Tag Archives: class

Class Notes

I write today about what we call the upper middle class. These people are not the soaring elites of inherited wealth, or titans of tech or entertainment. The relative influence of any individual in this class may be small, but as a societal force, they are overwhelming. They are the 20 percent of the income ladder, a realm populated by people in finance, tech, law, medicine, and management consulting. Some aren’t quite that rich, but do control legacy institutions of cultural influence. This class (hereafter the UMC for short) doesn’t always control capital in the traditional sense, but they fill the same social function as the bourgeois Marx wrote about. Two writers who go by The Psmiths, in this illuminating debate on the work of cultural taxonomist Paul Fussell, categorize them well. As they note, this is the sort of thing that, once noticed, is hard to unsee in many parts of life.

UMC members are, effectively, the tastemakers of modern America, those who set the bar that a less affluent middle class tends to chase. (Hence the suburban tract home, the period piece TV show, the middlebrow bestselling novel, the Disney vacation, and the perception that anything French is fancy, all of which are outsiders’ imitations of what the UMCs do or consume for fun.) The UMCs are also those whom the class Fussell calls the high proles (the non-educated well-off, who give us our law enforcement and home repair and small business starts and Donald Trump) and the rebellious far left define themselves against. Social media has had some flattening effects, and also some obscuring effects, but the overall position is not really in question. They are our arbiters.

One could plausibly argue the successes of this class are the reason living standards in the US have pulled away from other first world nations. A few titans get a lot of the attention and their knock-on effects certainly employ a lot of this class, but they alone haven’t been enough to affect median income numbers, at least not directly. The US’s economic advantage isn’t in a narrowing middle class, and it certainly isn’t at the bottom. Instead it comes from this upper middle class doing well, first in high-end services and later in tech. Over time they have also absorbed a lot from what had been the counterculture in a previous generation and cultivated an economy of nicer grocery stores and higher-end home goods and a vast cultural universe of somewhat nice things.

But if the upper middle class is an engine for affluence and American taste, it also has its peculiarities. A quote I have heard but cannot properly attribute is that contemporary UMC Americans are the first generation of well-off humans who measure their value by how much, not how little, they work. The top of the pyramid used to be a leisure class who used their accumulated wealth to enjoy life, drifting into cushy jobs and free to busy themselves with frivolous travel and hobbies and social calendars and rituals that even today’s old money would find absurd. That slice of society toward the top has widened now, which is in some ways a triumph of American capitalism, bringing more and more people into what seems to be a genuinely more comfortable lifestyle.

If one lets it be, at least. This top of the pyramid is wider because people have poured themselves into a system dependent on consistent high wages and appreciating assets and getting into that place where one can enjoy the positive upward cycle of compounding investments and stock options and credit card perks. It is inherently more precarious than old money stability, and it demands steady new infusions lest one seem to slip behind. To the well-ordered mind this is not a horrible price to pay. But there are pernicious side effects that, given the UMCs’ place in the order of things, can come to define a general culture. These side effects have also, since my college days, driven me utterly nuts.

The first is the natural workaholism. It starts innocently enough; I remember the crystallizing moment in college being when an otherwise attractive girl launched into a discourse on how “busy” she was, and wore it with a badge of pride. A culture arose around that sentiment, unstated and insidious: if one was not busy, what was one actually doing to advance one’s position? If everyone else was putting in ten hours of study for that test, or working through the night in an entry level job, is someone who doesn’t do so falling behind? Her world was a world in which all doors are supposed to open with the right amount of “hard work,” measured not in ingenuity but in effort expended, no matter how fruitless. Of course much of this work was not fruitless; the truly savvy knew they had to pursue certain internships, certain prestige-inflected steps up the latter, if they wanted to seek out their aspirational place in the hierarchy they had internalized. But as good, non-judgmental folks, the UMC lets people choose the type of hard work they please, so long as they are doing a lot of work.

This obsession with work can beget perfectionism: occupants of this class can be tempted by a conceit to expect everything to work for them and are deeply flummoxed by things that do not. The most skilled UMCs are the ones who know how to take that in stride; I know plenty of people who are in comfortable control of their surroundings. But a few too many struggle to kill the anxiety for things that are beyond their immediate reach. For the most deeply trapped in this mindset, it is not hard to wind up in a world where everyone else exists as an accessory to one’s own self-actualization. I have, in a few instances, perceived this neuroticism beneath the surface of dating life in this world. When people are conditioned by an expectation of special treatment, the anxiety becomes second nature, and the threat of challenging interactions or things going wrong that can exact a huge toll on the members of this class. (And, perhaps even more painfully, the people who are not in it, but think that aping its work habits will let them rise into it.) UMC incentives, if unwatched, can craft people into good worker bees who are amateurs at everything else.

Another real allergy I have is to privilege-hoarding among members of this class. I get it, of course: people want their kids to succeed, and it hurts to watch a child run into obstacles. But the bulldozers who will hunt down and judge their teachers for daring to give their kid something less than an A, or judge a coach if their kid of mediocre talent does not start on a competitive varsity roster, are not a net positive for society. If you want to signal to me that your supposed desire for social equality does not run particularly deep, tell me about the need to buy in a certain community “for the schools.” (Read: a community where my kid does not have to associate with poor people, since the correlation between supposed school quality and income of the people living in the place is very high, and I don’t think the causal arrow goes the way most people in this class want to think it goes.) Are we shocked to learn that such kids can come off as coddled, unable to navigate basic challenges of adulthood, themselves irked at dumb little annoyances and perpetuating an unfortunate cycle into a world of limited trust and self-absorption?

More subtle are the societal effects of the rise of the UMC. As this class has grown more isolated into its own suburbs and neighborhoods, concentrated more into a few preferred schools and created its own sub-markets for higher quality products, it has detached itself from the middle class experience. Selective college admissions has gone from a tough game to an absurdity, with acceptance rates half of what they were when I played it not all that very long ago. This is the class that has bid up real estate, and while that market has strained the finances of nearly everyone, couples within the UMC are at least still grudgingly able to afford things. Nearly all new construction is now aimed at the margins attainable only by people in this class and above. It is not hard to see why people who do not get to go along for this ride have started voting for people who think the system is broken.

Finally, the UMC has a healthy amount of hypocrisy: its members often like to pretend they are not privileged. Much of this is innocent; many members of this class have always been high achievers among other high achievers, so they assume they represent a larger swath of the population than they do. They all go through the same workaholism and often have that sense of precarity, which makes it hard to conceive of oneself as ever having truly made it. Add in the endless mirrors of social media comparison, showing other beautiful people at their best moments and ignoring the drudgery of the work, and rarely do they ever stop to appreciate how well-off they are. The UMC has become an unwitting accomplice in creating a vastly unequal society, one very much at odds with the paeans to equity and equality so often espoused by this class’s loose liberal leanings. (Of course there has been a lot more symbolic privilege-checking since the rise of what gets loosely called “woke,” but most UMCs have not substantively changed the way they live.)

Resentment at the downsides of UMC life has grown, and there are now a few alternatives now on display. Politics offers a few tools, and there are a few on the left who would like to tax the hell out of this class. It’s a tough opponent, though: rallying against the nameless lawyer in Westchester County or the corporate vice president in Minnetonka is a lot harder than going after the eccentric and possibly dangerous billionaire. This class is also very politically connected and has enough numbers (and money) to swing elections. Alternatively, the right now enjoys bashing some institutions the UMC holds dear (colleges, legacy media, museums), but while it can make their lives less enjoyable, it lacks a grand, broadly accepted theory for revolution. The UMCs are, after all, the handmaidens of the economy that boosts everyone’s 401(k)s.

What interests me more are the subtler rebellions, the impression that this game is no longer worth playing. The past decade has seen the rise of the casino economy, a desperate hope of making it against all odds through very perverse forms of effort: chasing influencer status, day trading and crypto, prediction markets and gambling apps. These opt-outs are theoretically open to anyone; the barriers to entry are low. But unlike the meritocracy, which does at least make some conscious (if very imperfect) effort to boost people from modest means up through the system, all of the opt-out systems are much easier to navigate if you already come from or have some money: some parent to seed the habits or some income source to allow for more lottery ticket purchases, and the knowledge of a fallback when the bet doesn’t go through. The winners at the casino are very visible, but they are by definition a very tiny slice of society; it’s a system that rewards a small number at the top while everyone else pretty much loses. And victory in this world is often random, sometimes but definitely not always dependent on special talent or uncommon perseverance. The casino economy is, with scattered exceptions, a stratifying force.

And then there is the great big shrug and the full retreat, the anxious or exhausted ex-striver on a downwardly mobile path who tips into an impermanence of marginal employment and living situations, descents into the endless scroll or the potent array of drugs now at hand. There is a growing “what’s the point of spending all that money on college” movement, which is sensible enough if a kid has a clear desire and plan to, say, become a plumber or an electrician, but the data on outcomes show this is otherwise still pretty awful advice to give kids, leading to more drift and precarity outside of the support networks and positive soft social pressures of college. Most luridly in this space, there is the backlash, the edgelord who goes into the dark corners of the internet and comes out unhinged. These are all, to some degree, downstream of the world the UMCs created.

Their world is our world. The UMCs are a tough target for class warfare, and it’s hard to expect their political opponents on the left and right ever uniting in a lasting way. There is some panic about AI erasing white collar jobs, but my experience among UMCs suggests they are the most likely people to exert some control over these systems and make sure they work for them; if AI blows up on them, I don’t think it will work better for much of anyone else. The influencer power of the casino may continue to reduce their cultural cachet, but the stable money is still there, perhaps further strained but probably the surest bet for a comfortable life.

I write this critique largely from within. I was formed in this milieu, to some degree in Duluth and intensely in DC, and while there is more nuance as I age, it is still the most common social circle in which I find myself. I speak their language and I get a lot of my news and entertainment from the same places they do. The UMCs are often intelligent, able to carry good conversation, and often have wide-ranging interests, capable of building strong theories on sports and enjoying good books. They have taste, which is usually fun, though as in anything can tip into pedantry or absurdity in the wrong hands. When they are not being workaholics (in which case they are not around to be social anyway) or hypocritical (which is rare enough in open conversation), they are a good time.

None of us are as simple as the vague Fussell categories, which continue to change over time. But if my fate is to generally be in the UMC world, I will remain aware of that, and resist the worst of it. Work will never become life, and I will let my eventual spawn find their own way as much as they can rather than trying to clear away all obstacles away do the work for them. I will remain able to enjoy simple pleasures with the true middle class and rip a few beers at a dive bar with the proles and have fun in both settings, even as I also enjoy my art museums and niche novels and wine tastings. And if my financial station remains or grows more pleasantly above average, I will remember it and never take it for granted, and know that my arrival here is in no way a statement of my true human worth. This may be the greatest failure of the meritocratic classes, one it has often visited on the whole of society: we too often forget that a life spent chasing statuses and classes is, too often, a very thin and unsatisfying one.

Cono Sur, Part III: Subiendo

This is the third in a four-part series. Part I | Part II

My first impressions of Buenos Aires are mixed. The drive in from the airport is a slog down an apartment-lined highway. Next, I am greeted by a massive protest on the Avenida 9 de Julio, the greatest of the many great porteño avenues, and my cab driver meanders the neighborhood of San Telmo in dismay. The universities of Buenos Aires have risen in rebellion, marching in blocs of matching shirts for their schools, decrying proposed funding cuts by the country’s radical new president. By this evening hour many are disassembling, but some are still pushing forward, chanting and singing, and others have settled under the Obelisco in the city center with beverages. Signage here and there advertises this and future protests, and the next morning, the cleaning crews are rolling through. Argentine protests spawn their own little economy.

When my taxi finally reaches my last second lodging choice for the night, I find my “Presidential Suite” truly unremarkable, a bare bones all-white room with a light that shines through a frosted glass door all night long. (Hey, it was 30-some bucks.) The walk to the ferry dock in the dark the next morning, mostly through an unremarkable office district, does not help. While the Casa Rosada and the Plaza de Mayo are interesting, against a threatening sky and a tight timeline two friends and I are not compelled to linger, and I find myself perhaps suffering from square fatigue after a month of Spanish urban form. (Now, writing from a land far from them, I crave another evening on one of those plazas.)

The grand avenues and plazas are deceiving. Buenos Aires is a gritty city, a metropolis that encompasses all walks of Argentine life. In this country the immigrants never had the chance to move to tract housing in Jersey. They came to places like the Palermo neighborhood, a rough-and-tumble borderland where city met pampa and where streetfighters paved the way for the tango. While in the US the cowboys were always somewhere off in the great western netherland, a legend now filled by projections, in Buenos Aires the gauchos drifted right in. There was no Midwestern buffer between the frontier and the cosmopolitan center of power, and that collision starkly defined the first century-plus of Argentine existence through near endless civil strife between federalists and nationalists. Pampa life was no distant myth here, and even as some of those dusty immigrant suburbs now gentrify, there is still a raw edge to this city.

Predictably, neither copying European high culture nor wallowing in gaucho hagiography has served Buenos Aires well. Certain political figures such as Juan Perón have, arguably, adopted the worst of both. “I want neither progressivism nor criollismo, in the way those words are commonly used,” writes Jorge Luis Borges in “The Full Extent of My Hope,” an essay that holds up a century later. “The first means subjecting ourselves to being almost-North-Americans or almost-Europeans, a tenacious being almost-others. The second, once a word of action…is today a word of nostalgia.” Buenos Aires is a stark collision between two very different worlds, and the nation it rules is still sorting out the twisting strands of those two great stories.

And yet, Buenos Aires is full of gifts from both inheritances, once one learns how to see it. Borges again: “Never have I given myself over to its streets without receiving some unexpected consolation, whether from feeling unreality, from guitars at the back of some patio, or from contact with other lives,” he writes on his city in Evaristo Carriego. In time, I come to understand his sentiment.

The city starts to open up to me when I turn over tour guide duties to my friend Andrew, who studied abroad here. We visit the San Telmo market, an endless string of vendors on a narrow street through a bustling neighborhood of the same name, a delight of maté paraphernalia, art, cookware, Messi and Mafalda swag, CBD brownies, and any other effect one may find necessary. Instead of musicians, tango dancers do the busking; the garb of choice appears to be tracksuits for Boca Juniors, the working-class soccer superpower. Here is a city teeming with life, crowded and edgy, filled with inheritors of the gaucho tradition, even in a metropolis those forerunners would never know.

And then there is the dream of what can be. We tour the Palacio Barolo, a grand office building near the Argentine Congress whose 1920s builders created an homage to Dante: hell in its ornate main hall gilded with gargoyles and dragons, purgatory in the office spaces, and an ascent to paradise in the narrow tower at the top, which culminates in a cupola with a series of balconies and, two floors above that, a glass lighthouse turret that can hold ten vertiginous people for 360-degree views of Buenos Aires at sunset. The city rolls out in every direction, denser than in Borges’ day but aglow in the night, bustling with beauty. As we go about our tour up and down narrow stairs and 1920s elevators, a man dressed as Dante pops up here and there to read cantos from the Divine Comedy, a very Latin American melodramatic flourish that nonetheless sheds light on the vision behind this building.

The day after the wedding, Andrew, his wife Kara, and I spend the night in Palermo Soho, a trendy neighborhood of tree-lined narrow streets and hipster shops. Borges was born here, and many of the low-slung turn of the century buildings remain, enlivened with brilliant color and elaborate mural art, along with some jarring modern additions. Dinner for the three of us plus old roommate Tim is at Don Julio, rated by some critics as the greatest steakhouse on earth. I am in no position to measure it against the competition, but by 1:30 in the morning when our night there is done, I am in no mood to doubt the claim. The butterflied sirloin melts in my mouth, a malbec and a cabernet franc wash it down, the pumpkin and cheese plates just add life, and despite being overstuffed I will indeed have the dulce de leche ice cream for dessert, thank you very much. Food is an art form here, tradition and inventiveness brought together with utmost care. We drift the few blocks back to the Miravida Palermo Soho, a boutique hotel where I have somehow wound up with the lofted penthouse room with a terrace wrapping around two sides of the building. I end my night blissed out on meat and wine, and I say goodnight to my friends and catch the last snippets of revelry in Palermo on the streets below. I rose to a paradise twice in one night.

A confession: I have spent too much of my life in a state of status anxiety. I’ve long run in circles adjacent to considerable wealth and power and enjoyed some of their benefits while never really holding them myself, a position that provides both great fortune through the access it allows and a nonstop sense that I am somehow falling short, have somehow chosen poorly and consigned myself to being a passenger on the grand plans of others. This feeling is exacerbated by certain habits of the current American upper middle class, which include an eternal instinct to downplay any advantages one does enjoy, a sustained myth of equal footing that does not always play out in reality. Too often have I measured myself against opaque but daunting measures of success, queasily collecting Pell grants or opting out of some activities because I cannot afford them, struggling to find the right balance between a knee-jerk frugality and a desire to experience everything my peers are, if not more. It fosters a lingering sense that, no matter how meticulous I have been, I am not quite ready to launch.

Lately, however, I have been able to allow myself a few more flourishes like this terrace at the Miravida Palermo Soho, and I can at least put up the appearance without feeling false. A small achievement, perhaps, but one freighted with some meaning. The ability to move between worlds is a lesson from Georgetown, a recognition that we can contain multitudes, can aspire to snippets of the best of all the worlds we brush through instead of feeling chained to one. I catch myself over dinner in some grumble over my ability to live in certain ways from my perch in Duluth, but on this balcony, I can write that strain away.

Belonging is not a matter of money or title. It is a matter of taste, a matter of belief, of seizing opportunities when they arise. In the grand scheme those things may be small. It is also dependent on finding the right people, and that is by no means small. But here, on a balcony in Buenos Aires, I rest assured that there is nothing false in certain dreams, that a certain life is within my grasp. It is up to me to seize it.

Part four is here.

Confessions of a Mouthpiece for an Elite Charade

In 2011…Georgetown found itself with a $1.5 million pot of money intended for student activities that the administration no longer wished to administer. It allowed students to vote on how to use the money. Out of several proposals, they chose one to create a “student-run endowment that invested in student and alumni innovative ideas that do good in the world.”…It was a perfectly laudable and well-meaning initiative, and it spoke to how many young people had been trained to think about change in an age dominated by a market consensus: as a thing that could be pursued by investment committee as much as by social and political action.

–Anand Giridharadas, Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

For the first time I’m in my life, I’ve received an indirect mention in a highly acclaimed work of non-fiction. As the public relations director for the Georgetown student government that helped push through the Social Innovation and Public Service (SIPS) fund mentioned in the above quote, I’ll be updating my résumé with a line that reads “Mouthpiece for the Elite Charade to Change the World.”

All joking aside, Anand Giridharadas’s new book came to me at a vital time as I re-think my role as a person on a road to a reasonably comfortable career that seeks to create positive change in one little corner of the world. Winners Take All opens with a chapter that follows a Georgetown student two years behind me (no acquaintance) who, while groomed for a by her financier of a father, also developed a strong urge to do good in the world, in part thanks to Georgetown’s devotion to Jesuit ideals and an Aristotelian philosophical tradition. (The book name-drops two Jesuit priests, Frs. Matthew Carnes and Kevin O’Brien, who I’d cite as mild influences on my life, and major influences on a few friends who did a better job of getting to know them.) As a result, she was drawn to a career at McKinsey, the elite management consulting firm that pitched her on a chance to be a change agent. As she settled in, however, her doubts began to grow: her clients were mostly wealthy corporations, and any public benefit to her work was often tangential at best. Is this really the best way to effect positive change in the 21st century? Or is that claim just a convenient ruse for people who want money and prestige to claim some broader benefit for their work?

Winners Take All takes no prisoners as it examines these do-gooding elites. Giridharadas’ primary targets are not the greed-is-good purveyors of unrestrained capitalism who led the neoliberal rise, but instead the liberals who quietly accept its premises (wittingly or unwittingly) and try to soften the edges. It blasts Silicon Valley in particular for its unctuous claims about changing the world while operating in ways that are blithely indifferent to, if not actively destructive of, the human lives on the other end of the screen. Giridharadas sits down with some philanthropists and social impact investors, who struggle to varying degrees to justify their work and the system that makes their wealth possible. He spends some time with the “thought leaders” from TED talks and Davos lectures who claim to have simple answers as opposed to the old ideal of the public intellectual who sees complexity and pokes holes. No one who tries to “do well by doing good” gets off unscathed, though some certainly emerge as more admirable than others.

Giridharadas concludes with Bill Clinton, the Georgetown alumnus who started his political career as an Arkansas populist before becoming the Third Way triangulator-in-chief as President and the founder for the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), an echo chamber for wannabe world-changing elites who get together to network with one another. (In one of the book’s high points, Giridharadas skewers several CGI panels designed to reflect on rising opposition to high-minded globalists and their seeming loss of touch with the masses that consist only of high-minded globalists.) Giridharadas lingers on Clinton’s closing address at a CGI conference: “All that worked in the modern world was private, donor-financed world-saving, full of good intentions, unaccountable to the public, based on win-win partnerships initiated by companies and philanthropists and other private actors, blessed (sometimes) by public officials…The only problem-solving approach that worked in the modern world, according to Clinton, was one that made the people an afterthought, to be helped but not truly heard.”

While Winners Take All effectively highlights the mixed motives and questionable efficacy of world-changing elites, the quote on Clinton illustrates a perhaps a more serious threat of market-focused theories of social change: the way in which it undermines democratic norms, and indeed the entire public realm as a sphere of human activity. The recent populist turn in American politics will likely make some elites even more comfortable with the idea of some aristocracy operating above the supposed dirty work of day-to-day politicking, which feeds a cycle of bitterness and division. The book makes little effort to offer up an alternative save a return to a more redistributive system, which one senses is insufficient to counteract the market-based thinking that has suffused so much of the dialogue. Perhaps simple recognition is an adequate start.

On a more personal level, I’ve been wrestling with questions like this since my DC days. I went to a few recruitment and orientation-type events for a McKinsey competitor, but decided I’d rather spend my first two years out of Georgetown failing to write novels instead. It would be a stretch to say my decision was a noble rebellion against the elite charade, but I was certainly skeptical of any claims about the overarching good that work could achieve, a sense cultivated in part by my critical tutors in academia and back home in Duluth and in part probably just based in my temperament. If I was going to end up in a career with pretensions of world-changing, it would look very different.

Even so, it’s fascinating to see how some things come full circle: I now work for a consulting firm with a stated social mission. My firm has little else in common with the McKinsey machine; it is a nonprofit, it does not drape itself in overwrought claims of influence, and its efforts are largely grounded in service to a place and its people instead of a vague ethos of excellence. Even so, I now get the sense that I could have thrived in that high-end consulting world, to say nothing of what it would mean for my wallet and sense of prestige. I’ve taken an odd path to where I am now, with an eclectic writing life and an idiosyncratic urban planning master’s degree, and while I’ve wondered some over the past two years if I wouldn’t have been better off with a gaudy MBA as a credential of broader expertise, I am also independent enough that I will always relish a chance to view my chosen field from some distance and play the loyal opposition, if not an unabashed critic.

As for my own complicity, I will make no apologies for the SIPS program: there were limits on what we could do with it, and it has gone on to do some very laudable work, including funding for low-income Georgetown students to spend their summers in DC. I also take pains to emphasize the blurriness of class distinctions, and that sometimes those who have seen the belly of the beast are the most qualified to critique it. (Giridharadas, for example, is a McKinsey alumnus, and many of his interview subjects are contacts from his days in that world.) Those of us who brush into these circles at certain points in our lives must acknowledge our place within these larger debates, and be able to step out and reflect on our roles. The dynamics of power and class and democracy will always be fluid, but a commitment to self-examination and transparency need not be.

Elite Consciousness

Since Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations against Brett Kavanaugh emerged, I’ve had a couple of people ask me two related questions: did I know anyone who went to Georgetown Prep when I was in DC, and did the accounts of hyper-privilege and drunken sexual antics seem believable? The answers to those questions are ‘yes’ and ‘yes,’ but I’m not going to wade far into that debate that has been hashed out so thoroughly elsewhere. Instead, I’m going to highlight Ross Douthat’s Wednesday column, which is customarily on-point in its take on the different flavors of East Coast elite. The Kavanaugh affair is in part the product of power dynamics within a rarefied world of classes and sub-classes, and one that I’ve at least passed through in my life, playing Nick Carraway to the Gatsbys and Daisies and Toms around me.

I found myself nodding in agreement throughout the column. Douthat is right to note that the upper middle class strivers (of which there are many more than there are trust fund bluebloods) looking to raise their status are often far more showy in those efforts than those who already know they are on top. I also found that many of the members of these elite classes perfectly pleasant individuals to talk to one-on-one, even as their broader social circles remained difficult to penetrate. Douthat also nails the irrelevance of distinctions between nerds and strivers and the well-heeled, since everyone who goes to an elite college is basically all of these things, with the partial exception of the last one. We attendees of so-called elite colleges are the people who want to be all of the things at once, and whatever else we may say about it, American elite culture does seem to allow for this better than many less prestigious institutions. But, humans being humans, barriers and cliques inevitably arise or are bestowed by certain facts of personal history, and all of these distinctions silently emerge.

They emerge, but they don’t necessarily last: Douthat’s keenest observation is how so many people come to adopt much of the elite preppy culture, whether they realize it or not. I see myself here. While I didn’t come from poverty or a point of extreme naïveté, the world I came from was certifiably not something akin to an East Coast prep school. I spent my freshman year heaping scorn on the Vineyard Vines wardrobes that proliferated, and yet now I confess to owning a pair of boat shoes and multiple pink button-downs. (I have managed to resist the salmon shorts to date.) While I drank across all four of my college years, my partying habits also evolved from cautious remove to unabashed participation in many of the more traditional alcohol-fueled college festivities over time. Unlike a certain Supreme Court nominee, I will not try to pretend that I did not get very, very drunk on a semi-regular basis, and I hope many of my college-era friends are comfortable enough with who they were to admit that, too.

For that matter, I don’t regret those days at all. My move into that world was, on the whole, a force for good in my life. If I ever had an “I’ve made it” moment at Georgetown, it was never really academic, where I was comfortable from the beginning aside from some predictable mild college adjustments. Nor was it in my education in DC political culture; that had its fits and starts, but in retrospect I’m proud of College Me for how I handled most of that. It was instead social, and crystallized when I found myself participating in some good-natured heckling in a bathroom line in one of the senior Disorientation parties in the dining hall. (Yes, college students get drunk everywhere, but the Georgetown’s direct sponsorship of events like this separated it from the blind eye turned by, say, a major public school.) Even in an intoxicated state, I realized that I was suddenly one with the crowd, and probably had been for some time.

Alcohol played a major role in eroding class barriers on the East Coast. We all partied together, gave each other shit for it, and bounced back from any mildly stupid escapades. I am more confident, better-adjusted, and more able to take down barriers because I lived that way for a little while. We came from all over, but we could all slam shots at The Tombs, and whatever ridiculous antics that followed could build bridges and give us common ground, leading us to discover commonalities I never expected. Friendships require more than shared boozing, of course, but the way that lifestyle took down uptight kids’ inhibitions had value beyond basic lubrication.

This is not to say that this culture does not have its glaring dark sides. First and foremost comes the paradox of the necessary hard limits on acceptable sexual conduct while using substances that blur one’s sense of limits. The intersection of alcoholic self-medication, sexual uncertainties, and ambition to prove oneself will probably always run the risk of proving a toxic brew, and I do not have a good answer on how to prevent that beyond the standard demands for consent and a sense of common decency. I also watched alcoholism nearly wreck one good college friend, and had to reckon with how my own enjoyment of those reckless nights enabled his routine descent into a stupor because I was capable of stopping while he was not. (That friend, thankfully, has been sober for years now.) But this should not distract us from the fact that any prohibitions here are probably doomed to fail, and the vast majority of young men who participate in these activities never become alcoholics or commit sexual assault.

I’ve written a lot about the power of preppy East Coast culture on here, from the blurriness of American class lines (especially among the naïve members of the upper middle class) to the perceived failures of our meritocracy to the merits of a so-called elite education. For that matter, a piece of fiction I wrote earlier this year toyed with basically all of these themes and more. I’m not sure the writing in that story is as good as some of the others in this series; it’s certainly the most autobiographical, which can be both a help and a hindrance in fiction. Evan, a visitor to Yale from Minnesota, is a stand-in for me in my early Georgetown years in his stumbling efforts to make sense of his new class consciousness. But after that culture became a part of my own biography, I can now claim some moments where I am more the Mark character in this story, the one who delights in his rarefied world to its fullest extent.

My time at Georgetown, and particularly those times spent in a boozy blur, allowed me to blur between a modest Midwestern childhood and the halls of American power. Over time, it made me sympathetic to people I once resented, and at times still resent. As fun as it is to trash distant powerful people at times, I don’t think an elite class, however defined, is inherently any less moral or capable than any other group of people. Its flaws are simply magnified, given its proximity to power and notoriety. The transgressions of members of that class are far more likely to have consequences that reach beyond their own little circles. It is possible both to have empathy for and recognize the humanity of the people making their way here and at the same time demand higher standards for their conduct.

As generations reared on social media move into the public eye, it will become increasingly harder to hide any youthful transgressions. It therefore becomes essential to find ways to distinguish between juvenile yearbook comments and the facts of the case of an alleged crime. The early returns, with hysterical media coverage even from the few sources of journalism I trust and the histrionics in Senate hearings, are not good. The failings that enabled this crisis have innumerable root causes, but so many of them come from narrowness, from a young Brett Kavanaugh’s worldview to the blatantly political motivations of Republicans and Democrats.

That means pampered prep school kids need to get out and see a bit more of the world, yes; residing only in a narrow world of privilege does up the odds of thinking one can get away with things that everyone else cannot. I saw that firsthand. But it also means that the denizens of the upper middle class need to recognize the power they wield relative to the vast majority of the nation. While perhaps less directly problematic, this lack of perspective is widespread and damaging. And while I’d assign more responsibility for this sort of outreach to people with greater means to achieve it, those nowhere near elite circles should also do what they can to understand everyone else. No one gets off for free.

My own goal, perhaps inadequate but within my control, is to at once understand my place within a class hierarchy and how that feeds into the power dynamics around me, and at the same time recognize that this class-driven lens does not define anyone. We need more ways to look at the world. Maybe that starts with some drinks in a dorm room; maybe it comes up in any number of other improbable ways. The Mark character in my story is privileged by any definition, and sometimes very much plays the part. But he is self-aware enough to know it, and struggles against his worst instincts in search of something else. That, for now, is all I will ask for.

Georgetown Beauty, Georgetown Power

My time at Georgetown was a complicated four-year blur, one I’ve struggled to relate back to non-Hoyas without falling into clichés. This past week’s five-year reunion was a chance to revisit it in all its madness: old friends together again, another afternoon of pitchers at The Tombs, of reminiscences of past exploits and ruminations of future plans, plus some hopeless overplaying of “Despacito.” I took a couple of extra days in DC to get some more one-on-one time with friends I hadn’t seen in a while, and to run the Mall, dine in Union Station, and wander up around Dumbarton Oaks, those old haunts of a wide-eyed college kid. With time and distance the peaks and valleys fade into a haze, and above all I’ve come to realize how ridiculously fortunate I was to live out those four years.

After some time away, the most striking aspect of Georgetown was its beauty. There’s the beauty of the neighborhood, the first thing to strike me upon my arrival in DC ten years ago: pastel rowhouses, lush gardens, brick and cobblestones, perfect urban form, sheer aesthetic perfection. There’s the beauty of the campus, with its historic architecture and well-manicured lawns perched up over the Potomac. Sure, there was an unfortunate brutalist phase, but we’ve moved past that, and the most recent stuff, tasteful blends of modernism with the old brick and stone motifs, will stand the test of time in a way plenty of contemporary architecture won’t. And then there’s the beauty of the people: Georgetownites, both students and townies, men and women, are a remarkably attractive bunch. A walk around Georgetown is a constant brush with high fashion, sunny dresses, bronzed skin, casual elegance, and a certain excess of boat shoes and salmon shorts. My wardrobe for the weekend wasn’t exactly the one I break out for lazy Saturdays in Duluth.

Georgetown also knows how to throw a party to show off that beauty. Nearly any weekend night features a glitzy affair somewhere, with girls wobbling down cobblestone streets in high heels. College-era parties brought together the attractive people on back patios and rooftops and at the occasional event at an embassy. (They’re technically foreign soil, so lower drinking ages apply!) After final exams my senior year, there was a full week of university-sponsored partying, with various bar crawls and sporting events and a boozy journey to a farm somewhere out in Maryland. It culminated in a ridiculous night in which the university shut down Union Station to throw a final ball, its grand classical halls reimagined as elaborately themed rooms. The pomp and circumstance of commencement brought out Kentucky Derby caliber attire from the attendees. Reunion was no letdown here either, with a party at the Ritz-Carlton one night and candle-lit tents strewn around lawns on campus the next. These carnivals of beauty allow Georgetownites to revel in their own awesomeness, as inheritors of a claim to status available only to a select few.

I don’t have any illusions about what makes all this beauty possible: an incredible concentration of wealth. The neighborhood overflows with money and power. My graduating class featured more people from families in the top one percent of American households than it did from households poorer than my (very middle class) childhood. Most of my friends are now either employed by companies or attending graduate schools with very recognizable names. The dumpy off-campus house I lived in my junior and senior years, a rowhouse barely over 1,000 square feet with no garage and an eternal slick of Natty Light on its floorboards, sold for $910,000 last year. I could get myself a mid-level robber baron’s mansion in Duluth for less.

Moreover, a view of the Hilltop takes on a new light that it didn’t really have a decade ago. An electorate motivated by disdain for controlling elites is flexing its muscles, and there are few schools that scream “controlling elite” quite like Georgetown. While it may not have quite the prestige of the best of the Ivies, it has an East Coast bluebloodedness to rival any of them, to say nothing of the fact that it is located just two miles from the White House. Georgetown, with its steady flow of politicians in and out of the front gates, is as well-entrenched as any school in the status quo of the past half-century. The phrase “Georgetown cocktail party” has long been a slur directed at events for an out of touch ruling class, and at times some Hoyas do pretty well to live up to that ideal. Hoyas live a world apart, and Middle America has taken note.

Before heading back, I was curious to see if some of the snobbery I recall encountering as a freshman was impenetrable privilege or merely just the antics of pampered teenagers that one wasn’t apt to find in a Midwestern childhood. Said elitists are a minority, but among at least some, the standoffishness is indeed real. A friend and I theorized that this is especially pronounced at Georgetown; for a certain brand of East Coast elite, it’s a second-tier school that comes up short of an Ivy, and the pressure to prove oneself looms large. These strivers don’t necessarily exude active disdain, but such a rigid class consciousness is also not something one finds in a place like Harvard, where simple acceptance is proof enough that one belongs. Whether we’re right or not, that struggle to break down barriers remains the greatest strike against elite schools. Some of it is just a desire to do as well as one’s parents, and to continue in the same orbits or edge into yet higher echelons; it’s hard to blame anyone for that. The trouble comes when those who enjoy Georgetown status fail to recognize it for what it is; when those who were born on second or third base think they’ve hit doubles or triples and make few or facile efforts to understand more. (I’m certainly not saying I started out at home plate, either.)

Even so, it’s a bit strange to now watch my former classmates (and myself, I suppose?) get labeled as the elite establishment, as children of a corrupt breeding ground of power and privilege that reinforces this country’s divides and sneers down at the plebes in Middle America. Above all, it’s just silly to picture most of my old peers that way after I spent four years having sloppy college parties with them, flailing about in certain classes with them, and joining them in a collective effort to figure out what one earth we were doing with our lives. Even though we’re five years older, so little had changed among us Hoyas, either in looks or in temperament: we’re still mostly a group of ambitious but uptight kids in search of the occasional release. Some of them have now maneuvered themselves into positions to make far more money than I ever will, and others of us are reaching out to grasp levers of power. We’ve been groomed for these sorts of lives, and are probably as qualified as anyone to lead them, but that does little to undermine the fragility of human experience, even in a world with so many layers of seeming sophistication. So few of us know exactly what we’re doing, and are often trapped in our own insular little worlds, no matter how outwardly cosmopolitan we may appear.

In spite of these critiques, the pride I have in those four years has only grown as I settle into a life in a land far from Georgetown. I certainly don’t mean to say Georgetown put me on a different level, but it also gave me a perspective that is fairly unique in a place like northern Minnesota, and while the world I now live in is far from Washington, I can still navigate that sea and enjoy it. I now hold a master’s degree from a flagship public university as well, and while that school gifted me with an irreplaceable group of peers and a handful of excellent professors and instructors, Georgetown now shines that much more brightly in contrast to some of the instructional mediocrity and bureaucratic rot I experienced at that institution. (There I go being an elitist again, I suppose.) I came away more convinced than I used to be that Georgetown deserves the status it projects, and that simply being there prepared me more for leadership roles than any sort of management education could have. Its brass runs a tight ship, and the academic and personal support networks are excellent. Georgetown also has a soul: its efforts at moral formation push above and beyond most other elite schools. The Jesuits still linger, even in a world where their level of commitment is increasingly alien.

At its best, Georgetown gives its students a few magical years of self-discovery, and an outlet for the hyper-ambitious among us who wouldn’t feel like we’re testing our potential to the extent that we should if we just stayed close to home. John Thompson Jr. likened Georgetown to heaven, and a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? Any philosophy that tries to suppress that instinct, whether equality-obsessed liberalism or a more conservative ethos that lashes out at people who seem to rise above their stations, is fighting a losing war against the human psyche. I’ve joked that the Georgetowns of the world aren’t part of reality, but they are very real. I lived it, and will continue to live it in certain ways for the rest of my life.

To any northern Minnesotan who wonders how I could defend such a different world, Georgetown fuels my hunger to do what I do, and paradoxically, the intellectual backdrop I lean on to do it wouldn’t exist without these dips back in those swampy waters. To the Hoyas who struggle to understand why someone gifted with all of that privilege would give a measure of it up to head back to some northern Minnesotan woods, remember how fragile Georgetown’s beauty can be, something that I suspect the passing years will underscore more and more. The most powerful determinants of a life well lived lie beyond that narrow world, and its unquestioned perpetuation has consequences far beyond DC. But that beauty is a source of power and wonder, and drives us to heights we’d otherwise never know. Georgetown forever.

On Class Divides

Not many people have many nice things to say about the state of our current presidential campaign. But even rotting trees can bear fruits, however, and the Trump candidacy in particular has inspired a rush of quality analysis on people who have had a rough time in an often post-industrial economy. Some even pitch this election along class terms, as the people struggling in 2016 America coalesce around a single figure and a well-educated, well-connected, and financially stable upper class tries to figure out what all the fuss is about. It’s not that simple, of course, but it still points to some important realities that are worth talking about.

The relationship between race and poverty tends to get plenty of press, and has been contested politically (whether out in the open or more subtly) throughout the country’s history. Class warfare, on the other hand, has come in spurts, only surging when led by Jacksonians or turn-of-the-century populists and such. It has long been dormant as a national political force, most likely due to a Cold War consensus that rejected anything that smelled of Marx and claimed it was possible to rise up via hard work, a free market, and some basic supports from the government such as public education, taxation policy friendly to homeownership, and a small safety net. And for the second half of the twentieth century, that was more or less true.

Revolutionary Marxism is fading into history now, and few people seriously believe many of its tenets: most notably, history disproved the idea of a united proletariat. But the people on the bottom half of the socioeconomic ladder haven’t gone anywhere, and with overwhelming evidence showing greater separation between the top and the bottom, the class lines are hardening again. There has been a rise of a vague, white underclass. People have been putting out books on this rough topic for some time now, but the pace has accelerated this year, and has culminated in some provocative recent titles, including White Trash by Nancy Isenberg and Hillbilly Elegy by J.D. Vance. (The Atlantic reviews both here; the interview with Vance that made the book go viral is here.) The lament is clear: there’s an entire class of people, from the rural South to Appalachia to working-class suburbs, that has mostly been ignored or scorned by the upper classes, and this is starting to come home to roost politically. It also hits home for a northern Minnesotan; while nowhere as extreme as in Appalachia, there are headlines about counties scrambling to combat heroin abuse, and the region caucused for Trump, while the wealthier Republicans of the Twin Cities gave Marco Rubio his lone win of the primary season. Something is clearly happening here.

The Atlantic piece makes an important distinction: tossing anyone who’s white and doesn’t have a bachelor’s degree (or even those with bachelor’s degrees in non-prestige positions) in one big group is going to hide a lot. In fact, it feels like a group that elites might use to denote “white people who are not like me.” This blind lumping of all flyover country white people has led some on the left to accuse poor white people of voting against their economic interests. This misreads the electorate: for the most part, the stereotypical Appalachian doesn’t vote. It’s their neighbors who do who are the core Trump supporters: the people who are managing to get by in these places, as teachers or policemen or in whatever remaining factory jobs there are. Surrounded by people whose lives are going down the tubes, these relative success stories want to pull up the drawbridge to protect themselves and their families from the depravity around them. As people who have made it, they don’t want their hard-earned tax money going to the deadbeat down the street. Middle America is a nuanced place filled with its own networks class distinctions, sometimes more subtle but no less real than on the coasts.

Trump’s appeal goes beyond class, though, and the emergence of a more distinct class divide goes far beyond Trump. The media is now filled with people decrying elites (many of them elites themselves), and the Democrats faced their own sustained anti-establishment insurgency through the primary season. No one can really agree on what the establishment is (Finance? Big government? People with PhDs? Any rich person?), but it sure makes for a convenient bogeyman. Suddenly, longstanding divides are becoming realms of political conflict.

It’s so easy to resort to these generalizations because class is so highly fluid, and we can plausibly accuse most people of being part of some class we don’t like. In 26 short years, I’ve had moments where I’ve felt near the top and toward the bottom. Most people also don’t have a very good appreciation for where they land on this spectrum; even as a very self-aware person, it was easy to think I was “poor” in a place like Georgetown. (In relative terms, sure; in absolute terms, not at all.) For someone in poverty, a 15-dollar-an-hour wage seems like a ticket to the middle class. A couple making over $100,000—successful, clearly, but possible with two jobs that aren’t exceptionally high-paying—is already in the top 25 percent of households. In fact, median household income lands at around $51,000, so a full half of American households are earning less than that. Yet most upper middle class kids—generally, the people I’ve been surrounded by throughout my life—think they come from somewhere much closer to the middle, and for some, there’s a genuine anxiety in needing to preserve some sort of status. People are constantly struggling with ideas of class, and it’s not hard to come to resent a more successful group or fear a less successful one.

Education can prove just as much a source of class as income, as I can well attest as the kid of two parents who have never brought home huge paychecks, but both have advanced degrees: my path to Georgetown felt as natural as it must for children of far greater means. Seven in ten Americans don’t have bachelor’s degrees; one doesn’t need a degree from an elite school to get a credential that separates oneself from over half the country. For graduates of high schools from which the vast majority of graduates go to college, this may seem baffling, but that just goes to show what a different world such high schools are in comparted to the ones where people don’t follow these roads. My new master’s degree puts me in the ten percent of the country that has an advanced degree, and I expect I’ll end up in what others might label the “upper middle class” in some way or another, whether I like it or not. The paths set before people can make alternatives difficult to fathom.

And then, of course, there are less tangible ways to signal status, such as clothing and comportment and spending habits. One can now create an illusion of wealth by buying and acting in certain ways, and on the other side of the coin, there are the bohemians for whom scorn of such status symbols is a status symbol in and of itself. The conformity of hipster non-conformity is its own little subculture with its own set of rules now. The “upper class” is just as complicated and diverse as the lower class, as it tends to include anyone from financiers to professors to celebrities to people who just work boring but well-paying jobs. Some think class comes with certain codes of conduct; others use the benefits of class to act as they please.

There are so many gradations, and so many different ways to signal class, that any effort to draw clear lines is probably doomed. Likewise with class-based political action: critical masses of people just don’t usually define themselves by identities that are this fluid, this capable of changing with time. But as those lines grow less flexible, these identities can harden, and the contour emerging in this presidential race will probably only grow with time. Visible voting blocs need not win to have influence, and even if Trump goes down in flames, it’s not hard to imagine a more polished populist successfully stoking this newly visible class divide.

I’m not totally opposed to such a campaign. Elites ignore the masses at their peril, and while stratification is unavoidable in complex economies, those on top need to do everything in their power to stay in touch with the rest. Class consciousness creates a necessary dialogue, and could perhaps yet lead to sensible policy outcomes. But it also comes with inherent risks and threatens to expose deeper divides, and the rhetoric of class warfare (from all sides) isn’t always conducive to a stable republic. The growing divide compels people who care about the American body politic—particularly those with greater means to do so—to keep a pulse on both and to cycle in and out, comfortable in both chic restaurants and dive bars, in the box seats or in the bleachers.

America’s classless history may be a myth, but that need not lead us to assume battle lines. Even if we do, they likely won’t last, given the messiness of it all. Class distinctions can help us understand a society, but we shouldn’t mistake them for reality. Yes, money and credentials can take a person far in life. But they are still no substitute for virtue, and we cannot reduce people to what they earn, where they’ve gone to school, or the signals they send. If all we can see are divisions, we shouldn’t be surprised to find ourselves in a fragmented state.