I first read this book years and years ago as the son of a downwardly mobile family attending an upper-prole college. And as John warns, it fundamentally changed the way I understood everyone around me and made me hyperaware of my own tastes and behaviors. Somehow, I zig-zagged my way up the ladder a bit enough to encounter, and work among, the real upper and upper-middle class of my midsized city. I had grown up in the same city as these people but had never encountered them at all before. They have done an incredible job of isolating themselves from both the mids and the proles despite their geographic proximity.
What I find particularly interesting now are the class distinctions between the strivers and the inter-generationally wealthy, both of whom I encounter in law practice. The old money people (OMPs) erect these invisible barriers that the stivers have difficulty perceiving. The strivers lean hard into the value of education and intellectual pursuits while the OMPs are almost anti-intellectual. The OMPs often have done very well academically, but it is assumed that of course you’d do whatever needed to be done to maintain your class standing. One shouldn’t lean on it too much. That’s tacky. If you admit to an OMP that you are reading St. Augustine or studying Greek in your free time, they will smirk. Acceptable leisure activities for them generally involve socializing at the club, playing golf or tennis, or spending time at your lake house. Why would you read a book? Basically, any expression of genuine excitement or earnest curiosity is right out. Everything hast to be held a little at arm’s length. The strivers like to travel to Europe and will pack their days with sightseeing. The OMPs travel to Europe, too, but they do little sightseeing. A more appealing vacation for an OMP might be skiing. They love skiing. And it’s kind of understandable why: you have to do it regularly, it costs a lot, you have to know where to go and when to go, and there’s a lot of unusual equipment and clothing involved. It's perfectly frivolous. It’s very difficult for strivers to break into this world if you didn’t grow up in it—especially if you all live in the South. While the strivers like to attend the symphony or the ballet, the OMPs sit on the board but leave halfway through the performance. And in law practice, while the strivers do most of the work, the OMPs have all the clients.
One thing I've noticed is that most people consider their class to be the ideal one. Personally, I like reading and touring and dislike skiing for all the reasons that make it highbrow. I *would* prefer to leave halfway through the classical concert though.)
I think most people fail to achieve escape velocity because they actually do hold the values of their class dearly and struggle to value those of the next class up, even if they can afford them. I'm curious how you found that, as a "striver" who changed classes.
That is a good observation and an interesting question. I was raised essentially with striver ideals and taught that academic success was the avenue for career achievement and economic stability. And that's how I made it to where I am. Law practice is, of course, full of people like me. But breaking into that next tier of OMPs hasn't really happened for me, and that is largely by choice. As you observe, I do prefer my striver ideals. I like reading St. Augustine and learning classical Greek. I like going to Europe and visiting historical sites. I don't want to join the country club or go skiing. I often enjoy the social company of OMBs. They can be quite fun and charming. But there's a lot about myself that I have to hide from them. I have seen people "move up" into that sphere but it's not for me. From the striver perspective, the OMPs can come across a surprisingly boorish, shallow, and morally "flexible."
‘… most people consider their class to be the ideal one.’
I agree, and it makes for a happy world. Everyone gets to enjoy disapproving of or laughing at others’ lives and habits, which makes everyone happy. The nice thing is that it is just as easy and satisfying to disapprove of/ laugh at idle and entitled posh wasters as it is to disapprove of (or laugh at) petty bourgeois strivers or the feckless underclass Lots of fun for everyone. In the UK, we have always enjoyed this game. Welcome to our world.
Fussell should be humiliated by proposing "Class X", which is clearly the (self-defeating) upper-middle attempt to ascend into the upper by demonstrating superior sophistication via tasteful subversion of good taste. Class X is not some escape, it is just the same old engine that keeps the thing turning (which is why it diffused down to the middle class over the next generation or so).
Conscious subversion of class expectation is the core goal of (failing) upper middle status climbers. Why? Because actual indifference to class expectation is the fundamental class marker of the upper class, and the climbing upper middles are ineptly aping it.
True ascent to the upper requires actually not caring, which is why the upper class is so hard to enter: it must be stumbled into indifferently like some magic door only found by those who do not seek it. Being third+ generation rich unsurprisingly makes this easier.
Yeah, I think people pursuing that aesthetic "won" the status game and so encouraged the next generation to immitate their signifiers. The key thing is that the idea that "Class X" is somehow outside the class striver system is obviously absurd. Compare:
"‘I am more intelligent and interesting than you are: please do not bore me.’"
to
“Create a rich, warm, sensual allusion to your own good taste that will demand respect and consideration in every setting you care to imagine.”
The first is just as embarrassingly insecure as the second, just targeted at upper-middle instead of middle, which is why the first appeals to upper-middles, but the second is eye-roll-inducingly pathetic.
I agree with the Psmiths: it really was a genuinely bohemian rejection of the system back in the 1980s when Fussell was writing, but the upper middle class took it in the 2000s (as documented by David Brooks) and now it's middle-class.
The framing of it as a way of becoming more interesting and sophisticated than one's upper-middle class peers shows it is still part of the same status games. It isn't even the first time this aesthetic was adopted by the upper-middle class, and then filtered down for wider consumption.
The Bohemian lifestyle became appealing among the children of wealthy families of good-breeding in the 1860-70s, and filtered down into popular culture via books and plays, and ultimately the opera La Boheme, which showed a romantic ideal of the Bohemian lifestyle quite distinct from the the well-to-do young Englishman sowing their wild oats who often actually lived briefly as "starving" artists in Paris.
I'm not sure how it started; I was too young to be sensitive to these things in Fussell's time. I think Fussell was probably flattering himself at the time, but I suspect it might have begun with hippies doing what they wanted at the start, possibly earlier on in the 60s or 70s. We may never know.
I definitely agree it got incorporated into status games and filtered down afterward; we probably won't know what the new 'Category X' of our era is for 30 years or so.
I think we may be living through an actual structural change in the ability of the class system to propagate itself, so Fussell may finally get what he wants. Low fertility, large amounts of economically successful and culturally influential immigration, a disproportionate amount of wealth being held by first generation tech moguls, all create a large population of people with the financial, institutional, and cultural weight of the previous inheritor upper class, but who are not cultural members of it. This reduces the pressure for any individual to assimilate into its norms.
The breakdown of different audiences for different things the Psmiths mention is a big part of this too.
I submit that the genuinely not caring aspect of the uppers is due to their genuine lack of anxiety that they should ever be in actual need. It’s a subtle state that I, born a middle, have only caught a glimpse of: that no matter who you really are, what you do, or what happens, you will always have a cushion, a place, a means to make it better. George W. Bush is an example of this. But I must object to calling Trump a prole: the declaration betrays the class anxiety of the author to do so. Liking Trump is coded prole, which of course is not the same thing. Trump’s a striver, obviously, and striving is the quintessential characteristic of the middle classes. I think one has to take into account the context of New York and its particular status hierarchy to parse him correctly. What’s for certain is the uppers didn’t want to let him in, because you can’t get there by storming the gates, that’s kinda rule no. 1, and got lots of their upper middle class servants to try and keep him out. The whole topic is fascinating and I’ve often wondered why so few write about it. My current hypothesis is that no one truly transcends the class they grew up with. That’s not to say class is static. Strivers create the next upper class as the uppers fade … as they are bound to, because they don’t have that strivers energy. It’s their cadres - the upper middles - who sense the passing with anxiety and try to hold back the inevitable. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. The upper class of the late 20th century is played out, and everybody knows it.
Trump’s tastes are extremely prole. He is very wealthy and very influential, but he emphatically doesn’t try to ape the style and mannerisms of other (“higher”) classes.
Trump is a bizarre one-of-a-kind aberration within the US class system, best ignored by anyone trying to understand it. I think deep down he's a lower-upper class man pretending to be a lower class man's idea of an upper class man in order to annoy the actual upper class, but probably with several other epicycles of irony attached.
Trying to understand him in particular doesn't get you any closer to understanding the US class system, and extending your theories of the US class system to cover him just makes everything more confusing.
Gold-plated baroque furnishings doesn't count as aping the style of higher classes? Honestly AFAIK that's not something most people of any class try to ape, these days, but he does.
To me it betrays anxiety that one’s origins aren’t quite as classy as they’d like. Having to put on a show for others is for strivers. Neither the real uppers or the real lowers care that much about appearances.
Sorry but gold dipped everything isn’t prole. It’s wannabe upper class. I find his taste, well, distasteful, but I’m certainly not going to use that to damn him. On the contrary, I’m exactly the kind of person who should look down on Trump, but I’ve been forced by circumstances and my own commitment to reality to examine the Trump phenomena further. It’s extremely frustrating to see people jump to vast conclusions based on a single data point. Forget guns and religion, the clinging to the assumptions of the last century is truly next level. And I still don’t share his taste.
I don't think this analogy holds at the level of class signifier, because active participation in the miserable parts of social media (e.g., Twitter and Bluesky) is upper middle descending to middle.
Maybe "oh, I haven't really gone on TikTok" would be akin to bragging about no TV, as it is similarly seen as widespread low-brow media consumption.
The brief mention of Hamilton took me on a mental detour -- for the record, I really like it and don't think it's 'midwit', I think it's just a middle-class cultural product and that is only kind of related to intelligence for the same reason that everything else written about the middle-class here is only kind of related to intelligence.
Its position at the end of a class treadmill normalizing rap music is a good shout, but I don't think this is really a change in the character of musicals. Musicals in the American theater have never really been particularly High Art, they are fundamentally campy and garish and have only a limited relationship to their theatrical cousins from the old world. The best evidence of this is of course that Trump himself famously loves musicals and he has certainly never appreciated "High Art" in his life. Rap fits perfectly. It's also all tied up in the sort of orthogonal status hierarchies of gay and NYC ethnic culture which do not perfectly map onto the boundaries discussed here, which are mostly about the stratification of standard American whites, and for that reason the analysis in the article might apply to Hamilton as a show you can watch on Disney+ or listen to on Spotify but not really in its original Broadway form. Anyway, upper middle-class people do enjoy musicals, but they mostly do it ironically and as a Fun Outing, not as a serious cultural experience in the way you might get from going to the orchestra or a production of Shakespeare or even just a Met exhibition.
What I think is much more interesting is that the upper-middle class really dislikes Hamilton in a way that they do not despise other musicals, despite those typically being *less* tasteful. The quantity of discourse on why Hamilton is Actually Bad is kind of crazy when you zoom out a bit, given that it is in my view clearly one of the better products of American musical theater (though, again, this is not some enormously high bar). I expect this is because it blurs the lines between middle-class and upper-middle cultural products -- the embedded historicity and political self-seriousness feels too much like the sort of thing upper-middle class people make. Too many people unironically enjoy it as art, which is threatening to the upper-middle cultural position that is defined by only enjoying middle-class cultural products (musicals, summer blockbusters, genre fiction, etc.) in an ironic or 'guilty pleasure' mode.
This leads me to my main takeaway, which is that I think both the review and the book (which I have, in fairness, only consumed through this and a few other reviews), are a view of the class system from within the upper-middle class. Which is entirely fair, of course, no matter how much you try you're not going to escape your own frame. But I think this is precisely the reason for the contempt of the middle-middle. The upper-middle class *is* full of status anxiety, only instead of a positive status anxiety about constantly trying to improve their perceived position (i.e., what the middle class is accused of doing), they are trying to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the people they already know are below them, to preserve the exclusivity of their class as much as possible. There is nothing they hate or fear more than being seen as middle-class. To jump on a note from the review -- I don't actually think most upper-middle class people would see a suggestion that their son should become a plumber as an insult, it would be more of a bemused confusion, unless it was knowingly delivered as an insult by a person of similar status (middle-middle people would *absolutely* see this as an insult, though). I think they're much more likely to be insulted by the idea that their child should be a primary school teacher, i.e., a properly middle-middle profession.
Last note to tie this all together is that I think the degree to which upper-middle class people control cultural production is vastly overstated here, though this is a widely held self-congratulatory view by upper-middle people. Maybe you could argue that mass culture is downstream of high culture and academia, which the upper-middle actually controls, but I don't think this is really true anymore. But of course just like with Hamilton, it would be silly to think of Taylor Swift, Hollywood blockbusters, television, almost every popular fiction book released in a given year, or basically any cultural product consumed by a wide audience whatsoever as being an upper-middle product.
From my view as an upwardly-mobile person born into a prole family, the middle-middle is really the main character and motivating force of American culture and upper-middle psychology is really about smart people trying as hard as they can to conceal this fact from themselves by pretending the middle-middle are aping them, when the upper-middle is mostly forming its culture by *contradicting* the middle-middle.
Nodded most of the way til the end, then I had to think. I believe you're right about contemporary culture being middle class too. The upper middle class tends to rely on culture that's been pre-vetted as classy. Classical music, art museums, etc, are safe. New culture often comes from a place of discomfort. Most obviously, comedians are a class of misfits who turn their discomfort into laughs. Comedians don't come from the affluent or socially secure. Taylor Swift has always been well-off but culturally prole, and therefore highly relatable. I don't think upper-middle class people are good at creating relatable content outside of self-help books, although this blog is a fairly good contradiction of that observation.
"It's also all tied up in the sort of orthogonal status hierarchies of gay and NYC ethnic culture which do not perfectly map onto the boundaries discussed here, which are mostly about the stratification of standard American whites...."
A good point, one that I also thought of when I read the book - the class hierarchies and tastes Fussell describes seem to only apply to dominant culture whites, or at least they don't discuss anyone outside that sphere much.
> It’s pretty obvious what happened here: sometime after Class was written, the upper-middle class adopted the trappings of Fussell’s category X.
No! There was never any "category X", it was always just fringe upper-middles trying to be not like other upper middles. The only unusual thing was that this "bobo" cluster of behaviors they random-walked to at that time turned out to be more catchy than usual. And so it spread to more people, impressed Fussell and later became acceptable to regular middle class. Then the book was written and now there are "bobos in paradise" food bars and so on to cultural irrelevance.
"Category X" is just Fussell autosuggesting himself that his aspirational reference group are, like, so cool man, they are _totally_ breaking the mold. It's the funniest chapter in the book.
It's pretty comfy in my prole world. It's Monday but I am unemployed so I am reading Heart of Darkness. It has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with dying before we have finished what we have set out to do. I hope reading books is finally a prole thing so I don't sound pretentious. I can't imagine anyone but a prole would think that reading would help you ascend.
The Nazi Ford joke is gold. The sticker is going on my Ford Taurus right over my RonPaul Revolution.
There should be a name for people who are trying against the human nature to not compare. Like fatties who already know that they should eat less, we know what's the thief of joy and there is no point of repeating that. The goal is to trick your brain into not noticing. That's where I want to belong.
I'm not saying he's upper class lol. Do you think he fits neatly with the description of proles above -- or is he an X? (I'm just having fun, I know the world doesn't fit into our neat boxes.) And no, btw, reading classic litterature has not become prole yet.
If I had to choose one identifier of an X person, it would the attitude of being content with one's life. Bukovski, if we just accept everything he wrote as autobigraphical, seemed to want a stable middle class lifestyle plus being able to write, nothing more than that. Maybe I am misremembering X as being conspicuosly intellectual, which doesn't fit my idea of Bukovski.
An interesting review but the following statement is certainly wrong--but wrong, I suppose, in a very interesting way:
"Do you remember the “New England Republican”? That was actually just euphemistic code for “upper-middle class Republican,” much as “Reagan Democrat” secretly meant “middle class Democrat” and “Southern Democrat” meant “high-prole Democrat.” Watch either party’s convention, watch their congressional delegation, or their rallies, and there was a pleasing diversity in accent, dress code, and implied social position."
. A Southern gentry democrat was not the same thing as a northeastern prole democrat. A southern prole democrat was not even the same thing as a southern prole democrat! Sam Rayburn and Al Smith were different: different in aesthetics, ideology, and sense of self. They were both offensive to contemporary northeastern WASPs but they were not the same and no one living in 1930 would have credibly claimed as much. So it really was well into the 1980s. Those words were not euphemistic codes. They described the most important divisions in American culture and politics.
It can be difficult to appreciate just how regionalized American culture used to be. We live in a homogenizing age. A coffee ship in Bozeman is the same as a coffee shop in Atlanta is the same as a coffee shop in rural Vermont. The working class white guy in California, Texas, and Minnesota all listen to music sung in the same country twang--even though only one of those guys might hear such a twang in real life.
Fussel has many shortcomings. But his largest is probably his conflation of regional class norms with national, or even human, ones. What has Fussel has to say was true of non-ethnic white people in the Mid Atlantic states between 1940 and 1970. It did not accurately describe the class mores of a Jewish hollywood executives or Texas oil barons--even though by the time the book was published both groups were entering their third generation at the top of American wealth and influence. This is a real limitation to his work--a limitation our generation is less likely to notice as so many of these regional cultural differences disappear.
I wish we'd had more time and space to get into the regionalism, because I think you're right that Fussell conflates these things. He says, more or less straight out, that the higher your class in America, the more Yankee you are. (Actually I think he says that places are higher class the longer they've been inhabited by "financially prudent Anglo-Saxons," which is a delightful turn of phrase but amounts to the same thing.)
There's been a lot of intermarriage between Jews and Fussell's upper three classes since the 1980s, I think. I was looking at some Saltonstall running for office in Massachusetts and was surprised to note he was actually Jewish somehow.
Aristocracies taking new blood in over the course of generations is an old story. If you don't you get stuff like the king of Spain with 10 great-great-grandparents.
The book was published in the 1980s, so 40 years out of date, and class signifiers are always changing. I remember reading it and thinking it was a barrage of useless trivia at best, outright fiction at worst.
My main takeaway from this is that American class is more similar to UK class than I thought! The categories are all very recognisable from a UK standpoint in terms of behaviour, I think the main difference is just the willingness to call yourself working class in the UK.
I think that most proles (by Fussel's definition) will self-identify as middle class. If you've got steady employment and a full set of teeth in the US then you call yourself middle class.
I love your review. I read Class when it first came out. I can’t say it changed my life, but it definitely changed my outlook on other people’s lives.
However, I have to point out that you missed what I think is Fussells’s most obvious marker of class: the size of the ball in the sports one follows or participates in (of course another marker is “I don’t like sports” - but that’s another discussion altogether). The size of the ball being inversely correlated with the class as polo and golf have small balls, football (both American and the rest of the world’s football) and basketball have large ones. Baseball and cricket being right in between.
I was going to object that those are games not sports, but table tennis is definitely a sport and not particularly classy, so this is not universally true.
Even golf and tennis, these days, have been democratized to the point that their classiness is questionable. OTOH, I think Fussell would be the first to admit that none of the class markers are foolproof.
We can say Donald Trump has the taste of a prole, but he clearly circulates in more exclusive circles than you and I. Income may not be the sole arbiter of class, but it clearly matters.
This was something that struck me about "Inventing Anna." She attempts to take on all the trappings of the upper class, but ends up fraternizing with a bunch of lower and middle class people.
It's not just taste, and it's not just income... those are decorative. There's some attitude toward life, some je ne sais quoi if you will, that the upper class sniff on each other and they know if you don't belong.
That too is culture! (And explains the affinity between the upper class and the proles, neither of whom care about middle and upper-middle status signaling games.)
According to the much simpler framework in Understanding Poverty, he's upper class because his affection is entirely conditional. There are only 3 classes in that book.
After reading Class, I once astounded my wife into speechlessness by pointing out (as evidence of how U/MC are pre-school was) the lack of fat kids.
(I made a similar observation once in grad school, noting out of my cohort of 50-ish there was only one morbidly obese and one just normally obese member)
Reviews of this book are always fun to read, but the book does seem dated to me (as John noted.) The out-of-sight uppers don't seem to have really maintained a cohesive "class" over the decades (maybe due to the change in admission policies at the elite universities that was pointed out.) The U.S. has high “downward mobility from the top,” meaning wealthy children are more likely to drop down the income distribution than similar children in Denmark, Canada, or the U.K. (Research by Chetty et al. (2014–2017) shows that children born to the top 1% have only about a 33% chance of remaining in the top 10% as adults. In Scandinavian countries, persistence at the top is stronger.)
Of course, as noted, you can be upper class but not rich yourself, but this may only last one or two generations. If your parents and grandparents aren't rich, you won't inherit an upper class position. If your parents are rich, you can be upper class throughout your life even if you don't make it yourself, but your kids likely won't. Wealth concentration in the U.S. depends heavily on active income and market dynamics rather than intergenerational smoothing systems.
America is also a huge country and people tend to move a lot. Furthermore, eveyone is simply less likely to socialize nowadays. Being upper class meant being born with intergenerational wealth and living in a community of other who also had intergenerational wealth. But nowadays everybody just spends their time on the internet instead of socializing with stable groups, and so "class" feels less salient in the way it might once have.
I'm not sure you're right about that. I don't think the upper echelons are failing to socialize with each other. Whether it's taking classes at the 92nd street Y, membership at the right country club, getting invited to the right fundraiser dinners, serving on the boards of the right organizations, they are plenty good at making sure to rub elbows with the right people. This entire strata is invisible to most of us below.
I did one find a discarded copy of a glossy magazine on the Upper East Side that was about and for rich people. There were photos of who wore what at what gala. one article was written by several teenagers explaining how they'd done a tour of Europe over summer break without adults and it had gone really well. The advertisements were for matchmaking services.
I think you are correct. It is a lot more prevalent than SorenJ imagines. I suspect this is so because as you note the socializing of both adults and children is in private spaces. Clubs. Foundations and galas. Private events. Private schools. Etc.
I am well aware of foundations, galas, country clubs, private schools, etc. I know a lot of these people, and am a member or participant in a fair amount of it!
But very little of this meets the very strict criteria of “Upper Class” described in the book. It is all “Upper Middle Class.”
This was one of the points made. While you think you are describing the upper class, you are actually describing the upper middle class (allegedly).
Good point. By Fussell’s terms we’re all upper-middle, since the true uppers are so rare and invisible they wouldn’t be at the gala or the regatta at all, but at home pretending not to exist.
Yeah you put it more succinctly than me, but that is what I was getting at. I think maybe a group like that did exist at one point, but nowadays it is pretty small. The upper middle is, if anything, even more influential than they once were. If none of the billionaires in the US can be said to be “upper class,” then who really is upper class? A handful of families in NYC?
True multigenerational dynastic wealth combined with multigenerational old money attitudes and pedigrees are increasingly rare today. Some east coast families. The Fords. That sort of thing.
Today’s tech billionaires would be vulgar, conspicuous, upper-middle/prole plutocrats unless and until their grandchildren have turned the fortune into quiet, boring lineage.
Yeah I think it still exists to an extent, it is just not that prevalent, and I don’t think the markers in the book are relevant anymore. NYC would be one of the few places in the US where it is more relevant.
Let me try to rephrase: if only 0.001% of the populations meet the criteria (and remember, the criteria according to the book is not just about wealth. Most of the billionaires in the US would not be “upper class”), and those people aren’t all going to the same elite colleges, then is it really a cohesive “class?”
I grew up in the mountain west, so I don’t even think we have an “upper class” at all because it is not old enough to have subcommunities with generations of inherited wealth. We do, of course, have wealthy people and an “upper middle class.” The people born after 2000 do not socialize in the same way the youth used to, for better or for worse.
I first read this book years and years ago as the son of a downwardly mobile family attending an upper-prole college. And as John warns, it fundamentally changed the way I understood everyone around me and made me hyperaware of my own tastes and behaviors. Somehow, I zig-zagged my way up the ladder a bit enough to encounter, and work among, the real upper and upper-middle class of my midsized city. I had grown up in the same city as these people but had never encountered them at all before. They have done an incredible job of isolating themselves from both the mids and the proles despite their geographic proximity.
What I find particularly interesting now are the class distinctions between the strivers and the inter-generationally wealthy, both of whom I encounter in law practice. The old money people (OMPs) erect these invisible barriers that the stivers have difficulty perceiving. The strivers lean hard into the value of education and intellectual pursuits while the OMPs are almost anti-intellectual. The OMPs often have done very well academically, but it is assumed that of course you’d do whatever needed to be done to maintain your class standing. One shouldn’t lean on it too much. That’s tacky. If you admit to an OMP that you are reading St. Augustine or studying Greek in your free time, they will smirk. Acceptable leisure activities for them generally involve socializing at the club, playing golf or tennis, or spending time at your lake house. Why would you read a book? Basically, any expression of genuine excitement or earnest curiosity is right out. Everything hast to be held a little at arm’s length. The strivers like to travel to Europe and will pack their days with sightseeing. The OMPs travel to Europe, too, but they do little sightseeing. A more appealing vacation for an OMP might be skiing. They love skiing. And it’s kind of understandable why: you have to do it regularly, it costs a lot, you have to know where to go and when to go, and there’s a lot of unusual equipment and clothing involved. It's perfectly frivolous. It’s very difficult for strivers to break into this world if you didn’t grow up in it—especially if you all live in the South. While the strivers like to attend the symphony or the ballet, the OMPs sit on the board but leave halfway through the performance. And in law practice, while the strivers do most of the work, the OMPs have all the clients.
One thing I've noticed is that most people consider their class to be the ideal one. Personally, I like reading and touring and dislike skiing for all the reasons that make it highbrow. I *would* prefer to leave halfway through the classical concert though.)
I think most people fail to achieve escape velocity because they actually do hold the values of their class dearly and struggle to value those of the next class up, even if they can afford them. I'm curious how you found that, as a "striver" who changed classes.
That is a good observation and an interesting question. I was raised essentially with striver ideals and taught that academic success was the avenue for career achievement and economic stability. And that's how I made it to where I am. Law practice is, of course, full of people like me. But breaking into that next tier of OMPs hasn't really happened for me, and that is largely by choice. As you observe, I do prefer my striver ideals. I like reading St. Augustine and learning classical Greek. I like going to Europe and visiting historical sites. I don't want to join the country club or go skiing. I often enjoy the social company of OMBs. They can be quite fun and charming. But there's a lot about myself that I have to hide from them. I have seen people "move up" into that sphere but it's not for me. From the striver perspective, the OMPs can come across a surprisingly boorish, shallow, and morally "flexible."
‘… most people consider their class to be the ideal one.’
I agree, and it makes for a happy world. Everyone gets to enjoy disapproving of or laughing at others’ lives and habits, which makes everyone happy. The nice thing is that it is just as easy and satisfying to disapprove of/ laugh at idle and entitled posh wasters as it is to disapprove of (or laugh at) petty bourgeois strivers or the feckless underclass Lots of fun for everyone. In the UK, we have always enjoyed this game. Welcome to our world.
I'm so glad I'm a Delta!
👀🫥
Fussell should be humiliated by proposing "Class X", which is clearly the (self-defeating) upper-middle attempt to ascend into the upper by demonstrating superior sophistication via tasteful subversion of good taste. Class X is not some escape, it is just the same old engine that keeps the thing turning (which is why it diffused down to the middle class over the next generation or so).
Conscious subversion of class expectation is the core goal of (failing) upper middle status climbers. Why? Because actual indifference to class expectation is the fundamental class marker of the upper class, and the climbing upper middles are ineptly aping it.
True ascent to the upper requires actually not caring, which is why the upper class is so hard to enter: it must be stumbled into indifferently like some magic door only found by those who do not seek it. Being third+ generation rich unsurprisingly makes this easier.
Class X became Gen X…my theory is that Fussell and his friends became the cool aunts and uncles for the latchkey generation to aspire to
Something something Strauss Howe turnings etc
Yeah, I think people pursuing that aesthetic "won" the status game and so encouraged the next generation to immitate their signifiers. The key thing is that the idea that "Class X" is somehow outside the class striver system is obviously absurd. Compare:
"‘I am more intelligent and interesting than you are: please do not bore me.’"
to
“Create a rich, warm, sensual allusion to your own good taste that will demand respect and consideration in every setting you care to imagine.”
The first is just as embarrassingly insecure as the second, just targeted at upper-middle instead of middle, which is why the first appeals to upper-middles, but the second is eye-roll-inducingly pathetic.
I agree with the Psmiths: it really was a genuinely bohemian rejection of the system back in the 1980s when Fussell was writing, but the upper middle class took it in the 2000s (as documented by David Brooks) and now it's middle-class.
The framing of it as a way of becoming more interesting and sophisticated than one's upper-middle class peers shows it is still part of the same status games. It isn't even the first time this aesthetic was adopted by the upper-middle class, and then filtered down for wider consumption.
The Bohemian lifestyle became appealing among the children of wealthy families of good-breeding in the 1860-70s, and filtered down into popular culture via books and plays, and ultimately the opera La Boheme, which showed a romantic ideal of the Bohemian lifestyle quite distinct from the the well-to-do young Englishman sowing their wild oats who often actually lived briefly as "starving" artists in Paris.
I'm not sure how it started; I was too young to be sensitive to these things in Fussell's time. I think Fussell was probably flattering himself at the time, but I suspect it might have begun with hippies doing what they wanted at the start, possibly earlier on in the 60s or 70s. We may never know.
I definitely agree it got incorporated into status games and filtered down afterward; we probably won't know what the new 'Category X' of our era is for 30 years or so.
I think we may be living through an actual structural change in the ability of the class system to propagate itself, so Fussell may finally get what he wants. Low fertility, large amounts of economically successful and culturally influential immigration, a disproportionate amount of wealth being held by first generation tech moguls, all create a large population of people with the financial, institutional, and cultural weight of the previous inheritor upper class, but who are not cultural members of it. This reduces the pressure for any individual to assimilate into its norms.
The breakdown of different audiences for different things the Psmiths mention is a big part of this too.
I submit that the genuinely not caring aspect of the uppers is due to their genuine lack of anxiety that they should ever be in actual need. It’s a subtle state that I, born a middle, have only caught a glimpse of: that no matter who you really are, what you do, or what happens, you will always have a cushion, a place, a means to make it better. George W. Bush is an example of this. But I must object to calling Trump a prole: the declaration betrays the class anxiety of the author to do so. Liking Trump is coded prole, which of course is not the same thing. Trump’s a striver, obviously, and striving is the quintessential characteristic of the middle classes. I think one has to take into account the context of New York and its particular status hierarchy to parse him correctly. What’s for certain is the uppers didn’t want to let him in, because you can’t get there by storming the gates, that’s kinda rule no. 1, and got lots of their upper middle class servants to try and keep him out. The whole topic is fascinating and I’ve often wondered why so few write about it. My current hypothesis is that no one truly transcends the class they grew up with. That’s not to say class is static. Strivers create the next upper class as the uppers fade … as they are bound to, because they don’t have that strivers energy. It’s their cadres - the upper middles - who sense the passing with anxiety and try to hold back the inevitable. I think that’s what we’re seeing now. The upper class of the late 20th century is played out, and everybody knows it.
Trump’s tastes are extremely prole. He is very wealthy and very influential, but he emphatically doesn’t try to ape the style and mannerisms of other (“higher”) classes.
Trump is a bizarre one-of-a-kind aberration within the US class system, best ignored by anyone trying to understand it. I think deep down he's a lower-upper class man pretending to be a lower class man's idea of an upper class man in order to annoy the actual upper class, but probably with several other epicycles of irony attached.
Trying to understand him in particular doesn't get you any closer to understanding the US class system, and extending your theories of the US class system to cover him just makes everything more confusing.
Gold-plated baroque furnishings doesn't count as aping the style of higher classes? Honestly AFAIK that's not something most people of any class try to ape, these days, but he does.
Gold plated everything is the working class idea of upper class.
To me it betrays anxiety that one’s origins aren’t quite as classy as they’d like. Having to put on a show for others is for strivers. Neither the real uppers or the real lowers care that much about appearances.
Sorry but gold dipped everything isn’t prole. It’s wannabe upper class. I find his taste, well, distasteful, but I’m certainly not going to use that to damn him. On the contrary, I’m exactly the kind of person who should look down on Trump, but I’ve been forced by circumstances and my own commitment to reality to examine the Trump phenomena further. It’s extremely frustrating to see people jump to vast conclusions based on a single data point. Forget guns and religion, the clinging to the assumptions of the last century is truly next level. And I still don’t share his taste.
I see Trump as the poor man's idea of a rich man, the weakling's idea of a strong man.
I saw "Class X" as basically hipsters, or maybe the way hipsters see themselves.
The "I don't have a TV" of today is "I'm not on social media" :D
I don't think this analogy holds at the level of class signifier, because active participation in the miserable parts of social media (e.g., Twitter and Bluesky) is upper middle descending to middle.
Maybe "oh, I haven't really gone on TikTok" would be akin to bragging about no TV, as it is similarly seen as widespread low-brow media consumption.
The problem with that, is that these days that can mean "I might as well not exist".
and the truly highbrow don't exist in the same spaces as us low-end types.
... making everyone who writes or comments on Substack a Prole.
_Praesente comitatu excepta_, of course.
I'm willing to pretend that Substack doesn't count if you are.
Great review. A couple comments.
The brief mention of Hamilton took me on a mental detour -- for the record, I really like it and don't think it's 'midwit', I think it's just a middle-class cultural product and that is only kind of related to intelligence for the same reason that everything else written about the middle-class here is only kind of related to intelligence.
Its position at the end of a class treadmill normalizing rap music is a good shout, but I don't think this is really a change in the character of musicals. Musicals in the American theater have never really been particularly High Art, they are fundamentally campy and garish and have only a limited relationship to their theatrical cousins from the old world. The best evidence of this is of course that Trump himself famously loves musicals and he has certainly never appreciated "High Art" in his life. Rap fits perfectly. It's also all tied up in the sort of orthogonal status hierarchies of gay and NYC ethnic culture which do not perfectly map onto the boundaries discussed here, which are mostly about the stratification of standard American whites, and for that reason the analysis in the article might apply to Hamilton as a show you can watch on Disney+ or listen to on Spotify but not really in its original Broadway form. Anyway, upper middle-class people do enjoy musicals, but they mostly do it ironically and as a Fun Outing, not as a serious cultural experience in the way you might get from going to the orchestra or a production of Shakespeare or even just a Met exhibition.
What I think is much more interesting is that the upper-middle class really dislikes Hamilton in a way that they do not despise other musicals, despite those typically being *less* tasteful. The quantity of discourse on why Hamilton is Actually Bad is kind of crazy when you zoom out a bit, given that it is in my view clearly one of the better products of American musical theater (though, again, this is not some enormously high bar). I expect this is because it blurs the lines between middle-class and upper-middle cultural products -- the embedded historicity and political self-seriousness feels too much like the sort of thing upper-middle class people make. Too many people unironically enjoy it as art, which is threatening to the upper-middle cultural position that is defined by only enjoying middle-class cultural products (musicals, summer blockbusters, genre fiction, etc.) in an ironic or 'guilty pleasure' mode.
This leads me to my main takeaway, which is that I think both the review and the book (which I have, in fairness, only consumed through this and a few other reviews), are a view of the class system from within the upper-middle class. Which is entirely fair, of course, no matter how much you try you're not going to escape your own frame. But I think this is precisely the reason for the contempt of the middle-middle. The upper-middle class *is* full of status anxiety, only instead of a positive status anxiety about constantly trying to improve their perceived position (i.e., what the middle class is accused of doing), they are trying to distinguish themselves as much as possible from the people they already know are below them, to preserve the exclusivity of their class as much as possible. There is nothing they hate or fear more than being seen as middle-class. To jump on a note from the review -- I don't actually think most upper-middle class people would see a suggestion that their son should become a plumber as an insult, it would be more of a bemused confusion, unless it was knowingly delivered as an insult by a person of similar status (middle-middle people would *absolutely* see this as an insult, though). I think they're much more likely to be insulted by the idea that their child should be a primary school teacher, i.e., a properly middle-middle profession.
Last note to tie this all together is that I think the degree to which upper-middle class people control cultural production is vastly overstated here, though this is a widely held self-congratulatory view by upper-middle people. Maybe you could argue that mass culture is downstream of high culture and academia, which the upper-middle actually controls, but I don't think this is really true anymore. But of course just like with Hamilton, it would be silly to think of Taylor Swift, Hollywood blockbusters, television, almost every popular fiction book released in a given year, or basically any cultural product consumed by a wide audience whatsoever as being an upper-middle product.
From my view as an upwardly-mobile person born into a prole family, the middle-middle is really the main character and motivating force of American culture and upper-middle psychology is really about smart people trying as hard as they can to conceal this fact from themselves by pretending the middle-middle are aping them, when the upper-middle is mostly forming its culture by *contradicting* the middle-middle.
I think you are one of those people who if they started publishing regularly would be a famous blogger within the year
Nodded most of the way til the end, then I had to think. I believe you're right about contemporary culture being middle class too. The upper middle class tends to rely on culture that's been pre-vetted as classy. Classical music, art museums, etc, are safe. New culture often comes from a place of discomfort. Most obviously, comedians are a class of misfits who turn their discomfort into laughs. Comedians don't come from the affluent or socially secure. Taylor Swift has always been well-off but culturally prole, and therefore highly relatable. I don't think upper-middle class people are good at creating relatable content outside of self-help books, although this blog is a fairly good contradiction of that observation.
"It's also all tied up in the sort of orthogonal status hierarchies of gay and NYC ethnic culture which do not perfectly map onto the boundaries discussed here, which are mostly about the stratification of standard American whites...."
A good point, one that I also thought of when I read the book - the class hierarchies and tastes Fussell describes seem to only apply to dominant culture whites, or at least they don't discuss anyone outside that sphere much.
> It’s pretty obvious what happened here: sometime after Class was written, the upper-middle class adopted the trappings of Fussell’s category X.
No! There was never any "category X", it was always just fringe upper-middles trying to be not like other upper middles. The only unusual thing was that this "bobo" cluster of behaviors they random-walked to at that time turned out to be more catchy than usual. And so it spread to more people, impressed Fussell and later became acceptable to regular middle class. Then the book was written and now there are "bobos in paradise" food bars and so on to cultural irrelevance.
"Category X" is just Fussell autosuggesting himself that his aspirational reference group are, like, so cool man, they are _totally_ breaking the mold. It's the funniest chapter in the book.
This 100%.
It's pretty comfy in my prole world. It's Monday but I am unemployed so I am reading Heart of Darkness. It has nothing to do with Africa and everything to do with dying before we have finished what we have set out to do. I hope reading books is finally a prole thing so I don't sound pretentious. I can't imagine anyone but a prole would think that reading would help you ascend.
The Nazi Ford joke is gold. The sticker is going on my Ford Taurus right over my RonPaul Revolution.
There does exist a whole subgroup of prole homeschool moms reading classic literature to and with their children.
You're probably the version of Category X that exists now; Fussell's Category X signifiers have gone middle class, as the Psmiths say.
There should be a name for people who are trying against the human nature to not compare. Like fatties who already know that they should eat less, we know what's the thief of joy and there is no point of repeating that. The goal is to trick your brain into not noticing. That's where I want to belong.
The polyamory people are always trying to avoid jealousy.
I'm not sure they're ever really successful.
Was Charles Bukowski prole?
Is that a trick question? He worked in a post-office with no even a hint of ironic detachment. How mid!
I'm not saying he's upper class lol. Do you think he fits neatly with the description of proles above -- or is he an X? (I'm just having fun, I know the world doesn't fit into our neat boxes.) And no, btw, reading classic litterature has not become prole yet.
If I had to choose one identifier of an X person, it would the attitude of being content with one's life. Bukovski, if we just accept everything he wrote as autobigraphical, seemed to want a stable middle class lifestyle plus being able to write, nothing more than that. Maybe I am misremembering X as being conspicuosly intellectual, which doesn't fit my idea of Bukovski.
An interesting review but the following statement is certainly wrong--but wrong, I suppose, in a very interesting way:
"Do you remember the “New England Republican”? That was actually just euphemistic code for “upper-middle class Republican,” much as “Reagan Democrat” secretly meant “middle class Democrat” and “Southern Democrat” meant “high-prole Democrat.” Watch either party’s convention, watch their congressional delegation, or their rallies, and there was a pleasing diversity in accent, dress code, and implied social position."
. A Southern gentry democrat was not the same thing as a northeastern prole democrat. A southern prole democrat was not even the same thing as a southern prole democrat! Sam Rayburn and Al Smith were different: different in aesthetics, ideology, and sense of self. They were both offensive to contemporary northeastern WASPs but they were not the same and no one living in 1930 would have credibly claimed as much. So it really was well into the 1980s. Those words were not euphemistic codes. They described the most important divisions in American culture and politics.
It can be difficult to appreciate just how regionalized American culture used to be. We live in a homogenizing age. A coffee ship in Bozeman is the same as a coffee shop in Atlanta is the same as a coffee shop in rural Vermont. The working class white guy in California, Texas, and Minnesota all listen to music sung in the same country twang--even though only one of those guys might hear such a twang in real life.
Fussel has many shortcomings. But his largest is probably his conflation of regional class norms with national, or even human, ones. What has Fussel has to say was true of non-ethnic white people in the Mid Atlantic states between 1940 and 1970. It did not accurately describe the class mores of a Jewish hollywood executives or Texas oil barons--even though by the time the book was published both groups were entering their third generation at the top of American wealth and influence. This is a real limitation to his work--a limitation our generation is less likely to notice as so many of these regional cultural differences disappear.
I wish we'd had more time and space to get into the regionalism, because I think you're right that Fussell conflates these things. He says, more or less straight out, that the higher your class in America, the more Yankee you are. (Actually I think he says that places are higher class the longer they've been inhabited by "financially prudent Anglo-Saxons," which is a delightful turn of phrase but amounts to the same thing.)
Fussell isn't 100% right about the Yankee thing, but he isn't totally wrong, either.
I agree. The Jews belong in a different category. They are, after all, the chosen people.
There's been a lot of intermarriage between Jews and Fussell's upper three classes since the 1980s, I think. I was looking at some Saltonstall running for office in Massachusetts and was surprised to note he was actually Jewish somehow.
Aristocracies taking new blood in over the course of generations is an old story. If you don't you get stuff like the king of Spain with 10 great-great-grandparents.
Sure. In his case, the root is still yankee.
I think the thing about Anglo-Saxons is outdated: https://substack.com/home/post/p-159015422
The book was published in the 1980s, so 40 years out of date, and class signifiers are always changing. I remember reading it and thinking it was a barrage of useless trivia at best, outright fiction at worst.
What class is Peter Thiel?
My main takeaway from this is that American class is more similar to UK class than I thought! The categories are all very recognisable from a UK standpoint in terms of behaviour, I think the main difference is just the willingness to call yourself working class in the UK.
I feel like when some Americans say “middle class” they mean what in the UK they mean when they say “working class”.
I think that most proles (by Fussel's definition) will self-identify as middle class. If you've got steady employment and a full set of teeth in the US then you call yourself middle class.
I love your review. I read Class when it first came out. I can’t say it changed my life, but it definitely changed my outlook on other people’s lives.
However, I have to point out that you missed what I think is Fussells’s most obvious marker of class: the size of the ball in the sports one follows or participates in (of course another marker is “I don’t like sports” - but that’s another discussion altogether). The size of the ball being inversely correlated with the class as polo and golf have small balls, football (both American and the rest of the world’s football) and basketball have large ones. Baseball and cricket being right in between.
Ah, pinball, the classiest of sports
Nothing classier than playing marbles
I was going to object that those are games not sports, but table tennis is definitely a sport and not particularly classy, so this is not universally true.
Even golf and tennis, these days, have been democratized to the point that their classiness is questionable. OTOH, I think Fussell would be the first to admit that none of the class markers are foolproof.
Except perhaps pachinko
We can say Donald Trump has the taste of a prole, but he clearly circulates in more exclusive circles than you and I. Income may not be the sole arbiter of class, but it clearly matters.
This was something that struck me about "Inventing Anna." She attempts to take on all the trappings of the upper class, but ends up fraternizing with a bunch of lower and middle class people.
It's not just taste, and it's not just income... those are decorative. There's some attitude toward life, some je ne sais quoi if you will, that the upper class sniff on each other and they know if you don't belong.
That too is culture! (And explains the affinity between the upper class and the proles, neither of whom care about middle and upper-middle status signaling games.)
According to the much simpler framework in Understanding Poverty, he's upper class because his affection is entirely conditional. There are only 3 classes in that book.
He is crass. The gold toilet says it loudly. His dad was a slumlord. His women are of dubious origin. His first wife was a model. That says a lot.
After reading Class, I once astounded my wife into speechlessness by pointing out (as evidence of how U/MC are pre-school was) the lack of fat kids.
(I made a similar observation once in grad school, noting out of my cohort of 50-ish there was only one morbidly obese and one just normally obese member)
I am French and that fact alone gives me enough ambiguity to put me in the upper
Reviews of this book are always fun to read, but the book does seem dated to me (as John noted.) The out-of-sight uppers don't seem to have really maintained a cohesive "class" over the decades (maybe due to the change in admission policies at the elite universities that was pointed out.) The U.S. has high “downward mobility from the top,” meaning wealthy children are more likely to drop down the income distribution than similar children in Denmark, Canada, or the U.K. (Research by Chetty et al. (2014–2017) shows that children born to the top 1% have only about a 33% chance of remaining in the top 10% as adults. In Scandinavian countries, persistence at the top is stronger.)
Of course, as noted, you can be upper class but not rich yourself, but this may only last one or two generations. If your parents and grandparents aren't rich, you won't inherit an upper class position. If your parents are rich, you can be upper class throughout your life even if you don't make it yourself, but your kids likely won't. Wealth concentration in the U.S. depends heavily on active income and market dynamics rather than intergenerational smoothing systems.
America is also a huge country and people tend to move a lot. Furthermore, eveyone is simply less likely to socialize nowadays. Being upper class meant being born with intergenerational wealth and living in a community of other who also had intergenerational wealth. But nowadays everybody just spends their time on the internet instead of socializing with stable groups, and so "class" feels less salient in the way it might once have.
I'm not sure you're right about that. I don't think the upper echelons are failing to socialize with each other. Whether it's taking classes at the 92nd street Y, membership at the right country club, getting invited to the right fundraiser dinners, serving on the boards of the right organizations, they are plenty good at making sure to rub elbows with the right people. This entire strata is invisible to most of us below.
I did one find a discarded copy of a glossy magazine on the Upper East Side that was about and for rich people. There were photos of who wore what at what gala. one article was written by several teenagers explaining how they'd done a tour of Europe over summer break without adults and it had gone really well. The advertisements were for matchmaking services.
I think you are correct. It is a lot more prevalent than SorenJ imagines. I suspect this is so because as you note the socializing of both adults and children is in private spaces. Clubs. Foundations and galas. Private events. Private schools. Etc.
I am well aware of foundations, galas, country clubs, private schools, etc. I know a lot of these people, and am a member or participant in a fair amount of it!
But very little of this meets the very strict criteria of “Upper Class” described in the book. It is all “Upper Middle Class.”
This was one of the points made. While you think you are describing the upper class, you are actually describing the upper middle class (allegedly).
Good point. By Fussell’s terms we’re all upper-middle, since the true uppers are so rare and invisible they wouldn’t be at the gala or the regatta at all, but at home pretending not to exist.
Yeah you put it more succinctly than me, but that is what I was getting at. I think maybe a group like that did exist at one point, but nowadays it is pretty small. The upper middle is, if anything, even more influential than they once were. If none of the billionaires in the US can be said to be “upper class,” then who really is upper class? A handful of families in NYC?
True multigenerational dynastic wealth combined with multigenerational old money attitudes and pedigrees are increasingly rare today. Some east coast families. The Fords. That sort of thing.
Today’s tech billionaires would be vulgar, conspicuous, upper-middle/prole plutocrats unless and until their grandchildren have turned the fortune into quiet, boring lineage.
Yeah I think it still exists to an extent, it is just not that prevalent, and I don’t think the markers in the book are relevant anymore. NYC would be one of the few places in the US where it is more relevant.
Let me try to rephrase: if only 0.001% of the populations meet the criteria (and remember, the criteria according to the book is not just about wealth. Most of the billionaires in the US would not be “upper class”), and those people aren’t all going to the same elite colleges, then is it really a cohesive “class?”
I grew up in the mountain west, so I don’t even think we have an “upper class” at all because it is not old enough to have subcommunities with generations of inherited wealth. We do, of course, have wealthy people and an “upper middle class.” The people born after 2000 do not socialize in the same way the youth used to, for better or for worse.
This is a wonderful review of a book I love very much – thanks for the updates!
In the shadow of your last attack, I was questioning and looking back. You said baby we don’t speak of that, like a real aristocrat.
What level of middle class do I present as, sharing Vampire Weekend lyrics on Substack?🤔
Fascinating article. Definitely something I will be pondering for days to come.
Nothing like a nice casual Great Replacement conspiracy theory, amazing what has become salonfähig these days.