3.03 The Middle?

Middle Class?

Putting the Dimensions of Class Together

Many elements of everyday life such as a person's income, wealth, education, job status/prestige and where they live combine to form a rough picture of social class.  There is not a universally accepted model for social class but income, wealth, education, location, prestige/power all can arguably play a part in determining class.

Using your knowledge of what the median American looks like, let's evaluate social class in America.  Think about these guiding questions as we go along today:

• What are the different classes in the US?
• Is there a middle class, and if so, what is it?

The median American looks like this:

household income:         ~ $80K

wealth (PEW):                 may or may not have any retirement savings, 1.8 cars,                                                $192K total assets

education:                    some college but no degree

location:                        small city ~ 1million peo (Fresno, Tulsa)

prestige 

(Github, prestige.com): high blue collar (police officer) or low white collar (social worker)

Knowing the median is the middle American (50th percentile), what is your opinion about how large should the middle class be?  That is, how much above the median and below the median should be considered the "middle class" (For example, should it be from percentiles 80-20, 75-25, 60-40, or something else)? And then what would you consider the other classes?  (There is no right answer here, just want to get you thinking.)

The peak of the middle class in the US was arguably during the post-WWII decades (1945-1975).  Since then, the middle class has been changing - shrinking and becoming more limited and more difficult to attain.  

Sociologists have attempted to define the middle in various ways.  One example from PEW, Are you in the American middle class uses income and location to determine the middle class. You can use that link above to examine how your own family compares to the rest of the US and whether PEW places them in the middle class. 

Here is the Google Form for this Lesson.

1.  Using the link from the PEW, was the estimate from PEW the same as where you would've placed your family? Were you surprised at all how your family compares to the US, why or why not?

There is not an empirical division between social classes in the US. Sociologists have used different models of social class to explain how social class disaggregates in the United States.

Gilbert's Model
The table below is based on Hamilton College professor Dennis Gilbert's 1992 model of social class.  Look at the table and notice how Gilbert uses multiple measures (job, income, education) to parse out the classes. 

2.  Which class do you think your family is, based on Gilbert's model?  Do all three components for your family fit his model?

Joan Williams

After the 2016 election of Trump which surprised many people, Williams who wrote an article (posted here in Harvard Business Review) to explain the reasons that so many people voted for Trump.  She was mostly writing to people with college degrees who live in large cities who could not understand why people voted for him. Her article was expanded into a book, White Working Class; Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America.

Williams' book is a useful guide to understanding the growing chasm between classes in the US.  She explains that the lifestyle, value and nuance differences between classes in is so large that the term "middle" is no longer useful.  Gilberts model uses Upper-middle, lower middle and working class all as part of the "middle" class.  Williams redefines the "upper middle" as professional managerial elites and she does not consider them to be part of the middle class. Here is a list and a chart of how Williams defines classes in the US:

Watch her Ted Talk below.  

 

3. After reading Williams' article posted here in Harvard Business Review or after watching the Ted Talk above, what do you think of her assessment of the contrast between the professional managerial elite class and the working class?  Do you understand why she is saying that this results in a political divide?

If you want to watch additional videos or a shorter one or see additional resources about Williams' work, check these out:

• Here is a 2 minute explanation by the author on Youtube.
• Here is a 4 minute interview with the author on Fox News.
• And Williams started a project to address the education divide called Diploma Divide.
• (Extra) For more about her work, see these:
• Review from Harvard Magazine here.
• Review from Financial Times.
• Review from Medium here.
• Powerpoint slides here.

Other sociologists that support Joan Williams' thesis

There have been a number of recent works by sociologists that explore social class dynamics.  Most of them confirm the divide that Williams explains and also add their own nuance.  Take a look at each of the brief explanations below:

In Stolen Pride (2024) sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains (from a NYT review) that, "white, blue-collar conservatives feel that they had been waiting in line for the American dream only to have Democratic constituencies — educated women and minorities, for example — cut ahead of them. In “Stolen Pride,” Hochschild elaborates that those voters saw Barack Obama as a bully helping the line-cutters advance. Trump then emerged as the “good bully” who was strong enough to fight back."

Hochschild also wrote Pride and Prejudice in JD Vance Country published in Mother Jones (2024).

Robert Wuthnow's The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America

Princeton University sociologist, Robert Wuthnow explains the dynamic that Joan Williams describes in his book The Left Behind; Decline and Rage in Rural America that location has strongly affected how rural Americans feel and how they vote.  

Here is a 2018 interview with Professor Wuthnow from Vox.

From Princeton U. Press:

What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order — the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities—underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington’s seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.

Arlie Russell Hochschild's Strangers in their Own Land

In her 2016 book, Strangers In Their Own Land; Anger and Mourning on the American Right, renown sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild explains that growing social class inequality happening at the same time as civil rights equality affected many White Americans fto feel like they are left behind by the government and that they are "strangers in their own land."  As a reaction to president Obama's election and the financial bailout of Wall Street in 2009, these conservatives formed the beginning of a new right wing conservativism known as the "Tea Party."  What I found most intriguing in her book was the concept of the "deep story", or a story that shapes the way people feel.  It doesn't matter if the story is real or true or not.  What matters is that the story is believed to be true so people shape their feelings and actions as if it were real.  Dr. Hochschild's idea 

is explained on NPR's Hidden Brain, 
In her new book, Strangers in Their Own Land, sociologist Arlie Hochschild tackles this paradox. She says that while people might vote against their economic needs, they're actually voting to serve their emotional needs. Hochschild says that both conservative and liberals have "deep stories" — about who they are, and what their values are. Deep stories don't need to be completely accurate, but they have to feel true. They're the stories we tell ourselves to capture our hopes, pride, disappointments, fears, and anxieties.

Katherine Cramer's Politics of Resentment

 

Katherine J. Cramer is author of The Politics of Resentment: Rural Consciousness in Wisconsin and the Rise of Scott Walker (University of Chicago Press, 2016) and a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she heads the Morgridge Center for Public Service. Her work focuses on the way people in the U.S. make sense of politics and their place in it. Cramer’s methodology is unusual and very direct. Instead of relying polls and survey data, she drops in on informal gatherings in rural areas—coffee shops, gas stations—and listens in on what people say to their neighbors and friends. It is a method that likely gets at psychological and social truths missed by pollsters.  Summary from Scientific American here explains, 

Many times this resentment comes out as a feeling of, “I’m a deserving person, a hardworking American and the things I deserve are actually going to other people who are less deserving.” Donald Trump’s message really tapped into that sentiment. What I heard him saying was: You are right, you are not getting your fair share, you should be angry, you are a deserving, hardworking American and what you deserve is going to people who don’t deserve it. He pointed his finger at immigrants, the Chinese, bad trade deals, Muslims, uppity women. He gave people concrete targets, and it was a way of sparking anger and mobilizing support.

 

Janesville, An American Story

The author explains that Janesville is "a microcosm of what was happening in many places in the country and with many kinds of work, because that’s what’s been happening out of the Great Recession. The unemployment level has fallen, but income levels have stayed quite depressed since before the Great Recession..."
New Yorker review here.

NPR review here. 

 

Sociologist Jennifer Silva's We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America

From Slate,

In the run-up to the 2016 election, sociologist Jennifer Silva conducted more than 100 in-depth interviews with black, white, and Latino working-class residents of a struggling coal town in Pennsylvania. Many of the people she spoke with were nonvoters in 2016 and before. Their politics, she writes in her new book We’re Still Here: Pain and Politics in the Heart of America, were often a hodgepodge of left and right. Their views could appear “incoherent or irrational” on the surface: Many of them trusted Donald Trump because of his wealth, for example, even as they supported higher taxes on the rich.

Many of the people Silva interviewed were profoundly cynical about social institutions, government, marriage, and family ties. They had often suffered trauma, such as domestic violence or military-related PTSD, and were in near-constant physical and/or psychological pain. Instead of placing their hope in systems that have failed them repeatedly, Silva finds, they worked to recast their own stories of pain into opportunities for individual self-improvement. Organized into groups of brief profiles from the town she anonymized as “Coal Brook, Pennsylvania,” the book is an unsparing and empathetic portrait of a diverse corner of blue-collar America.

Silva, a sociologist at Indiana University Bloomington, was raised in a working-class family in Massachusetts. Her father dropped out of high school to join the military, and she was the first in her family to get a bachelor’s degree. When we spoke on the phone last month, we talked about working-class white people’s affinity for Trump, the rise of conspiracy theories, Hillbilly Elegy, and the lessons that 2020 presidential candidates can take from her research. This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

Notre Dame Sociology professor Rory McVeigh and Creighton professor Kevin Estep's The Politics of Losing trace the parallels between the 1920s Klan and today’s right-wing backlash, identifying the conditions that allow white nationalism to emerge from the shadows. White middle-class Protestant Americans in the 1920s found themselves stranded by an economy that was increasingly industrialized and fueled by immigrant labor. Mirroring the Klan’s earlier tactics, Donald Trump delivered a message that mingled economic populism with deep cultural resentments. McVeigh and Estep present a sociological analysis of the Klan’s outbreaks that goes beyond Trump the individual to show how his rise to power was made possible by a convergence of circumstances. White Americans’ experience of declining privilege and perceptions of lost power can trigger a political backlash that overtly asserts white-nationalist goals. The Politics of Losing offers a rigorous and lucid explanation for a recurrent phenomenon in American history, with important lessons about the origins of our alarming political climate.

Review of the book in Contexts here.

4. Choose one of the books above and explain what the book adds to Williams' ideas about the class divide.  (Be sure to say which book)

5.  Any questions about defining the middle class?

Kohn and Lareau; Social Class Differences in Parenting

Family shapes people differently based on the social class of the family.   In her book Unequal Childhoods, Annette Lareau explains that parents from working-class households emphasize following rules and discipline while upper-middle-class parents teach their kids to take risks, negotiate, and think creatively.  Lareau explains how these different parenting methods shape children from different social classes:

• Upper middle-class families encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority and it can give the children a sense of entitlement.
• Working-class and lower-income families encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and these parents do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method teaches the children to respect people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.

Lareau explains these differences in her research.  Her book, Unequal Childhoods is explained in the Atlantic here.  And there is an excerpt available here.

Lareau identifies these two styles:

Concerted Cultivation: The parenting style, favored by middle-class families, in which parents encourage negotiation and discussion and the questioning of authority, and enroll their children in extensive organized activity participation. This style helps children in middle-class careers, teaches them to question people in authority, develops a large vocabulary, and makes them comfortable in discussions with people of authority. However, it gives the children a sense of entitlement.

Accomplishment of Natural Growth: The parenting style, favored by working-class and lower-class families, in which parents issue directives to their children rather than negotiations, encourage the following and trusting of people in authority positions, and do not structure their children's daily activities, but rather let the children play on their own. This method has benefits that prepare the children for a job in "working" class jobs, teaches the children to respect and take the advice of people in authority, and allows the children to become independent at a younger age.

Student discussion:

Why do you think each social class shapes kids these ways?  Brainstorm your own hypothesis here.

Analyze either your family or a family you know - which style do you think they are and why?  Can you give a specific example?

Extra

Here is a an article from the Washington Post explaining the difficulty of defining the middle class.