society.
It's interesting, you describe a situation similar to mine. Your grandparents pulled themselves into solid middle-classdom, but YOUR folks still had to wait for careers and savings to blossom before it happened to them. My experience was perhaps an even more drastic example of this.
Both of my grandfathers were tenured professors at the same university. One of them was a civil engineer who designed several bridges across TN, consulted for DARPA on guided weapons, and even had a part in Skylab iirc. I dunno exactly how much money he had, but he retired at 55 and has been spending lavishly the last 30 years (dozens of cars). My other grandfather leveraged some real estate stuff to invest in the Reagan recovery, and then again rode the dot com bubble. He likely had 10s of millions when he died.
Despite this, growing up, we were of fairly meager means. Food came from a can or a box, except the one time a month I got to choose between Burger King or Pizza Hut. When I was around 11-12 my dad's career had blossomed enough that we finally ascended to middle class proper, if on the austere side still. You would barely know our previous generation were so loaded excepting for the lavish gifts at xmas time.
I wonder if this was a superior system. I don't want to valorize struggle and maybe it's a coincidence, but it seems like the failson rate went up drastically as society moved away from this previous model to the one we have now where middle-class or rich parents pay their kids way pretty much completely at least through college, if not further. I would never advocate for a parent to let their kid go hungry, obviously bail them out if shit goes sideways, but maybe there's something crucial about a default state of learning to marshal your own resources and build a life a d we've lost that with this new norm where parental support for young adults is a given.
What you are describing seems poor today but was most definitely “middle class” back then, though maybe not “comfortable”. Most of the people I knew lived like this.
I agree that there is much to be said for making it on your own and realizing that luxuries aren’t necessary for fun nor for love nor for family nor for meaning.
Real estate is the biggest problem today and the prior generation with real estate wealth feels they must use it to help the younger generation. Same with education expenses and sometimes healthcare.
When it comes to food and clothing and basic essentials, these are relatively cheaper (as a percent of income) than they were back then.
I think this is a good summary.
Health care is fixable with obvious insurance reforms -- a public option, Medicare for all or just bigger O'care subsidies.
Housing needs more ... housing; since I've been a kid, I've seen the population odometer roll over twice, to 200M and then to 300M.
I have no idea what educational expenses even are these days; although list prices at private universities are out of control, you can get an excellent education at a public university, and I have no idea how many people pay list anywhere, for that matter.
None of this sounds impossible to fix.
Ironically the sectors most linked to government subsidies have had the highest inflation, so one needs to be cautious about government intervention.
Stop inflating home prices via handouts to homeowners like mortgage deductions and property tax deductions.
There is nothing wrong with renting - the problem is the cost of renting or owning relative to incomes.Streamlining the permitting process (and many of the other “abundance” ideas NS has covered here ) are worth a try.
The problem with healthcare is the costs of hospitals and their incentives (to pad costs, add admin and add physical plant)- who and how we pay matters much less than getting overhead costs down. Academia has a similar issue.
Local hospitals and their employees and unions and universities and their admin and academics are major sources of support for the Dems- there will never be cost cutting nor an undermining of the current model under a Dem regime.. Obamacare strengthened hospital monopolies and undercut competition, limiting the ability for insurers to negotiate on price. As far as Repubs go, I haven’t seen any ideas or changes / except taxing endowments of the wealthiest colleges, which is wise.
Solvable, yes, but I’m not hopeful our current parties and pols are the ones to solve it. More completion (and AI) might be a catalyst.
On housing the problem is supply, full stop. We need to allow more construction on the metro areas with economic growth. It seems like we are making progress on this front, albeit slowly.
On healthcare costs - not the full solution - but one idea that seems to work in other countries is a clearer delineation between market-based goods and those that are insurance/government provided. We can see this with things like the costs of elective procedures, OTC medicine and veterinary practice, even dental to certain extent. If we can leverage the power of markets to operate, we can drive down costs and accessibility. We are starting to go down that route with telehealths and big corporate clinics that operate more outside of the broader insurance system. For non-critical care we should have a free market (regulate the safety aspect of it, not the pricing side of things) and then just provide coverage on the more catastrophic side of things. This does interfere a bit with incentivising preventative care, but even then there are plenty of thing to try, one of them increasingly being providing FSA/HSA funds to be used on whatever the customer wants, or requiring certain numbers of checkups to maintain pricing discounts (like good driver discounts with auto). Regardless of how subsidized we make the acute/life-threatening side of the equation, better opening up the market on the other side should help with plenty of the market dynamics.
There are obvious problems with renting -- homeowners invest much more in their own properties than in rentals, where they could be forced to leave.
The problems in healthcare are probably mostly due to hospital chain mergers combined with medical associations limiting the number of doctors produced each year, to maintain higher salaries.
Your statement about Democrats never trying to limit healthcare costs is pretty much evidence-free. The only folks who are likely to work against monopolistic behavior on the part of doctors or hospitals are going to be Democrats, not free market Republicans.
Hospitals are the biggest driver of healthcare cost inflation and the biggest share of total costs and the Dems focus on….pharma? Which is 15 pct of costs.
Obamacare deliberately strengthened hospital monopolies and pricing power and eliminated competition. Actually outlawed it (from MD-owned private clinics) in some cases.
Have you heard of the SEIU?
Substandard city hospitals are huge employers. And doesn’t everyone love that what used to be your local doctors office is now hospital-run and charges “facility fees” which alone are 2x what a doctors visit there cost pre-Obamacare,
Feel free to go educate yourself on the subject, or just comfort yourself with the “evidence free” mantra….and have a lollipop.
Hospital chains buying up local doctors' offices is precisely the type of monopolistic behavior I was arguing against, so we don't disagree there.
Banning (really, locking them out of Medicare and Medicaid) MD-owned hospitals was done to avoid the conflict of interest where doctors would send the best insured people to hospitals they own a financial interest in.
Can't really argue about the focus on drug costs, but I still don't see any chance of Republicans pushing back against high hospital costs.
I think it was just a lot easier to get ahead before
Post my grandparents and my wife's grandparents were pretty similar middle class fam.
Public school teachers etc.
Both were able to get multiple houses by the time they retired
The inflation of the 70’s followed by the low rates of the latter 80’s generated lots of real estate wealth.
I think my parents bought their house for $40k in 1970 and by 1985-6 it was worth $400k in a NY suburb. 10x.
In the last 40 years it has about doubled - last sold in 2023 for $780k
Of course we thought a 2500 sq ft house for a family of 6 was a mansion back then (small bedrooms, small windows,), and it was. Today not so much. School district still good and safe in that town and anyone buying it today is much better off relative to anyone in 1985
Of course, $40k in the SP500 back in 1970 would look much better. In many states and towns real estate has underpermrd inflation (and well underperformed markets) over the last 30-40 years
Issue is people want to live on the peninsula or Boston burbs where houses are very expensive z. Also people don’t want to live in small dark houses, but if we are now families of 3 or 4 instead of families of 6 then 2000 sq ft is ample.
Prob is you can’t buy a 2000 sq ft house for 1 or 1.5x one salary like you could in 1970.
A lot of that damage happened in the 70’s and 80’s though
In the 90s you could buy a starter track home in my area for $100k. In 2010, I bought one for $200k, they are now going for $ 600k
2010 may have been a low point post GFC
So since 1990s it is up 6x over 30-35 years. Close to 6 percent price inflation since then, well ahead of wages though lagging stock prices. Probably a desirable area in terms of jobs, though?
Asset price inflation has been mostly the government policy since 2008, of course.
Yes, 2010 was a brief period where housing prices made sense. Where you could actually get a crappy starter home as a family starting out.
And no I wouldn't say were we were was a particular great place for jobs. But it was in CA, so...
Great piece. Fundamentally nobody seems to want to understand this delineation of class. I complain about the impact of being low class/caste often, but nobody gets it due to my present income being “ok”. What they don’t understand is that the potential for low caste/low class students that didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford is very low, and after we hit some natural peak as I feel like I have the most rational thing to do is exit the gene pool.
Sadly, there’s no hope for people of my class stature whatsoever.
Anybody who looks down on you because you didn’t have the connections, wealth and scores to get into Stanford or Harvard is a fool.
Did your school teachers go to Stanford? Your nurses? Your attorney? Local business people? Even your doctors more likely went to state school as did most corporate CEOs.
Build a good life- family, friends, religion, books, enjoy the outdoors. Decades ago people didn’t have fancy cars, big houses or take foreign vacations and yet we enjoyed life and expanded the gene pool. The hamster wheel of elite production (and even more so, maintenance of elite status) is a stressful and often empty place. Career isn’t everything - more often a means to an end.
We should all try not to get caught up in all the aspirational “personal branding” that displays real (or faux) wealth.
This long predates Instagram. I remember watching 70’s/80’s sitcoms where the supposed working class characters had nicer apartments than I had ever seen.
Far cry from “The Honeymooners” or even “I Love Lucy” (who were rich).
I do wish there were pols who focused on American high school grads or community college students and forced or encouraged/incented companies to get involved in training, technical certification, apprenticeships. We should not leave these kids dangling.
I had hoped Trump would do something like this (for every H1B there should be 5x Americans in training or whatever), but no.
The Dems won’t do it because the unions don’t like apprenticeships or interns or training unless they can control it and skim from it- and high school grads aren’t their base.
Anyway, I see it. I have a kid embarrassed to take a non-elite job because his friends have elite jobs and feels life is less meaningful if he can’t spend like them (and he certainly can’t buy a house in Silicon Valley or Manhattan suburbs).
I have other relatives who are not embarrassed by their non-elite status and are enjoying life but who are more envious of the rich and get angry that the game is rigged. They told their kids from a young age they would never go to Harvard (untrue - one of them could have if he encouraged them academically, but he’s going to Clemson which is awesome).
Anyway there is a lot of stress and angst out there but if I take away the stuff that is excessively self-conscious (worried about what others think) and the stuff that is external (outward displays of wealth and spending power) are our lives really more stressful than the middle class of yore who had no savings, an old car, a small house and maybe a one week vacation a year somewhere close by? We’ve placed, or misplaced heavy expectations on ourselves.
It is shocking how much the right degree from the right school opens up doors. Not necessarily because it teaches you relevant things. Or even because it connects you to the "right people". It's just allows you to pass various implicit/explicit filters that have been put in place for various professional/social roles.
Speaking from personal before/after experience of getting a masters degree from a name-brand university.
Depressing
"
What they don’t understand is that the potential for low caste/low class students that didn’t get into Harvard or Stanford is very low
"
BS.
The house I was born in, literally didn't have electricity or running water. Later bean burritos was by far the most saying we ever ate. Because it was cheap.
I went into the army and got in trouble there for having more fun than the law allows.
Then I turned it all around, got my degree at a UC, my CPA, and later MBA. And now doing just fine.
If you work hard and make good choices, you can still have a fine life.
You don't need to go to one of those ivy league schools
I'm sorry, but you definitely don't need to get into Harvard or Stanford to move into the middle class. I know far more people who went to various State U's who've done well in computer software, hardware and systems engineering than those who went to any Ivy, even throwing in MIT and Stanford into that bucket.
I never said middle class, I’m middle class today. But I’m not in the same caste or class as anybody that got into or went to Harvard or Stanford or MIT or Yale
You wrote "there's no hope for people of my class stature whatsoever" compared to someone who went to MIT, Stanford, Yale or Harvard.
This is nonsense. My wife's brother went to Harvard, and their grandparents were an immigrant junkman, and an immigrant who died young and left a wife who spoke no English and couldn't work. I went to MIT and my mother was the daughter of a dry good salesman, and my father came here from Turkey speaking no English and with $100 in his pocket. My oldest went to Yale Law.
There *is* a relatively small social class who send their kids off to Ivy feeder prep schools and expect that their kids will get into Harvard, Yale or Princeton. Trust me, these are not people to envy or emulate.
Sounds like I’m far behind you and have no hope of catching up because I have no potential then. You’re falling into the same trap as Noah mentioned- over indexing in the past.
Ultimately people that get into elite schools are so far superior in every way to people like me that I can’t even begin to understand them much less be in the same social strata. I’m like an ant looking up at a human
I went to a state U. The typical grad in my class worked and currently works at Cisco. The typical MIT or Yale grad is making millions at Anthropic or “just” is a staff engineer at Facebook making $800k. Just completely different worlds.
First, I hate the term working class, as if those professors you mention don't work, and often 50-100 hours per week. White collar professionals usually work very hard, if I had to guess, at least as many hours as blue collar, if not many more. Very insulting and misleading term. The middle manager who puts in an often stressful 50 hours per week is not living a life of lazy leisure.
And, yes, even though I have an MBA from Noah's alma mater, the University of Michigan, I can list some blue collar bonafides too, newspaper delivery boy, pizza Maker at Checker BBQ, Oak Park, Michigan, as a skinny 15 year old, Ace Hardware tool clerk, and shoveling snow in the freezing Detroit winters of the 1970's. Personally, I enjoyed all of those jobs.
I just commented on this above; it's only recently that I've seen the term "working class" bandied about so much. When I was growing up it was white collar and blue collar which delineated the type of job you had, and probably said a lot about social class, too.
Yeah, obviously the class divide here is degree holders and non-degree holders.
There is another shift though - career vs non-career. The blue collar worker of prior generations probably was employee for longer stretches of time by the same employer. They might work their way up a bit. But the "service economy" of switching between gig work, short term retail, restaurant, and fulfillment center job is not a career. This is one reason the "trades" get promoted - it is blue collar but also a career. Regardless of the degree/non-degree divide the career/non-career divide is increasingly strong. The socialized upswing is actually underpinned by a big group of degree-holding non-career folks.
I wonder if much of the problem is English not having a trabalhador/operário distinction like Portuguese and other Romance languages ("trabalhador" could depend of the context, but usually means "person who works for a living"; "operário" is "manual worker with th exception of servants")
"Manual labourer" worked just well in Old Blighty when Victoria was the Queen.
Working class may be a translation from German (Marx) that didn't land well.
"Manual labo(u)rer" is also closer in meaning, if we want to include factory workers and exclude office workers.
The Marxian notion of the working class was a contrast to capitalists and landlords -- it includes anyone who must work for pay rather than live off rents or profits, so it would include, for instance, a physician whose salary is in the top 5% of the population. (My father, a surgeon, likes to joke that he qualifies as a manual laborer because he can't work without his hands, but obviously he's not what we mean when we speak of "manual laborers" or the "working class." I could exclude him with a term that specifies modest income and social status, but it would be unfamiliar and cumbersome.)
A manual laborer is one who can be replaced by a robot (soon including surgeons) whereas an information worker is one who can be replaced by an AI agent.
There are only 2 classes: working and rentier
Except there are a lot of people that have jobs and also get rental or other passive
You can assert that, not very analytically useful but ideologically probably serves your purpose
It's useful for certain kinds of analysis whether a person's income depends on their own labor or someone else's -- e.g. if there's a new labor-displacing technology, it's bad for the people whose labor it displaces but not for their employers who use the technology.
What complicates this is that there are many different specialties of labor whose wages and working conditions are different, and that many people earn some mix of "labor" and "rent or capital" incomes -- so instead of the binary categories, maybe you need to ask what kind of labor someone does, what their labor income is, what their non-labor income is, etc.
Or simplify it again into something like the categories familiar to most Americans, where you're grouped into one of a few classes based on your opportunities, occupational category, resultant lifestyle, etc.
Exactly! Most of us are (or should be) a mixture of working and rentier income, but thumbs have been placed on the scales between working income and rentier income. Check out Better Markets for more details
Doesn't it make more sense to say that "working and rentier" are two classes of *income* rather than two classes of people in society? If you want to categorize people, your analysis is still complicated by different types of labor, how much of each type of income people have, what their lifestyle is like, their potential, their family background etc. "Income from your own labor" and "income not from your own labor" are useful ways to categorize income (I've seen it in economics classrooms to model labor supply), but they answer a different question than "does Evan Mackay belong to the same segment of society as a Ford assembly line worker?"
All labor depends on someone else's
It;s utter fucking nonsense as a distinction, it's 19th century atavism.
This isn't a particularly useful distinction. First, everyone who's retired is a 'rentier.' Second, most rentiers got there by saving money from working (note I said 'most' not 'the wealthiest'). A class distinction with 100% class mobility isn't interesting.
Even many of the "wealthiest" got there by working, albeit many would contest if that amount was "disproportionate."
I can understand that basic distinction, but it ignores the real differences of a PMC family that works and has a comfortable life with a family that works hard but is always behind on bills, can’t afford vacations, and knows that they can’t send kids to college to have a chance at a better life.
I would disagree on not being able to afford to send their children to college for a better life. Even today, there is enough college aid that it can be done by anyone without that much difficulty. At the very least you could join the military, and then go with your military benefits. That is not an excuse for not going to college.
Nah - manual laborer or even just laborer conveys the same sense.
But that’s the reverse sentiment to the article. I would put most workers, intellectual or blue collar or whatever, into the working class category. That’s what Noah is denying though.
How many hours a week would a working class person have to work to live the lifestyle of a professional class person?
That is how to level set the analysis.
They certainly overlap as categories. Depends on value added that other people are willing to pay for, so not helpful categories🤷♂️
Yes-it's the transfer of existing wealth and purchasing power to the top over the past 50 years that has impoverished a majority of Americans by now. This occurred through regulatory capture. Examination of the New Deal reforms and their erosion is in order to clarify the analysis.
No it isn’t.
“Working class” conflates two very different groups with superficial similarities:
1) People who are poor despite trying to get the job that pays best
2) People who choose their profession for non-financial reasons, which causes them to be poor
A critical difference is that #1 wants to be rich and #2 disdains wealth. That many in both groups dislike the rich blinds some to their differences.
The left will never connect with #1 while attacking embracing group 2’s desire to denigrate the idea of getting rich.
Working class doesn’t imply that everyone outside of it doesn’t work. Id have thought UM would have covered that?
There are two highly disturbing thoughts in this essay
One, that anybody who is educated in America would believe Socialism is a viable economic model. A model that has killed millions, led to shortages and a sclerotic system where only party elites benefit.
Two, that a college education separated people from each other.
As for number two let’s blame a college system that has promoted radicals who want to fundamentally change America.
America and its systems has raise the economic health of Americans and people all around the world.
Has capitalism left some behind, of course but no more than any other system of economics. That educated elites have never read a book about deep flaws of Marx and Engels is depressing.
"One, that anybody who is educated in America would believe Socialism is a viable economic model."
Given how many American educators are socialists, and given that the US has never experienced socialist economy in practice (and by that I mean actual collective ownership of means of production, not just European-style social democracy behind which US socialists love to hide), I am not surprised at all. There is just not enough visceral knowledge of all the queues and empty shelves that inevitably came with it, from Berlin to Vladivostok.
Immigrants from Cuba, Venezuela or Nicaragua are probably the only American voting blocs that are a) numerous enough, b) experienced enough to push back. The question is how many of them vote Democrat.
Central/Eastern Europeans just aren't a force in US politics.
You certainly would never win any seat in Southern Florida espousing fealty to socialism. They have seen the ugly face of it. Yes, the generous social welfare systems in Europe do not mean that they are socialist countries. They are, in fact, capitalist or, perhaps more bluntly, state capitalist. They are also one other thing: they are heavily taxed. This may be why their economies have fallen so far behind the US.
They are nowhere near state capitalist either. In fact the EU prohibits state aid. They are capitalist countries with social welfare. The communist countries were state capitalist - it was a term devised to condemn them by other more puritan communists.
On the other hand the people who disclaim communism or socialism as a filed ideology tend to put China in the capitalist camp, at least in regard to its economy, but it does have large state involvement. And is fairly successful.
Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize Airbus was privately owned, as is Électricité de France (EDF). I mistakenly believed the French Government owns both.
Our language itself has been corrupted. Terms like "socialism" and "capitalism" are meaningless absent a detailed definition of what the speaker intends. Advertising (pace Lippman) culture has driven us to the "meme", where communication has become fishing for an emotive trigger noticed by the maximum number of people, who attribute the meaning to a myriad of dissimilar personal experiences. We must clean up our language!
The idea of future earning potential, of long term cumulative income Is very important - and in America, much more so than in Europe, people are - at least up until today - very optimistic (and unrealistic) about how they and their family will do long term. Because that is how it has been for generations in this country. Working people, earning a lower class income now, want to vote for a party that will support their families growth upwards, not make them more comfortable today. They want to vote for a candidate who understands this, who has shown that they apprecate the situation of the hard working optimist. They want support for their dreams. They would like some help now of course, but not if it comes at the expense of their future imagined life.
The so-called "Reagan Revolution" started America down this road, rewarding the rentier class above all working people. The capital gains tax v. income tax was the beginning.
To be honest this whole debate is an American usage (and misunderstanding in my view) of class. When the term working class was invented there was a large and rich idle class which, in Britain and Europe, didn’t work and looked down on work. Nothing really similar applied in the US. Bertie Wooster etc.
The middle class were not the people in the middle of the income level, but the top 5-10% or so. Obviously not rich but comfortable and capable of employing servants, having some land. However they were clearly not upper class.
The working class were and are the class that works for someone else, and have to work to continue to enjoy their standard of living.
It’s pretty odd to see well paid workers as not working class, they are subject to the same relationships to their employers as anybody who is employed. They can be laid off as easily as anybody else, with some cushioning from savings which. (Anticipating a rebuttal - Managers who own more stock than wages fall out of this category because of their compensation being in the stock)
The supposed rich who consider themselves “middle class” are absolutely right, by the 19thC definition of top 5-10%.
The term super rich has always annoyed me, it needs normalisation. Once you redefine a billionaire as rich then a millionaire isn’t rich.
The term has no practical meaning if you put a doctor making $500K in the same bucket as a McDonalds worker. I don't really care about the definition of class in 1800s Europe because it is 2026 and I am not in Europe. And once you define a millionaire as not rich you have lost the plot.
> The term has no practical meaning if you put a doctor making $500K in the same bucket as a McDonalds worker. I
The doctor would be self employed in the US. So that is not the same category as the working class. They were middle class in 19C Britain as well. As I said.
As for the 19th C jibe, what has changed? If you work for a capitalist then you are in the same class as anybody who would lose his status, maybe house and lifestyle if fired.
It’s a relationship comparative to other economic relationships to property, like being a renter. Income and education doesn’t mean you can’t be part of the rental classes and it doesn’t mean you aren’t part of the working class.
The kind of people who rebel against this generally have no problem calling themselves workers. It’s just weird.
Yes-there are only 2 classes: working and rentier. The 1985 book which summarized the ideas animating Maggie Thatcher's reforms was "English Culture and the Decline of the Industrial Spirit": https://archive.org/details/englishculturede0000wien
Which of these two do people like Richard Branson, King Charles, Adele or Demis Hassabis belong to?
King Charles is maybe not the best example. I'm pretty sure we can fit him nicely into the old English class system!
What is the point of making these classifications anyway? Most people have never met a billionaire ( I actually met Elon Musk once, but I was richer than him at that point ) but here are some famous ones, see if you think they belong in the same class: Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Mark Zuckerberg, Taylor Swift, Donald Trump, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, Larry Page, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Stephen King, Beyoncé, Rupert Murdoch, Kim Kardashian, Jeff Bezos, Mohammed Bin Salman, King Charles, Rhianna, Masayoshi Son, Warren Buffet, Laurene Jobs, Peter Jackson, Vladimir Putin.
Yes the British categorizations differ from the American usage but it seems Millenials and younger today in America understand neither usage.
Dad worked shifts until a chemical plant explosion disabled him. At 14 on 1967, I became a HS janitor. Worked us off of vital food stamps. Put myself thru the best university ranked in the world in Cambridge. Obviously not Harvard.
I was the 1st person in my 250 years of American lineage to get a college degree.
Grew businesses for BigCorp and others over a billion dollars. Sold a company. Founded a company.
Yet I don't see or value class. I value work. Integrity.
I've lectured with Heisenberg. Dined with Jack Welch. Got my Eagle from Chuck Yeager.
I delivered Domino's Pizza last year as a bridge to financial retirement..Love the teamwork and love the customers.
I suspect that fertility decline is connected to folks Fear of the Future.
I grew up crawling under desks for of Hydrogen bombs. I suspect young folks fear the future more now.
Your post made me think of Engels visiting America in 1888 and being thoroughly depressed at the lack of proper class-consciousness. How rude of American workers not to fit more neatly into Marxist ideology! He found many fathers for this "failure": American prosperity resulting in complacent workers; racial divisions preventing class unity; a two-party system that was stacked against new organizations like the socialists, etc. Curiously, Engels found American socialists to be overly dogmatic and urged them to adopt a more practical, hands-on approach that business-minded Americans would favor instead of beating workers over the head with copies of Das Kapital. Today's DSA influencer class would actually benefit from that lesson.
There is also the annual wringing of the hands within the Democratic Party about why the party keeps failing to attract the working class vote. There was a Post article recently on this about how the Dems identified people who rose up from humble circumstances and yet weren't quite hitting the right notes with that target audience (https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/07/09/can-working-class-roots-help-democrats-win-back-working-class-voters/). Some of it has to do with the candidates having risen out of the working class and so no longer coming off as being a current member, while others just lacked the proper vibes. Speaking of which, our politics seem very vibes-based. Maybe because we're a new country where different cultural backgrounds are thrown together, we have to make a lot of snap judgments about whether someone is a friend or foe. (There's a theory that Americans smile more than others for this very reason...I may not understand your language or your cultural assumptions, so let me just look friendly at all times.) As a result, people like Plattner and Fetterman can be "working class" while Deb Haaland, a single mother who needed Medicaid and food stamps, isn't necessarily seen as such (having been a cabinet secretary). I think gender plays a role too as "working class" can be intertwined with traditional social mores. Working-class voters may shy away from backing female candidates as they still hold on to the view that women should be at home.
Great piece. The phenomenon of the activist left being dominated by middle-class (or even upper-class) graduates seems something of a catch-22. They (or I should probably say we) are people who have a good education, usually a liberal upbringing, and some time and resources on their hands. They tend to be more perceptive to inequality and various injustices of American society, and will typically feel some level of guilt about their own situation, and a desire to 'do something'. So, inevitably, in their youth at least, they will often be drawn to left-wing ideas.
However, their own social background will always delegitimise their attempts to some extent, and their style of politics will reflect that background, miscalibrated to the realities of the actual lower and working classes in the US. This type of left will typically be beaten by the (far-)right, because the Right's messaging is more effective at appealing to the lower middle and (to some extent) working classes. Worse, even if the 'graduate left' can occasionally win, its (redistributionist etc) policies, put into practice, seem not very popular with most of the electorate - and probably not very workable either.
I guess the solution could *theoretically* be upper/middle-class leftists taking a hard look at their own politics and investigate the extent to which they are emotionally driven and insular - based on the concerns and impulses of their own milieu - rather than aligned with what most of the American electorate apparently wants.
Well-off people SHOULD have a sense of noblesse oblige, it's literally how slavery ended and mass franchisment happened. But, too many well meaning libs are mislead by captured illiberal advocacy groups like ACLU or prison-abolishment weirdos, who end up inflicting lots of suffering on poor people, ironically.
“And yet Evan MacKay is really not in the same boat as people who stand on an assembly line, even if those people make more money than he does. He could, if he wanted, go work in private equity and live in a mansion on Cape Cod.”
Though I sort of agree with the spirit of the argument, I feel it assumes that all elite degrees are created equal and that windows of opportunity are indefinitely wide. The reality is MacKay (or other sociology phd students) can’t just decide to go work in private equity instead, nor can the adjuct professor recoup the years spent outside industry and shoot up the income ladder. Many of those high-paying jobs in finance or tech have specific paths and, if you don’t get into the escalator at the right time, it’s very hard to regain access. So I think both the present and future economic prospects of many academics (or other college-educated workers without a lot of marketable skills) are at least a bit more aligned with those of the "working class" than the article suggests.
The deeper source of tension, I think, lies less in present or future earnings potential than in past choices. Ending up as a sociology phd student after graduating from Harvard undergrad implies, in the overwhelming majority of cases, having turned down much more lucrative options to pursue a lower-paying job out of passion or conviction. The decision can be alienating to a group of voters who could not afford to treat income as secondary. DSA leaders may be fighting for goals important to blue-collar workers like higher pay and greater economic opportunity, but their own trajectories seemingly downplay the importance of those material gains. So I agree the jacket with the UAW logo obscures a fundamentally different relationship to risk, money, and work between MacKay and blue-collar workers in manufacturing. But I think that difference is less about where MacKay could still go than about what he could afford to turn down.
"grad student instructors’ union at the University of Michigan" - me too, back in the mid-1990s!
Excellent essay. I also grew up in a house with one bathroom for five and very old cars, but always considered myself upper middle class.
I wonder if people mean something else when they say working class - wage dependence. Whether you’re a $250,000 earning senior manager at a corporation, or an autoworker, your entire lifestyle is dependent on the whims of a political bureaucracy that is deeply impersonal and alien to you. That precarity is felt in the bones. As opposed to capital owners (wealthy people, business owners, entrepreneurs, owners of large equity portfolios), who have the ability to call their own shots more often or fall back on a cushion of wealth. This is true at the highest level of wage income - why so many investment bankers are trying to get into private equity - it’s not that bankers are poor, but private equity is an ownership business.
Yes, obviously world’s smallest violin. Obviously they’re not “working class”. But there seems to be definitely something to “ I’m limited to a narrow range of occupations and employers with little control over my own professional life in order to sustain the lifestyle that I believe my family is entitled to”.
No one is preventing wage dependent workers, especially those making over $250K, from saving and investing a good part of that income to escape that dependence. Maybe they are addicted to work.
Addicted yes - but likely to status and lifestyle more than work.
Beyond that though, there is not a practical way most wage work can allow you to save enough capital over anything other than a 15+ year horizon to buffet yourself from the shock of loss of work if you have relatively inflexible status / lifestyle expectations. You can save a lot, just not enough to escape precarity - for many people that is.
For someone making $250K they can invest $50k a year without cutting back expenses very much, and after 10 years if invested in an index fund would leave them with over $1,000,000 saved. There is no free lunch, so they would have to sacrifice some of their current lifestyle to build up wealth, but it would make life better for them in the future.
This greatly depends on where you live
For example, where I grew in california, which is a cheaper part of california, it costs around six hundred thousand for a crappy 1960s starter track home that needs a bunch of work.
And again, this is one of the cheaper parts of california.And a lot of other places you could easily be spending over a million dollars.
If you are facing housing costs like that, then two hundred fifty grand a year doesn't get you very far
This is my point but spouse may be an edge case here who is definitely middle class but whose skills are adapted to maybe 2 or 3 companies that make military aircraft
I suppose could do commercial if there was suddenly world peace
Spouse was once confronted with having to cross a picket line when the machinists went on strike