"I was astonished to realize that Scottish-ness and Irishish-ness, similar to the Anglophilia in many upper classes - thinking of William Buckley's accent now - had become posh in some contexts in the States. I was late coming to this realization and it's still weird."
I don't know much about the upper class, but a lot of middle-class Americans are very proud that some ancestor came from Ireland or Scotland.
"Lobster used to be low-class" is an overstated meme. In PG Wodehouse's "Code of the Woosters", Bertie Wooster agrees to do a favour (being thrown into gaol) for his Aunt Dahlia in exchange for a meal to be cooked by her (comedically amazing) personal chef Anatole, and immediately sets to setting out his dream menu. The fish course? Sylphides a la Creme d'ecrivesses: lobster with crayfish sauce (baked in pastry with brandy and cream). That was 1938.
Maybe not lobster so much, but things like oysters and shellfish in general were working/lower class cheap food. Oysters are now fancified, but nobody (so far as I know) has yet produced an upper-class version of a bag of whelks or jellied eels (though give them time).
And there's a certain irony in French food being considered high-class, since a lot of the recipes come from "we need to find ways to cook every part of the animal". Rural and farm cooking. The attitude behind Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England (the English are wealthy enough that even the common man may dine on beef rather than frogs' legs and snails): https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-o-the-roast-beef-of-old-england-the-gate-of-calais-n01464
"Numerous xenophobic references indicate Hogarth's low opinion of the French. The huge side of British beef at the exact centre of the picture, destined for the English inn at Calais, is neatly balanced by the scrawny French soldier at the other side of the drawbridge. A fat friar, the only well-nourished Frenchman in the picture, covetously pokes the beef."
And indeed a patriotic ballad prior to that:
"When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
I read the X Class a little more broadly: it's academics, people who might have become academics if they'd played their cards right, and young people who still could.
I'd be very hesitant about drawing conclusions about past living standards from TV shows. Think about the oft-remarked difference between the apartments we saw on 'Friends', and the sort of New York apartments people in that income group would actually have been able to afford.
I actually disagree a bit here. I think academics have more potential than the average person to be X Class (especially younger academics), but also many academics are living out the upper-middle class dream of being a respectable professional.
The X Class is what every person believes he is: "The other people are poseurs and sheep. But I transcend all this and make choices independently on the merits. My choices reflect how unique and smart and independent I am. I am an X person."
Seriously, do you think anyone self-identifies as a "High-Prole?"
Mid-to-high prole, in the HOUSE! Like... if your grandpa wasn't a lumberjack, and your grandma didn't have plastic swans in the strawberry garden out in front of their mobile home, next to the potted geraniums, then what the hell are you even doing, calling yourself a Real Amurican? (I'm kidding here of course... sort of. No wait... Yes. Yes, I'm definitely totally kidding.)
One of the things I loved about Fussell's bullshit book was how it widened my hypothesis space for understanding why most people doing "white collar" work nearby to my aughties-era datascience gigs were so insecure. They like: *intrinsically cared* about how strangers who weren't even their family *saw them* for like... reasons OTHER than "not-unethically convincing a big boss type into granting one permission to play with super expensive toys". After reading Fussell, I started sometimes purposefully wearing purple because it was funny.
Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs.
I believe they are probably neurotic and anxious (the women) and thus fidgety and restless, and with good reason, because their husbands are keeping the weight off by banging the mistress. Also, the men golf and sail a lot.
Actually you don't need to be neurotic or anxious to be fidgety.
Source: am highly fidgety but emotionally on the chill side (and live a comparatively stress-free life), but do have ADHD. Wouldn't say I'm effortlessly svelte, but definitely don't watch my weight much and yet maintain normal BMI.
My maternal grandfather was a very small scale farmer who wouldn't have known the term "prole" (in fairness it probably wasn't coined yet). In his view there were two kinds of people: "regular people" and "the rich." The former were good, the latter were thieves. He had zero desire to be rich, cared nothing about appearances, and was probably the happiest guy I ever met.
It's the same word - "prole" is short for "proletarius" or later "proletariat" who were originally just the people in the Roman census who didn't own anything so the censors just counted their kids.
Right, but it would be a mistake to count appearances of "prole" in Latin text (perhaps in quotations?) as if they were appearances of "prole" in the modern English sense.
A long time ago I read an article about the two middle classes, the Academic Middle Class and the Commercial Middle Class. All I can find of it now is this quote by Freeman Dyson:
> In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.
This sounds broadly correct to me, as one who awkwardly straddles both sides of the fence. The Commercial Middle Class can be seen in their BMW X5s, the Academic Middle Class in their Subarus or on their bicycles (with the occasional Tesla at the upper end). The commercial middle class are richer (per unit social status) than the academic middle class, so the academic middle class has to work harder on signalling in order to compensate.
Lawyers, bankers, and most types of engineers are Commercial Middle Class, while well-paid public-sector types tend to be Academic Middle Class (along with academics, of course). Silicon Valley seems to be largely Commerical Middle Class with a lot of Academic Middle Class pretensions, and much of the conflict you'll find inside big Silicon Valley companies is just AMC vs CMC posturing; it seems like the best way to get promoted is to have the ability to mouth AMC values while getting paid a CMC salary.
The AMC thinks the CMC is beneath them, because it goes around spending money on flashy crap like fancy cars and nice houses with swimming pools, and we all know that only lower-class people feel the need to signal like that. The CMC meanwhile thinks the AMC is beneath them because they don't even have flashy cars or nice houses with swimming pools, and that's just sad.
Fussell's Class X basically sounds like a description of the sorts of things that were becoming popular among the Academic Middle Class in 1983.
What you're describing sounds kind of like Moldbug's "Brahmin" (AMC) vs "Vaisya" (CMC), although it's hard to be sure of the identification. Seems a bit different from what Fussell is going for though; the AMC you describe definitely does not sound like Class X to me, instead sounding more just like his "upper-middle"...
There are several ways this distinction has been described, Piketty's Brahmin left & merchant right, I've also heard priestly class & merchant class. Either way, plus ça change... (indicating my frightful British middle class-ness by using French there, see Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Having spent time at a mid-size OLD Connecticut law firm, I'd say they are a definite mix. There were attorneys there that were old money, didn't need to work, but being an attorney was respectable and allowed them to help fellow upper-class people. Good firms need to have people like this because some old money people don't want to work with CMC people - ever. But this was disappearing when I entered the profession (mid 2000's). All the young associates were striver CMCs and there were no old money young lawyers. This is likely because the grind of being a young lawyer is not something someone with nothing to prove would ever do now.
My mostly-indirect exposure to 'real old money' (upper class) people was similarly enlightening – you've got the maybe upper-middle class people that do the work, the middle and lower class people that do the 'real' work (i.e. drudgery), and a few figurehead lower-upper class people being (AFAICT) 'punished' by being 'requested' to hold down an 'important' position at one of the family's concerns.
(The specific old money people I got some glimpses of were pretty scary in some ways too!)
In England, it's waaaay more complicated than this.
The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu. Unlike other European countries, this was historically possible to enter through inter-marriage. This still happens a bit, but rarely in one step (e.g. Jeff Bezos sends his kids to Eton, and one of his granddaughters marries a marquess). All class movement (at least in England) is cross-generational, so you can't change class but your children can be a different class to yours.
The Working Class are people who work in factories, labourers, plumbers etc. There's a perennially unemployed underclass, who have now largely branched off but aren't quite a separate class as it's still possible to move between the two within one lifetime.
Historically, the middle class embraced industrial tycoons, lawyers, doctors, accountants and the better sort of "clerks" (white collar workers - Bob Cratchett and Scrooge were both middle class, but represent the farthest ends). A huge number of people moved up into this category after WWII, and particularly under Thatcher (when Blair was talking about "Mondeo man," this is who he was talking about.
The post-war movers represent the bulk of the middle class, and are people doing "office jobs" - salesmen, actuaries, solicitors (one type of lawyer), the sort of banker who might be a "trader" etc.* This is the Lower Middle Class and Middle Middle Class, although they seem to have more of a gradient between them than a line. This is the CMC. They're status-conscious, confrontation-averse and child-rearing-oriented, but in terms of accent and (physical) appearance aren't distinct from the working class.
The Upper Middle Class contains academics, the better sort of army officers, barristers (the other type of lawyer), doctors, senior civil servants (and the junior civil servants who are on track to become them), and the sort if banker who wouldn't be a "trader." They usually went to private schools or public schools (a confusing English term which means "expensive private school" and is what Hogwarts is a pastiche of), but some went to grammar schools (selective state schools). Within this class, there's a clear divide:
AMC (plus socially mobile people whose kids will be AMC): Most academics, a majority of senior civil servants, a majority of (white, gentile) doctors (including almost all male ones), roughly half of barristers, most people who work for NGOs, a few rich people living off their money, and some of the non-trader bankers. These people have their own public schools (e.g. Highgate, St Pauls) and private schools. They are more likely to be non-conformist or low-church (most are still Anglican by extraction), although they're mostly atheists. They were historically the old civilian middle class (merchants, clerks etc.), the sort of people who backed Cromwell in the civil war and became the American puritans. They're naturally Lib Dems politically but the Labour moderates (e.g. Starmer, Blair) come from this class. They probably instinctively think the roundheads were the good guys in the civil war (possibly with hand-wringing about Ireland). Historically, Barclays and Lloyds were run by them, banking seems to be mixed far more thoroughly now. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you'd believe they have a brother who teaches political science at KCL. Anyone who rises into the upper middle class through education (grammar schools or comprehensive>Oxbridge) ends up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think John Oliver.
[Martial?] Upper Middle Class: the better sort of army officers, some female doctors, a minority of the senior civil service (basically the rest of the Upper Middle Class). Eton is their Harvard, but somewhere like Rugby or Uppingham would be more typical. They tend to be high-church Anglican by extraction, and are far more likely to have a Norman surname or a weird Scottish connection than is typical in England. They're largely derived from the old rural gentry, or the eighth son of the fifth son of a ninth son of the Upper Class. These people *are* the Conservative Party, barring the occasional hanger-on like Hague or Gavin Williams. Historically, banks then ran were HSBC and funny like Arbuthnott's. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you believe they have a brother who's a captain in the Blues and Royals. To a man, they think the cavaliers were the good guys in the civil war. Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think David Cameron.
I'm fairly sure both upper middle classes are roughly the same size, but I could be off by about an order of magnitude (especially as by educational footprint, the MUMC looks much larger).
The Moldbug parallel should be apparent - the MUMC are basically sub-optimates, the AMC are Brahmins, the bulk of the Middle and Working Class are Vaisyas. This all interacts with race in very complicated ways, and English jews have their own byzantine internal class structure I don't entirely understand, but seem to have at least one equivalent to every group.
*There are two types of bankers. Some of them are "traders" and these are always the lower-class type but are in a broader category. I'm fairly fuzzy on what any of these people do so can't draw the line occupationally, but socially the distinction is obvious. "M&A" is possibly on the upper side of the line...?
"The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu."
I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces.
Another complication in the English class system is where Catholics fit, especially those who would have a claim to be in the Upper Class.
They're a bit "bourgeois" (in the condescending aristocratic sense): they like to seem like they uphold slightly old-fashioned middle-class "Victorian" values, aka, what middle-class people think "they're betters" should be like.
Because the contemporary branch of the reigning family stems from tiny Germany duchies, which at the time were ruled by small German grocers, and the family name until the WWI was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. There are titled families in the UK with genealogical trees to William the Conqueror, and that is considered to be way more interesting than small German grocers. Diana once said to Charles, that her (original) title is older, which also was true.
I think your description of the Martial Middle Class is a bit off. The description implies a certain kind of old Englishness of public schools, long family history, and tradition "a brother in the Blues and Royals". But then you contradict yourself and inlcude "Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle."
A quick look at the Tory cabinet suggests the latter is more fitting than the former as defining the Conservative party. Gove, Priti Patel, Hancock, are all children of business people, and Raab's parents were white collar employees. Except Gove, they're all second generation immigrants, none of them are descended from old rural gentry. In fact they all seem urban not rural.
In contrast Boris Johnson definitely strikes me as someone who oozes Englishness, though not the kind of Englishness you'll see in a Holywood film. I could very much see him as the village eccentric in a crowd of old rural gentry. Sunak's parents are probably AMC (doctor and pharmacist) but he went into banking (I think non-trading) but also seems to be turning into a bit of a country squire ever since he partially moved to the country.
I'd make two modifications to your taxonomy. First add an upper commercial middle class; this is where successful business people's children go and is is a backbone of the Tory party. The Martial/Country Squire upper middle class remains as a smaller (this might be my urban bias showing) group in the Tory party that has adapted to Thatcher-ism and now remains a firm ally of the commercial middle class (even if they might gripe about globalism now and then, or capitalism optimising away a nice institution or Victorian architecture).
Secondly your taxonomy doesn't have a place for everyone who defines themselves by education but didn't get the kind of degree that leads to a good graduate job. I'd say this is a new influx into the AMC that's got far less capital but is still changing it by weight of numbers plus some strong ideological weapons. Starmer vs Corbyn is an illustration of this fight.
The first "M" in MMC is probably an overstatement, but is just what distinguishes them from the AMC. My point is more "typical public school types" rather than "St Pauls/Highgate" types and that there's a clear distinction within them. It's more that Cameron and Osborne were clearly a different class to the self-made business types, but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties). The Tories, politically, are clearly aiming for the broad middle class (and now the working class), as voters. The people who are the MPs and most of the constituency associations are generally much more MMC.
I 100% agree that the long family tradition isn't close to universal (although within a couple of generations they all have it from inter-marriage). However, Britain being what it is, there really aren't enough self-made businessmen for them to have formed their own class.
Johnson is much more of an outlier but he's largely acting. His father and brother are much more conventionally MMC.
Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
> but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties).
You raise a good point. But I still think that if CMC (including upper) is looked at as a whole then it is inter-generationally sustainable. Your dad is a self made businessman and you've got an MBA and a management job. This roughly describes my and my bothers life paths. Our parents ran companies and sold them making good money but not stupid money. In practical terms, enough to contribute significantly to both of our first homes, but not enough to buy them for us outright (they could if they sold their second home, but they don't want to).
We were both supported and encouraged into education. But I went into computer science and got a white collar programming job, my brother now works at a hedge fund. We're both clearly distinguishable from the working class, but also clearly not Eton types, are would be repulsed by Corbyn even if we weren't Jewish (we weren't raised in the community).
I do agree about intermarriage with country squires. When we got the second home in the countryside my brother immediately developed a taste for fishing. The two classes are allied and the division is porous but I think the division is real. The average self made businessman who sends his kids to a good school probably sees his class and peer group as various other business people and his employees; not country squires unless he lives in the country and does squire things (but if he buys a country home he's high risk for getting typical hobbies). And while there's the potential for them to send kids to Eton or Rugby and produce little Camerons, most will send them to whatever local school is good with the intention of school->university-> white collar professional or the rich doctor / prestigious professor type of AMC.
> Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
I was thinking more about the general movement around Corbyn. Young, university educated, eager participants in imported American culture wars. But I think you got that from your last sentence?
I think you're in the group I'd be rounding off into the MMC (your brother particularly). I've never met a white-collar professional who didn't seem on one side of the line or another, but I'm slightly worried I might just be conflating a partisan divide with a broader social one. I've also no idea what the children of successful techies will be like!
I'm reluctant to type this, and am completely willing to defer if I'm very wrong, but I've also noticed that Jews seem to filter into the MMC less. This may be small sample size, but the handful of Jewish MMC I've met have all been at least third-generation. It must happen, but I suspect (possibly based on lazy stereotyping) that the slight contempt for academia that partly drives the division from the MMC side may generally be absent if your Jewish, so assimilation becomes more gradual absorption and hence more multi-generational...? I base that only on the fact that business-people whose kids I was at school with (massive selection bias there) would be horrified if their children went into academia.
The Corbyn clique themselves are very weird. I'd argue the Corbyn-supporting young are distinct from them (cf. Europe, coal-mining, Russia etc), and I'd assume are just young AMC and the political divide rounds off to age - young Liberal Democrats do exist, but they tend to make Young Conservatives seem normal by comparison.
Exactly. Almost every other culture has more complicated class system than America. There are really no classes in America, compared to UK, or Asia, or any other country except Canada and Australia. In America, the difference between top and the bottom class is like the difference between a white poodle and a black poodle. Everywhere else, it's like the difference between an ant and an elephant.
I think the CMC often looks down on the AMC also because of a view that they don't expose themselves to the risk and rewards of the market. That is certainly the case for my personal corner of the CMC filled with people who could have been academics but chose business. The view is that AMC develop theories without testing them in the real world like the CMC. The CMC has skin in the game.
Pragmatically, you couldn't film a show in a typical NYC apartment. You wouldn't be able to get more than a couple of people in the frame without a room that's deeper (along the camera--subject axis" than the frame is wide.
True, but take a look at the apartment that Jackie Gleason's bus-driver salary afforded him in the 1950s "Honeymooners." I've lived in apartment buildings with nicer laundry rooms.
Americans got a lot richer between, say, 1945 and 1970.
Academia is now a 100% class signals game. The research activity does matter only via the number and place where the articles are published. Everything is optimized for the profit of publishers, in exchange for signals of value, as measured by academic bureaucracy.
On a tangent, even the (relatively) new phenomena, like Open Access, are already rotten by this class game. For those working in academia, how many time have you heard that huge article processing charges are OK, because why? if you can't pay the APC it means that your project is not funded, therefore not valuable. What if I don't want to pay the APC, when is clearly money for nothing? Class signals.
Fussell's Class X is more or less what we used to call bohemians. The closest modern equivalent are hipsters, but even that term is faded. What he's picking up on are traits of well-educated countercultures like ironic poverty.
"Sure I'm the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for *InsertCollegeName*, but I'm cool and reuse my bags at the Organic Farmer's Market, and take 3 intercontinental/international trips by air per year (which totally cancelled out any benefit of not using plastic bags several times over at least in terms of CO2 Emissions). Last year we went to the Amazon and saw Pachamama statues..."
I think NPR subscriber. Although maybe the X Class has been subsumed into the UMC.
That Simpsons reference is deeply bubbled imo. There is a generation/subculture of people who grew up, went to a useless college, and don't have good jobs, but 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the Simpsons are not astonishingly wealthy or anything by current standards, just by journalist/media studies person standards
The story of small town America on Big Media is written by people who hated it, left, and nurse a grudge against the place they left. How many there genuinely like where they live? Those people aren't storytellers.
The only exception that comes to mind (which might reflect the fact I've not watched many shows set in small town America) is Stargirl. Blue Valley is portrayed as a very friendly place if slightly retro whose only major problem is supervillains; which are of course entirely necessary for the show to exist. I'd even say the show has some modest red-tribe coding (alongside plenty of blue). Pat Dugan strikes me as a small c-conservative. A mechanic who likes old cars and makes his son get a paper route to teach him responsibility; and sticks a Made In Detroit Stars&Stripes shield on his homemade giant robot.
Now granted (rot13 encoded spoilers) Gur fhcreivyynvaf ner jul gur gbja vf guevivat. Ubjrire gur fhcreivyynvaf ner irel oyhr pbqrq (fb ner zbfg bs gur urebrf; jura gurl urne jung gur ivyynvaf cyna gb qb gurve ernpgvba vf "ner lbh fher jr'er ba gur evtug fvqr"; hagvy gurl ernyvfr zvyyvbaf jvyy qvr).
All that said: for pro-small town America stories I strongly recommend Stargirl.
Agreed. Homer has a union job watching dials at a nuclear power plant, and does not live in a major metropolis. His kids go to public school, and his entire savings is often in a jar maintained by Marge.
I'm not surprised he can make the payments on a modest sized suburban home, even on one income. (It was less modest thirty years ago, but it hasn't gotten any bigger or, AFAIK, added any bathrooms since.)
technically it has gotten bigger over the years because simpsons continuity is not super well tracked so they've accidentally added rooms when people making episodes felt the need
The "does not live in a major metropolis" thing is big. People don't have to kvetch nearly as much about housing prices in Urbana as they do in Chicago.
Homer's basic lifestyle isn't unreasonable for someone who got in on a good union job in a boom (when they first built the nuclear plant), particularly when he was given the down payment. Sure, he's got two cars the whole time, but neither is new (and we don't know if he bought either new). One's a Plymouth (a "Junkerolla") the other a Chevrolet.
That he can somehow keep making payments and keep his job despite his extreme irresponsibility and incompetence is another matter, but if you take that away you have no show.
A replica Simpsons' house was built in Las Vegas and sold for $120k in 1997. But at 2200 square feet, it's clearly smaller than the one on TV, which I would guess is a little under 3000 sf.
The Simpsons house is at 742 Evergreen Terrace, presumably a reference to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where Matt Groening went to college. The most similar house in Olympia that I could find on Zillow in 2019 was a 2755 sf house on a 10,500 sf lot. It looks a little smaller than the TV house. It had recently sold for $500k.
You need to pick a town that contains a nuclear plant maybe? I know here in Canada the housing around these places is crazy expensive because you’ve got all these high wage workers moving into a town far enough from a big population.
In the Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.
Also in Homer's Enemy, Grimy/the writers rub in our face just how fantastical it is for Homer to have the lifestyle he has. Even just the size of his house, his two cars, and the number of kids was realistically unfeasable. This was Season 8, so maybe the change happened between Seasons 1 and 8 or the better explanation is the TV shows have always shown the characters being able to afford a better dwelling than they'd reasonably be able to.
I think some of it depends on what you consider home ownership.
My dad was a Silent Generation Department of Transportation Engineer with only a HS Diploma and a few college courses the state put him through as part of job training, my Mom was a hairdresser with a cosmetology degree who had to retire in her 40s due to arthritis. In the Early 70s, they moved into a 3 bedroom, 2 bath Ranch with my older siblings, then about 5 and 1. They would host my maternal grand parents for the last few years of their lives, and by the tim I came along in the mid-80s and had grown old enough to be aware of my surroundings, the house had been expanded with a three-car garage with a second floor "mother-in-law's apartment over it and a large den on the back with a large back porch... From the time I turned 4 in 1990 to the time we lost the house to foreclosure in 2012, my dad was the primary bread winner, and for most of that time, the house was home to on average 7 people(My parents, me and my older sister, my brother-in-law,my sister's 2 daughters) and sometimes hosted as many as 12 during holidays. We didn't live high on the hog, but we lived comfortably for the most part, and while my mom drew disability, and I drew disability once my father started drawing social security and my sister was consistently employed, it was always my dad's income that provided the safety net for the rest of the family.
In a technical sense, my Dad never owned that house, having taken out a second mortage to build those additions and probably refinancing at least one other time, was about 31 when my family moved in, and while he was like the only government employee I can ever recall reporting a good wage, he made as much as he did thanks in large part to having worked for the NCDOT from his late teens until retirement... and then went back to work for them part time while drawing retirement pay until he was laid off. He was already in his mid-40s when I came along, and by the time he retired, he had just shy of 40 years after tacking on unspent sick leave.
Admittedly, my father was far more competent(and persumably, the only reason Homer keeps his job from an in-universe standpoint is that Burns doesn't want a competent safety inspector as having to keep the plant up to code would cut into profits), but aside from Homer and marge being maybe10-20 years younger than my parents, based on the stated dates of the earliest flashback episodes, as originally concieved, I don't think the Simpson's situation when they first moved on to Evergreene Terrace is too dissimilar from my own family's situation when they moved into my childhood home. Of course, this is ignoring the show's sliding timeline and that time stamps on flash backs and flash forwards always seem to assume the show's present is when the episode aired(E.g. Early episodes gave 1984 for when Bart was a preschooler and Lisa was a baby, while later episodes put Marge and Homer's college years in the 90s(and arguably retconning Homer from highschool drop out to college drop out)... and i'm pretty sure the show has increased the amount of debt the Simpsons struggle with over time. The show's always played a bit loose with reality, but the original premise doesn't seem all that outlandish fora older 30s couple with two school-aged children and a baby circa the early 90s.
For homeownership, millennials are "still 5 to 10 percentage points behind where Generation X and baby boomers were at the same age."[0] Homer and Marge don't have college degrees, which makes them even less likely to own a home, 48% in 2015 versus 58% in 1995 [1], with much of that remaining fraction being older people. Plus it's a single income household, which I'm sure drops the fraction again, although I don't have statistics.
48% of people without a college degree own a home, but 80% of baby boomers own a home (and people even older are presumably even more likely)[0] while baby boomers and older are much less likely to have a college degree [1]. That 48% is going to be largely baby boomers and older who bought their house when it was much more plausible.
So if you sample one group defined by age and another group defined by a social marker who average out younger, which group do you expect to display higher levels of homeownership, an attribute that is correlated to age since you can save more money if you are older?
OK, there's more to it, but your comparison lacks rigour if it doesn't correct for age. Or the fact that a young person today is more likely than a young boomer to have a degree, so that's not a like-for-like comparison either. There's a reason why good social science is difficult and agitpop opinions are easy.
So long as you can show that the price of housing has increased versus earning power, your underlying point is likely valid though.
The amount of time it takes to save up for a down payment has also gone up significantly due to various factors (rising home prices, increased rent, more money going to student loans), so we can expect this trend to continue. https://www.zillow.com/research/how-many-years-down-payment-21734/
So it's not just that older people own homes more often because they've had more time to accumulate wealth, it's also become more difficult for younger generations to accumulate the wealth needed.
Does that 48% actually own their homes, or does that include those paying on a mortgage? If it refers to true ownership, it makes some sense that older people would be ahead in ownership, they've had time to actually pay of their mortgages... if that includes people paying on a mortgage, I wonder how much of the discrepency is income going to student loan repayments eating up income previous generations would have put towards a mortgage.
By my understanding it includes mortgage holders, or else I'd expect the home ownership number to be essentially zero for millennials (given that most mortgages have a 30 year payoff period and millennials are all under 50)
Since a mortgage is a secured loan, not a staged purchase, mortgage lenders do not own property other than where a default has occurred. On that basis I think you are correct.
Also I have a mortgage but am legally a homeowner (e.g. it is me, not my bank, who is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the boundaries of the property).
I wonder how many of that percent *purchased* the home they own, versus whether they inherited it?
If there is a substantial proportion of the younger generation who have hand-me-down housing, then it's not unthinkable that purchasing housing now might be more difficult than 48% sounds.
I would be very interested in reading about how much of the boomer/millennial wealth gap can be explained by longer life expectancy. (and possibly the potential for people today to spend that wealth living the retirement dream)
I think we are comparing apples and oranges here. Millennials have different priorities now. They marry significantly later than older generation, they want to "explore themselves" by traveling and buying nice things and by living in vibrant urban centers as opposed to smalltown suburbs with wife as the older generations did. The millennial lifestyle is better suited to living in rented place with roommates.
As another example: homeownership rate varies widely from country to country. In former eastern bloc countries the homeownership rate often exceeds 90%. In Switzerland it is 43.36. On the other hand for instance Swiss have vastly higher financial wealth than Eastern Europeans.
A lot of these statistics reflect changes in preferences which are vast over last few generations to put it mildly.
I don't have any statistics at hand here, but an informal survey of the millennials I know shows that it's not a change in preference but a feeling of inability to own a home. If you don't think you'll be able to own a home, then you'll prioritize goals that don't require owning a home, but that doesn't mean you don't want to own a home.
And I'm not sure the Eastern European example helps you here, since the reason for higher homeownership rates in Eastern Europe is that the USSR (and other Eastern European communist governments) provided essentially free housing to almost everyone. Everyone owns a home because it's easy to own a home, while in Switzerland owning a home is expensive and so Swiss people don't prioritize it
I can comment on Eastern bloc as I am from Slovakia. Now it is true that people owned their homes during socialism - but that was more than 40 years ago. The culture in my country is definitely aligned with the concept that the true independence also means owning your own house/condo. It also has a lot of good downstream effects: people care more about what is happening in the neighborhood and more active in local politics.
The Simpsons is also a fantasy cartoon. Despite what the author of that tweet says, it was never believable that someone with a high school degree could become a safety officer at a nuclear plant, let alone retain that job while being caught on camera sleeping all the time.
It's completely useless to use the world of the Simpsons as a measure of income inequality.
It is completely *true to life* even if not believable by you.
I worked at a Fortune 500 medical devices company with lots of fancy lab in Boulder, CO. 500+ employees working onsite, a big machine shop with 2 full-time union machinists, plus loads of fun chemicals and drill presses/emergency showers/cutting lasers sprinkled all around the campus, and literally dozens of PhD engineers at the top of their game making prototype battery-powered sonic cut-and-cauterize tools with exotic metals like tungsten.
The lead "materials safety" guy (in his own special lane, a dept that tracked all the active chemicals/dangerous equipment onsite, responsible for safe disposal I think) separate from a bigger team of folks who handled safety for *spaces* like this-or-that-lab space. He had been there for decades, no way he'd get hired there now (and in fact they didn't hire me directly, but as a temp, and would never since I don't have an engineering degree.) He got hired on the strength of having previously been a lead materials safety guy at... Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapon assembly facility in Colorado. He had his high school diploma only.
Interesting, and laudable (credentialism sucks). Was this recent?
In my defense, though, I'm guessing he didn't sleep on the job and narrowly avoid a meltdown using eeny, meeny, miny, moe :-)
(Also, *technically* Homer hadn't even graduated from high school when he was hired because he failed remedial science -- he just showed up the day the opened the panner plant and he got the job)
Of course Homer's mannerisms and level of incompetence is exaggerated. Wouldn't be much of a show if he didn't. But his material wealth relative to his occupation and social class is not exaggerated - that part is plausible.
He wasn't Homer, no... but IDK whether it's a small difference or a large one. He did have a huge gut and seemed to have no actual responsibilities and spend all his time doing nothing. Once in a while a PhD would deputize the lowest-ranking person available for the job of going to hassle him until he'd give the OK to change the assignments/passcodes so a different team of engineers would have access/authority over this or that lab space. One time I got that job, of going and asking him for something, which is the main reason I ever interacted with him enough to have an impression. My impression was... I have no idea what this guy's job is or why he's the person I'm asking about this. He seems... mean and sleepy?
I have no idea if the guy I'm talking about was generally competent or not--it was a big enough company that had for a very long time been "growing research team of kindly dorky nerds in HR environment that gives them toys and lets them play". I was only at the company a year, as a lowly tech.
Also, do you know very much about Rocky Flats? They pretty commonly noticed a room had become so dangerous there'd be no safe way to clean it, so they'd just brick up the doorway. Started causing cascading problems when things started dripping through walls & etc. At different points there was a big fire affecting floors w/ plutonium, a serious ground-water contamination concern, and more.
Agreed. My father left college (football scholarship) after one year to get married and support a family. He worked in the stockroom for about a decade, and then was promoted to Facilities Manager without completing so much as an Assoc Degree.
As you say, it was indeed possible in that era. The responsibility of training and certifying him was borne by the institution, not by him personally, so any training in dealing with chemicals, security, etc. was paid by his employer.
For background, he was at the tail end of the Silent Generation.
Correct. That Homer is rankly unqualified is one of the show's central gags; he's the only person to be fired when the plant is bought by Germans, and his workplace successes own either to dumb luck or the intervention of others. It's made quite clear that he was not hired on merit.
Yeah, I grew up in a town called Springfield—capital of Illinois! plenty of stuff to do there, two huge hospitals, University of Illinois branch—and you can absolutely become Homer Simpson if you want. There's even a power plant (coal, alas). Here's a three-bedroom house near where I was born for under $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1121-N-5th-St-Springfield-IL-62702/75499034_zpid/ . If you're patient and can get up to $150k you've got a ton of options; you can buy a house near a park in a beautiful old neighborhood filled with tall trees, etc.
It's not Detroit, either—there was no huge boom and no huge bust, and there are no emptied-out neighborhoods where the houses are falling down—it's just a place that both housing bubbles mostly ignored. (All the expensive houses, because it's a fairly red city that hasn't had the millennial move-back-to-the-city, are big mcmansions on the historic edges of town, which got built out in the 80s.)
As someone who’s driven through Springfield countless times: yes, there is absolutely a power plant of some sort in the city. It’s really hard to miss.
Maybe, but you can get the true Springfield effect in one of the few areas of Pennsylvania there isn't a Springfield. US 422 West heading towards Reading, you go up a small rise and...
Assuming that Homer got the job and the house when the show started in 1989 makes the whole thing a lot more plausible. Standard union pay scale for a 40+ year career and staying in the same house for that long would be enough to let anyone live comfortably.
While not 'rap' specifically, there's a large literature on the migration of lower class language to the middle and upper class. Particularly African-American English. From 'high-fives' to 'cool' to the word 'rap' itself, not to mention 'straight up', 'lit', 'woke'. These have all migrated to standard English, through what linguists call 'covert prestige'. Put simply (and crudely and simplistically), it's cool to be gangsta, even for rich people.
Also on the level of accent. In the U.K., while Received Pronunciation is replacing a lot of regional languages among the middle classes, it’s also been very much affected by features of those accents, and that applies to the RP of even the high aristocracy. Prince William’s accent has numerous features like widespread glottal stops and l-vocalisation that traditional TO lacked, and others like linking /r/ that we’re present but disparaged. Interestingly (possibly?) Kate Middleton has a somewhat more traditional version of the accent, suggesting maybe that as an upper-middle-class person she is having to “try harder”, to echo the book under review here.
And of course "traditional" RP is just mid-late 20th Century BBC English, which in turn would differ from the upper and upper middle class accents of earlier periods. If you read The Forsyte Saga, you'll find Galsworthy (via one of his characters) musing on the differences between the accents of members of different generations of the same upper middle class family and their close associates in the 1920s.
Absolutely. I think the version you hear in period dramas is usually the mid-century version you describe - with /əʊ/ for the GOAT vowel rather than the earlier /oʊ/. But the version in some textbooks and online sources can still be pretty close to the early 20th-century version described by Daniel Jones. It can have weird results - I once met a Polish film director whose flawless English was in an accent that I don't think I had ever heard from a living English person, only from old Pathe news broadcasts!
As for modern RP, I think Geoff Lindsey describes it right -
What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?
Pure RP accents are a thing of the past, but there are still recognisable public school accents (that is, what you get after attending a given public school followed by Oxbridge, or being socialised to speak as if you did).
My issue with it is that British doesn't make sense as a description of a group of accents. Obviously people talk about British accents in normal usage, but in linguistics it's not very coherent: RP has more features in common with Australian accents than with Highlands Scottish accents, and Northern Irish accents have more in common with North American ones than with southern English. Contrast this with North America, for example, where there is a wide variety of accents but the vast majority share more features with each other than they do with any other major accent group.
British English <I>grammar</I>, on the other hand, is a coherent category, so I dare say I'm fighting a losing battle on this one.
Elleston Trevor, who also wrote as Adam Hall for the Quiller books, once mentioned that after living in the US for decades and thinking the British Upper Class was still what he'd grown up with. he listened to the Queen on television in the 1990's and- she didn't quite sound upper class any more.
Interestingly (or not) I don't think this is conscious modulation on her part as a result of coaching from PR types. I grew up in the village where Diana Cavendish (Claire Foy's character from Breathe) lives, and she sounds pretty similar to the Queen now and I suspect sounded pretty similar to the queen 50 years ago.
Oh I'm certain that's right. Most people's accents change a fair bit over the course of their lives. Hardly anyone has the RP of the 1950s anymore, so it would be hard to maintain it.
I don't understand the technicalities of this stuff, but here's a story that backs up Geoff Nathan's take fairly well: My closest grad school friend is pretty posh: private (though not "public" i.e. super-elite) school in Cambridge, successful academics for father and uncle (at least one of whom was Oxbridge at one point I think), can trace her ancestry back to major 18th century Scottish aristocrats who were disposed after backing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, her aunt once tried to donate the family sword that she will inherit to a museum. After schooling in Cambridge, she went to University College London (to do Classics, perhaps inevitably). A few years later, when she met up with high school friends again, they, who had all also been to university in London had all mysteriously managed to acquire *London* accents. Which is to say, relatively speaking, more working class accents. (In the UK, the more your accent is tied to a place and the more specific that place is, the more working class your accent, generally speaking.) She knew that this was obviously not just a natural process, since she sounded as posh as ever. (I can confirm that she does not remotely have anything like a London accent.)
This isn't the only incident of accent suspiciously failing to match class background I can remember from Oxford either. The poshest sounding guy I met there was a second-generation Greek immigrant from, by his own account, a pretty rough area of Birmingham. Meanwhile, there was at least one pretty damn rich guy from Brighton was a suspiciously strong London accent. Having said that, traditional snobbery DEFINITELY still exists as well. A philosopher of maths from Glasgow (so very strong working-class accent, even though her family weren't all *that* badly off) told me that she was teased mercilessly at Cambridge as an undergrad. (This would have been maybe 2003-11 depending on exactly when she went.) And also told by friends that since she could pull of a convincing imitation of RP, it was a mystery why she didn't choose to speak that way all the time.
I don’t really get what your friend means by not a natural process. It’s completely typical to pick up the accent of people around you. I started at a state school and had a somewhat North London accent, then moved to a posh-ish school and developed a modern RP. I may switch a bit depending on setting, but the basic process is largely subconscious for most people.
The fact that it affected your friend less could be less “natural”, not more! She may be deliberately resistant to change. But of course it also just affects different people differently. I knew a woman from
California who lived in London for 30 years and never, to my ear, lost her accent at all.
You're right of course that I can't *prove* my friend is right. But 3 years is really quite a short amount of time for a big shift. And I don't think she meant that they had absolutely consciously switched exactly, as that they were driven by a desire to sound cooler, even if that wasn't conscious. It's worth saying here that specifically London accents would not necessarily be all THAT dominant at a good London university, given how international they are.
I see your point. Three years is plenty, but I think it's probably impossible to disentangle "desire to sound cooler" from being subconsciously influenced by the accent of people who you think are cool. My hunch remains that it's largely subconscious, just because most language change is, but I don't know.
One thing I've noticed is that the younger brothers and sisters of my privately-educated peers tend to have accents much more touched by Multicultural London English (MLE), the working-class London accent that has largely displaced Cockney and other traditional ones within the city. MLE emerged in the late 70s / early 80s, and affected that cohort from around the mid-nineties, while leaving us (inevitably less cool) older siblings with unaffected modern RP accents. Modern RP includes things like lots of glottal stops and l-vocalisation (something like "animu" for "animal" before a consonant) but lacks many of the distinguishing MLE features. At the time I assumed that the younger siblings were "trying to sound cool," but I think that was oversimplifying the dynamic a lot.
My best friend - who I met at Oxford - is the son of a motor mechanic from the North-East. When I met him in his first year, his Northumbrian accent was fairly mild (certainly milder than his father's) but very much noticeable. Over the course of the following couple of years in Oxford, his masters year in Cambridge, and his professional career in the arts in London, it's receded to the point of being a barey noticeable twinge - except when he speaks on the phone to his parents, at which point (without any conscious choice on his part) it returns. People who meet him now assume he's just posh. I also knew a Canadian girl who went to an English boarding school from 13. She sounded RP as all get-out until she phoned home, when she started abooting like a South Park character.
Is there a hypothesized mechanism here? Countersignalling? ("I'm using this word to demonstrate that I can use the word and still be unambiguously considered high class")
I think it's just kids growing up. 30 years ago, I was all about Snoop smoking blunts and talking about how much he didn't love hoes. Now I'm the boss and kids think I'm a nerd. Whatever they're into now will be boring and bougie in 2050.
I wonder if this is perhaps an example of what's called Nostalgie de la Boue:
<i>"Nostalgie de la boue is a nineteenth-century French term that means, literally, ‘nostalgia for the mud.’" "Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated ‘middle class.’ They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes, and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”</i>
"Likewise, there are typical working-class vacations (cruises), gadgets (those watches with all the dials), and so on and so forth. None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
Bias disclosure: I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper, so claiming that I'm more in touch with the working class than you is laughable. That said, I think Fussell is right here; working-class people *do* go on cruises. They just go into credit card debt to do it. A good treatment of class in the modern day would have to have an entire chapter on debt, and each class's treatment of it.
The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to. The middle class is extended credit and treats it carefully and responsibly. The working class is extended credit and abuses it. The lower class is not extended credit at all.
Huh? There is an entire class of bail bondsmen, appliance salesmen, used cars, and payday lenders that make a mint off loans to the "lower" class. I can see you've never had a neighbor who had to stop parking his car in his driveway to avoid it being repossessed.
I'm new to posting on this blog and...wow. It's true, you people really do have no idea whatsoever how the other half lives. You just make something up and believe that. :-(
Hi, new person. Phrases like “you people” are basically verboten here. Also, “I can see you’ve never...” is bad form. You can’t actually see that: you just get the sense that this person is out of touch. But they said that: the identified as upperest class. So being aggrieved at their ignorance doesn’t add a lot to the discussion. It’s sufficient and preferable just to point out they they’re substantially wrong, and explain why.
I think that would be a serious misread. There are communication norms in this space that can be adhered to by anyone of any class, and they’re certainly not native to any particular class. I’m pretty much doing the opposite of othering you: I’m taking the time to inform you of the social norms, and trusting in your fundamental reasonableness and good faith. You’re rather othering crotchety crank by taking one silly thing he said and creating a grand theory of “you people” out of it. Baseless assumptions are the heart of objectification
Uh, this is tricky. Harland isn't wrong. In "prole" culture you say it loud and brash and then fight about it. Metacogging about social and conversational norms while going out of your way to carefully signal welcomeness is a class marker from Harland's perspective.
I feel rather like a longhaired greasy freak who just drove into town with out-of-state license plates, and got pulled over right away by Cletus the county mounty. "Bwah, y'ain't from 'round here, are ya, bwah?" he says, shining his maglite into my eyes to check if they're bloodshot. Having had my license run through the computer and a momentary detention while a K-9 unit is called so it can sniff over my car, I'm being released with a friendly admonition that "this how we do things in this-sheah parts." Thanks kindly for your time, officer! I then immediately proceed to the nearest convenience store to purchase a "Blue Lives Matter" bumper sticker.
To be frank, almost everything you've described in this thread is a class norm. You think conflict, brashness, "rude" behavior, etc. are inimical to the development of healthy discourse. Taking a measured, faux-polite rhetorical position that is desperate to signal its rationality, calmness, and willingness to engage is at the absolute core of the educated elite's conception of the world. Those norms get elided on the internet, where a counter-norm of genuine acrimony and animosity on the part of the educated *young* elite is more predominant, but it doesn't mean what you describe is not a traditionally higher-class phenomenon.
The difference between the *young* elite's version (which is characterized by GENUINE disdain) and the "prole" perspective on discourse is that in the latter, being strong, brash, and having fights about everything is just... normal. People do it all the time. You and your best friend have furious arguments, maybe even physical fights on occasion. That's just life. Doesn't mean you don't like somebody -- in fact, you probably do it most with the people you love.
If I'd been writing more carefully, I would have added "...by banks." I was thinking of "loan" in the sense of mortgage rather than payday lending or used car loans, although you'll see in my response to Lexie that as soon as this other group of creditors was pointed out, I acknowledged it.
The upper middle class is extended credit and treats it responsibly. The middle class varies a lot in that department, which is one reason they're precarious.
> The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to.
The upper class doesn't *take* loans, they are *given* loans, which are used (by financial planners and other "servants") to turn illiquid wealth into funding for day-to-day expenses. Most importantly, the upper class and upper-middle class have no need of *unsecured* credit (a true upper probably having no concept of it; upper-middle knowing about it but avoiding it), putting them almost entirely out of reach of the kind of debt spiral that can ruin other classes.
Actually, the truly wealthy use quite a lot of debt, because as you acquire assets, many of them are illiquid. It's a middle-class conceit that economic safety is being debt-free.
This is right! Similarly only the middle class are obsessed with owning everything. The proles can't afford to and the upper often can't be bothered with the upkeep!
While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money. I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
This is a concern I've had about UBI in the future as well. People seem to assume freedom from work will lead people to commit their time to artistic passions or other virtuous ends, but the (admittedly not at all representative of the general populace) people we currently see experiencing freedom from work are hardly living this utopia, despite their piles of money.
Sigh...artistic passions. Only a tiny number of us humans have such desires, those of us high in the personality trait of Openness. The rest of us might make things, but according to our wants and needs, not because we have some burning passion inside. The real tragedy occurs when discussion is dominated by high Openness individuals who assume that anyone who doesn't feel the need to create art must be some kind of soulless insect. :/
In my career I’ve had periods of intense pressure when you’re super busy and periods of downtime, both at the same compensation level; as well as periods of genuinely worrying about money. Of the three, well compensated downtime is in my experience the most likely to result in depression and substance abuse.
I suspect in the UBI laden u/dys-topia, some clever entrepreneur would gamify daily life in a manner that would give people meaningful goals to shoot for in cases where people are not creative enough to fill their time in useful ways. Ideally something smarter than "how many likes can I get on instagram".
Here's a video by The History Guy about John B. Calhoun and the real Rats of N.I.M.H. Fascinating research that predicted the rise of hypersexuality, sociopathic elites, soyboys, incels and ultimately the end, as young rats didn't learn courtship behaviors and could not breed. Afterwards the rats never recovered, even when introduced to a healthy society.
I've read some heavy criticism of thatt experiment; that Calhoun only got that result once in all his rat and mouse experiments, and that particular one started with four mice that were already closely related and all he ended up with was some unlucky effects of inbreeding and mutational load.
You mean like the legions of starving artists, pre-tenure academics and other people who - in present day - sacrifice status and material comfort to work on things they're actually interested in?
I think we'll manage just fine, really, though there'll probably be a "lost generation" of people who were so used to getting orders they'll have no idea what to do with themselves.
This is a good reason why we need to legalize hallucinogenic drugs. At least you can alter your state in a manner that doesn't cause your liver permanent damage or send you into a bad addiction spiral.
>even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage)
I'd be interested to hear more about this
>I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
I think there's actually a surprisingly large gap between the amount of wealth that precludes one or one's children and grandchildren from needing to work and the amount of wealth that can sustain philanthropy as a full-time, decades-long endeavor.
Specifically, a US stock market index fund can historically get you, say, 3.5% return on average after inflation, meaning that you you can invest $4M in one and live forever on the increases, but only if you're willing to live on $120k/year. Of course, the stock market is high variability, so you'll have smarter forms of wealth management (which means more money to start with). You also will probably want more than that total if you want to live the upper class life style. But it's still in the range of $10M to live a very comfortable life without ever working. However, that amount will not fund a charity for very long, especially not indefinitely.
Fair enough... maybe they could volunteer for philanthropic organizations full time? Making the world a better place is a great way to acquire a sense of purpose ;-)
They absolutely could! But that might put other class signals at risk, such as 'not looking like you're trying' and 'not getting too much education'. Plus, ignoring what a mess the world is in, and especially ignoring the people who are suffering the most from that mess is also a long-standing highest-class tradition. Stepping out of that bubble is a slippery slope ....
I suspect Fussell has a lot of blind spots due to his own middle class position. It might look like the Upper Class has nothing to prove, but that's not true, it's just that they have nothing to prove to the likes of _you_. Their status games are invisible and incomprehensible to your middle-class mind.
I'm thinking that the Lower Class and Upper Class have just as many status games going on as the Middle Class, but Fussell is only sensitive enough to detect Middle Class signals.
The way Scott describes Fussell describing the upper class gives the impression that they often have no conception of money whatsoever. It seems like this could lead to an embarrassing situation where, for example, someone with a net worth of $50 million accidentally buys a $100 million Pollock painting because they don't realize that they don't have $100 million. Have you ever heard of something like this happening? Or is there a mechanism to prevent it?
I think the mechanism is that the uppers don't really _do_ anything themselves, so whomever it is that handles their money (or the team of people that do, or even the several _companies_ that do) would prevent a faux pas like you describe (mostly).
And at that level – buying million dollar paintings – you definitely _can_ return it if, somehow, you couldn't pay for it. And there would be lawyers on retainer to protect against any consequences (tho possibly by paying the aggrieved 'merchant' off for their trouble).
Update: both generations above mine have already read it! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
Some of my family were definitely in Fussell's working-class, especially back in the 80s, and it seems to be 100% accurate to me. They'd go to Vegas instead of on a cruise, but just about every description matches perfectly.
These days Vegas has been transformed until it resembles nothing as much as a stationary cruise ship. The buffets, the casinos, the shows, the comedians, the foreign underpaid labor...they're scarily alike.
I think Vegas also draws from plenty of middle class as well - at least compared to somewhere like Atlantic City or Reno. But lots of aspects of Vegas do seem to be the pinnacle of upper-prole.
Cruises and Disney vacations are certainly affordable (in the literal sense) for Fussell's "proles." It's just something you save up for over a longer time horizon or a special treat rather than something you just sorta do without putting much prior thought or planning into it.
I'd have to agree. Growing up in a very prolley household we went on vacation every year, but only to Disneyland twice. At the time (and still now, in my heart of hearts) I considered it the apex of all possible vacation destinations. You certainly can't afford to go there every year!
Working at Disneyland was my first real job and the employees (who are largely quite poor) go on Disney vacations themselves all the damn time because they can get into the parks for free and get gigantic discounts on hotels, flights, and yes, cruises (lest people forget that Disney also owns a cruise line).
I've never been to Disney Land... but my older brother worked at Disney World when I was a young child and my family went to Disney World several times during his tenure. I was too young to really remember much of those trips, but when me and my parents went in my teens, I remember it being a lot of quantity over quality... I personally find A day at Bush Gardens a superior vacation to a week at Disney World, or at least my teenaged self did... and being from North Carolina, Williamsburg is a much shorter car ride than Orlando.
I'm pretty sure at least some people do it – and I mean go several times a year – without quite 'saving up' for it in the normal way I think you intended. But I could be wrong – there are lots of ways to live more frugally, if one is willing to ignore at least some 'class expectations' (even as a prole).
There are of course different cruise lines for different classes. Carnival or Disney is different to Cunard or Viking, say.
Non-prole cruises are generally filled with 80+ year olds who still want to travel to exotic destinations but find that air travel and dragging suitcases everywhere is getting a bit too exhausting at their age.
I don't think a working class person, even if poor and a high school dropout, is necessarily "low" class. As I said in another comment, the restraint in what you do...speech, clothes, decor...all that defines class.
Trump, for example, was wealthy and had (on paper) a fancy education. His manners, speech, tweets...these were what made him "low class". He showed no restraint.
Important line: "Donald Trump is not, like, a *rich man*. He's what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." So, "working class aesthetics" with "upper class" results.
Interesting - I interpreted amusement instead of disdain. Maybe that's just because it was communicated through comedy. I agree that he doesn't express any kind of understanding for a class perspective outside his own.
Trump talks and acts like a kid from Queens. That's part of why the elite hate him so much. He may have gone to Wharton and be a billionaire who lived on Central Park but he still acts like the guy in a working class bar who will slap the shit out of someone who gives him lip or disrespects him.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1980s-style unapologetic Democrat patriotism; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump's very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.
On the other hand, if Trump represents working-class culture (I don't think he really does) just why shouldn't that be a mark against working class culture? Like, Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people! That really is shameful, and if working class people really are more likely to ignore it in their judgment of him *as a person* (I'm not talking about deciding in whose interests he'd govern) then surely this reflects badly on working class culture. Ditto his attempts to constantly belittle and dominate everyone around him. These aren't neutral-in-themselves status signals that happen to be considered gauche because they have been adopted by particular social classes, but behaviors that genuinely and predictably hurt others.
I find a lot of people on the populist right *love* to entertain 'shocking' generalizations about the culture of various groups that liberals and social justice types consider oppressed, but then try to leverage exactly the same sort of 'don't punch down' norm that they otherwise mock when the criticism is aimed at the white working class. So you get a lot of 'but black people in cities really do have a culture that tolerates crime!' 'Muslim are more likely to be terrorists', but then moralistic shock about how snobby Jon Stewart is if he suggests people in West Virginia often believe dumb conspiracy theories. (This cuts both ways obviously, a lot of liberals want everyone to respect the 'don't punch down norm' except when liberals are talking about the white working class, which is equally hypocritical.)
Punching down is a concept in which you're assumed to have a measurable level of power and you're looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
You comfort the afflicted, not the other way around!
Donald Trump is not afflicted, he's comfortable. He's not "the little guy," he just claims to represent them. Like every politician does. Dismissing criticism of a famous former president as "punching down" just because he shares an aesthetic with the working class makes no sense.
I wasn't slagging off the idea of punching down by being bad (often you shouldn't punch up either-i.e. judge-y tabloid gossip about the rich and famous is often just gross), just it's hypocritical deployment in a 'don't punch down against the groups I like, but it's fine if you do it against the ones I don't like'-way.
And have a servant to write the exec summary?
"I was astonished to realize that Scottish-ness and Irishish-ness, similar to the Anglophilia in many upper classes - thinking of William Buckley's accent now - had become posh in some contexts in the States. I was late coming to this realization and it's still weird."
I don't know much about the upper class, but a lot of middle-class Americans are very proud that some ancestor came from Ireland or Scotland.
"Lobster used to be low-class" is an overstated meme. In PG Wodehouse's "Code of the Woosters", Bertie Wooster agrees to do a favour (being thrown into gaol) for his Aunt Dahlia in exchange for a meal to be cooked by her (comedically amazing) personal chef Anatole, and immediately sets to setting out his dream menu. The fish course? Sylphides a la Creme d'ecrivesses: lobster with crayfish sauce (baked in pastry with brandy and cream). That was 1938.
Maybe not lobster so much, but things like oysters and shellfish in general were working/lower class cheap food. Oysters are now fancified, but nobody (so far as I know) has yet produced an upper-class version of a bag of whelks or jellied eels (though give them time).
And there's a certain irony in French food being considered high-class, since a lot of the recipes come from "we need to find ways to cook every part of the animal". Rural and farm cooking. The attitude behind Hogarth's The Roast Beef of Old England (the English are wealthy enough that even the common man may dine on beef rather than frogs' legs and snails): https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/hogarth-o-the-roast-beef-of-old-england-the-gate-of-calais-n01464
"Numerous xenophobic references indicate Hogarth's low opinion of the French. The huge side of British beef at the exact centre of the picture, destined for the English inn at Calais, is neatly balanced by the scrawny French soldier at the other side of the drawbridge. A fat friar, the only well-nourished Frenchman in the picture, covetously pokes the beef."
And indeed a patriotic ballad prior to that:
"When mighty Roast Beef was the Englishman's food,
It ennobled our veins and enriched our blood.
Our soldiers were brave and our courtiers were good
Oh! the Roast Beef of old England,
And old English Roast Beef!
But since we have learnt from all-vapouring France
To eat their ragouts as well as to dance,
We're fed up with nothing but vain complaisance
Oh! the Roast Beef of Old England,
And old English Roast Beef!"
How would we know if they disappeared? They were always invisible to normies.
Our boarding schools are still open, which is the surest way to know that we're still here. (This is exactly as tongue-in-cheek as Fussell.)
I read the X Class a little more broadly: it's academics, people who might have become academics if they'd played their cards right, and young people who still could.
I'd be very hesitant about drawing conclusions about past living standards from TV shows. Think about the oft-remarked difference between the apartments we saw on 'Friends', and the sort of New York apartments people in that income group would actually have been able to afford.
I actually disagree a bit here. I think academics have more potential than the average person to be X Class (especially younger academics), but also many academics are living out the upper-middle class dream of being a respectable professional.
Yes, I think it's basically hippy academics as opposed to more professional-signaling academics
I think it's basically hippy academics
The X Class is what every person believes he is: "The other people are poseurs and sheep. But I transcend all this and make choices independently on the merits. My choices reflect how unique and smart and independent I am. I am an X person."
Seriously, do you think anyone self-identifies as a "High-Prole?"
Mid-to-high prole, in the HOUSE! Like... if your grandpa wasn't a lumberjack, and your grandma didn't have plastic swans in the strawberry garden out in front of their mobile home, next to the potted geraniums, then what the hell are you even doing, calling yourself a Real Amurican? (I'm kidding here of course... sort of. No wait... Yes. Yes, I'm definitely totally kidding.)
One of the things I loved about Fussell's bullshit book was how it widened my hypothesis space for understanding why most people doing "white collar" work nearby to my aughties-era datascience gigs were so insecure. They like: *intrinsically cared* about how strangers who weren't even their family *saw them* for like... reasons OTHER than "not-unethically convincing a big boss type into granting one permission to play with super expensive toys". After reading Fussell, I started sometimes purposefully wearing purple because it was funny.
Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs.
"Sadly, I'm effortlessly svelte, even though my diet is mostly pizza and cheezburgs."
Classic humblebrag, but I'll allow it.
I suspect "effortlessly svelte" for most of the actual upper class involves doctors who prescribe the diet pills which actually work.
I believe they are probably neurotic and anxious (the women) and thus fidgety and restless, and with good reason, because their husbands are keeping the weight off by banging the mistress. Also, the men golf and sail a lot.
Actually you don't need to be neurotic or anxious to be fidgety.
Source: am highly fidgety but emotionally on the chill side (and live a comparatively stress-free life), but do have ADHD. Wouldn't say I'm effortlessly svelte, but definitely don't watch my weight much and yet maintain normal BMI.
Is there such a thing as a diet pill which actually works?
Amphetamines don't count.
Why don't amphetamines count?
Amphetamines may not count, but they're what I meant.
Not yet, but there is one in development by Xeno Biosciences.
My grandparents would have both fit the bill. One would have objected to "prole", the other to "high".
My maternal grandfather was a very small scale farmer who wouldn't have known the term "prole" (in fairness it probably wasn't coined yet). In his view there were two kinds of people: "regular people" and "the rich." The former were good, the latter were thieves. He had zero desire to be rich, cared nothing about appearances, and was probably the happiest guy I ever met.
"Prole" is used extensively in 1984 (published 1949) - Google Books actually shows it peaking in 1611, though I wonder if most of that is confusion with the similarly-spelled Latin word for "offspring". https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=prole&year_start=1500&year_end=2019&corpus=26&smoothing=3#
It's the same word - "prole" is short for "proletarius" or later "proletariat" who were originally just the people in the Roman census who didn't own anything so the censors just counted their kids.
Right, but it would be a mistake to count appearances of "prole" in Latin text (perhaps in quotations?) as if they were appearances of "prole" in the modern English sense.
The self-description isn't "High-Prole," it's "working-class-made-good." And yes, lots and lots of people identify like that.
A long time ago I read an article about the two middle classes, the Academic Middle Class and the Commercial Middle Class. All I can find of it now is this quote by Freeman Dyson:
> In England there were always two sharply opposed middle classes, the academic middle class and the commercial middle class. In the nineteenth century, the academic middle class won the battle for power and status. As a child of the academic middle class, I learned to look on the commercial middle class with loathing and contempt. Then came the triumph of Margaret Thatcher, which was also the revenge of the commercial middle class. The academics lost their power and prestige and the business people took over. The academics never forgave Thatcher and have been gloomy ever since.
This sounds broadly correct to me, as one who awkwardly straddles both sides of the fence. The Commercial Middle Class can be seen in their BMW X5s, the Academic Middle Class in their Subarus or on their bicycles (with the occasional Tesla at the upper end). The commercial middle class are richer (per unit social status) than the academic middle class, so the academic middle class has to work harder on signalling in order to compensate.
Lawyers, bankers, and most types of engineers are Commercial Middle Class, while well-paid public-sector types tend to be Academic Middle Class (along with academics, of course). Silicon Valley seems to be largely Commerical Middle Class with a lot of Academic Middle Class pretensions, and much of the conflict you'll find inside big Silicon Valley companies is just AMC vs CMC posturing; it seems like the best way to get promoted is to have the ability to mouth AMC values while getting paid a CMC salary.
The AMC thinks the CMC is beneath them, because it goes around spending money on flashy crap like fancy cars and nice houses with swimming pools, and we all know that only lower-class people feel the need to signal like that. The CMC meanwhile thinks the AMC is beneath them because they don't even have flashy cars or nice houses with swimming pools, and that's just sad.
Fussell's Class X basically sounds like a description of the sorts of things that were becoming popular among the Academic Middle Class in 1983.
What you're describing sounds kind of like Moldbug's "Brahmin" (AMC) vs "Vaisya" (CMC), although it's hard to be sure of the identification. Seems a bit different from what Fussell is going for though; the AMC you describe definitely does not sound like Class X to me, instead sounding more just like his "upper-middle"...
There are several ways this distinction has been described, Piketty's Brahmin left & merchant right, I've also heard priestly class & merchant class. Either way, plus ça change... (indicating my frightful British middle class-ness by using French there, see Nancy Mitford's "U and non-U" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U_and_non-U_English
Are doctors and lawyers CMC or AMC?
Lawyers tend to be CMC.
Doctors draw from both groups. Some specialties (plastic surgery?) are almost pure CMC, others (including psychiatrists maybe?) are more AMC.
Having spent time at a mid-size OLD Connecticut law firm, I'd say they are a definite mix. There were attorneys there that were old money, didn't need to work, but being an attorney was respectable and allowed them to help fellow upper-class people. Good firms need to have people like this because some old money people don't want to work with CMC people - ever. But this was disappearing when I entered the profession (mid 2000's). All the young associates were striver CMCs and there were no old money young lawyers. This is likely because the grind of being a young lawyer is not something someone with nothing to prove would ever do now.
Similar observation and strongly agree, with the exception being AMCs in a tax-exempt public-policy type of practice/consultancy.
My mostly-indirect exposure to 'real old money' (upper class) people was similarly enlightening – you've got the maybe upper-middle class people that do the work, the middle and lower class people that do the 'real' work (i.e. drudgery), and a few figurehead lower-upper class people being (AFAICT) 'punished' by being 'requested' to hold down an 'important' position at one of the family's concerns.
(The specific old money people I got some glimpses of were pretty scary in some ways too!)
How were they scary?
Along the lines of whatever it was that Jeffrey Epstein was doing is scary
In England, it's waaaay more complicated than this.
The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu. Unlike other European countries, this was historically possible to enter through inter-marriage. This still happens a bit, but rarely in one step (e.g. Jeff Bezos sends his kids to Eton, and one of his granddaughters marries a marquess). All class movement (at least in England) is cross-generational, so you can't change class but your children can be a different class to yours.
The Working Class are people who work in factories, labourers, plumbers etc. There's a perennially unemployed underclass, who have now largely branched off but aren't quite a separate class as it's still possible to move between the two within one lifetime.
Historically, the middle class embraced industrial tycoons, lawyers, doctors, accountants and the better sort of "clerks" (white collar workers - Bob Cratchett and Scrooge were both middle class, but represent the farthest ends). A huge number of people moved up into this category after WWII, and particularly under Thatcher (when Blair was talking about "Mondeo man," this is who he was talking about.
The post-war movers represent the bulk of the middle class, and are people doing "office jobs" - salesmen, actuaries, solicitors (one type of lawyer), the sort of banker who might be a "trader" etc.* This is the Lower Middle Class and Middle Middle Class, although they seem to have more of a gradient between them than a line. This is the CMC. They're status-conscious, confrontation-averse and child-rearing-oriented, but in terms of accent and (physical) appearance aren't distinct from the working class.
The Upper Middle Class contains academics, the better sort of army officers, barristers (the other type of lawyer), doctors, senior civil servants (and the junior civil servants who are on track to become them), and the sort if banker who wouldn't be a "trader." They usually went to private schools or public schools (a confusing English term which means "expensive private school" and is what Hogwarts is a pastiche of), but some went to grammar schools (selective state schools). Within this class, there's a clear divide:
AMC (plus socially mobile people whose kids will be AMC): Most academics, a majority of senior civil servants, a majority of (white, gentile) doctors (including almost all male ones), roughly half of barristers, most people who work for NGOs, a few rich people living off their money, and some of the non-trader bankers. These people have their own public schools (e.g. Highgate, St Pauls) and private schools. They are more likely to be non-conformist or low-church (most are still Anglican by extraction), although they're mostly atheists. They were historically the old civilian middle class (merchants, clerks etc.), the sort of people who backed Cromwell in the civil war and became the American puritans. They're naturally Lib Dems politically but the Labour moderates (e.g. Starmer, Blair) come from this class. They probably instinctively think the roundheads were the good guys in the civil war (possibly with hand-wringing about Ireland). Historically, Barclays and Lloyds were run by them, banking seems to be mixed far more thoroughly now. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you'd believe they have a brother who teaches political science at KCL. Anyone who rises into the upper middle class through education (grammar schools or comprehensive>Oxbridge) ends up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think John Oliver.
[Martial?] Upper Middle Class: the better sort of army officers, some female doctors, a minority of the senior civil service (basically the rest of the Upper Middle Class). Eton is their Harvard, but somewhere like Rugby or Uppingham would be more typical. They tend to be high-church Anglican by extraction, and are far more likely to have a Norman surname or a weird Scottish connection than is typical in England. They're largely derived from the old rural gentry, or the eighth son of the fifth son of a ninth son of the Upper Class. These people *are* the Conservative Party, barring the occasional hanger-on like Hague or Gavin Williams. Historically, banks then ran were HSBC and funny like Arbuthnott's. If in doubt, ask yourself whether you believe they have a brother who's a captain in the Blues and Royals. To a man, they think the cavaliers were the good guys in the civil war. Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle. Facially, think David Cameron.
I'm fairly sure both upper middle classes are roughly the same size, but I could be off by about an order of magnitude (especially as by educational footprint, the MUMC looks much larger).
The Moldbug parallel should be apparent - the MUMC are basically sub-optimates, the AMC are Brahmins, the bulk of the Middle and Working Class are Vaisyas. This all interacts with race in very complicated ways, and English jews have their own byzantine internal class structure I don't entirely understand, but seem to have at least one equivalent to every group.
*There are two types of bankers. Some of them are "traders" and these are always the lower-class type but are in a broader category. I'm fairly fuzzy on what any of these people do so can't draw the line occupationally, but socially the distinction is obvious. "M&A" is possibly on the upper side of the line...?
Actually, having googled him, John Oliver's face is too slightly too long but you get the basic idea.
"The Upper Class are proper hereditary peers, their families, the Royal Family, and the odd hanger-on who doesn't have a peerage but is clearly in the general milieu."
I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces.
Another complication in the English class system is where Catholics fit, especially those who would have a claim to be in the Upper Class.
"I was under the impression that the old aristocracy regarded the Royals as rather middle-class, although not to their faces."
Why? Because they have a job?
They're a bit "bourgeois" (in the condescending aristocratic sense): they like to seem like they uphold slightly old-fashioned middle-class "Victorian" values, aka, what middle-class people think "they're betters" should be like.
*their betters [come back edit button, all is forgiven!]
Because the contemporary branch of the reigning family stems from tiny Germany duchies, which at the time were ruled by small German grocers, and the family name until the WWI was Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. There are titled families in the UK with genealogical trees to William the Conqueror, and that is considered to be way more interesting than small German grocers. Diana once said to Charles, that her (original) title is older, which also was true.
Sorry - not the “title”, “original family name” was older.
I think your description of the Martial Middle Class is a bit off. The description implies a certain kind of old Englishness of public schools, long family history, and tradition "a brother in the Blues and Royals". But then you contradict yourself and inlcude "Anyone who rises into the Upper Middle Class from having parents who just randomly got rich enough to send their kids to public schools (businessmen, athletes etc.) tends to end up on this side of the aisle."
A quick look at the Tory cabinet suggests the latter is more fitting than the former as defining the Conservative party. Gove, Priti Patel, Hancock, are all children of business people, and Raab's parents were white collar employees. Except Gove, they're all second generation immigrants, none of them are descended from old rural gentry. In fact they all seem urban not rural.
In contrast Boris Johnson definitely strikes me as someone who oozes Englishness, though not the kind of Englishness you'll see in a Holywood film. I could very much see him as the village eccentric in a crowd of old rural gentry. Sunak's parents are probably AMC (doctor and pharmacist) but he went into banking (I think non-trading) but also seems to be turning into a bit of a country squire ever since he partially moved to the country.
I'd make two modifications to your taxonomy. First add an upper commercial middle class; this is where successful business people's children go and is is a backbone of the Tory party. The Martial/Country Squire upper middle class remains as a smaller (this might be my urban bias showing) group in the Tory party that has adapted to Thatcher-ism and now remains a firm ally of the commercial middle class (even if they might gripe about globalism now and then, or capitalism optimising away a nice institution or Victorian architecture).
Secondly your taxonomy doesn't have a place for everyone who defines themselves by education but didn't get the kind of degree that leads to a good graduate job. I'd say this is a new influx into the AMC that's got far less capital but is still changing it by weight of numbers plus some strong ideological weapons. Starmer vs Corbyn is an illustration of this fight.
The first "M" in MMC is probably an overstatement, but is just what distinguishes them from the AMC. My point is more "typical public school types" rather than "St Pauls/Highgate" types and that there's a clear distinction within them. It's more that Cameron and Osborne were clearly a different class to the self-made business types, but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties). The Tories, politically, are clearly aiming for the broad middle class (and now the working class), as voters. The people who are the MPs and most of the constituency associations are generally much more MMC.
I 100% agree that the long family tradition isn't close to universal (although within a couple of generations they all have it from inter-marriage). However, Britain being what it is, there really aren't enough self-made businessmen for them to have formed their own class.
Johnson is much more of an outlier but he's largely acting. His father and brother are much more conventionally MMC.
Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
> but the self-made business types' kids would be almost indistinguishable by the time they left Eton; that's why I don't think the Upper CMC is a thing - it's not sustainable inter-generationally, and their socially merged with the country squire types in the surrounding countryside (for London, the home counties).
You raise a good point. But I still think that if CMC (including upper) is looked at as a whole then it is inter-generationally sustainable. Your dad is a self made businessman and you've got an MBA and a management job. This roughly describes my and my bothers life paths. Our parents ran companies and sold them making good money but not stupid money. In practical terms, enough to contribute significantly to both of our first homes, but not enough to buy them for us outright (they could if they sold their second home, but they don't want to).
We were both supported and encouraged into education. But I went into computer science and got a white collar programming job, my brother now works at a hedge fund. We're both clearly distinguishable from the working class, but also clearly not Eton types, are would be repulsed by Corbyn even if we weren't Jewish (we weren't raised in the community).
I do agree about intermarriage with country squires. When we got the second home in the countryside my brother immediately developed a taste for fishing. The two classes are allied and the division is porous but I think the division is real. The average self made businessman who sends his kids to a good school probably sees his class and peer group as various other business people and his employees; not country squires unless he lives in the country and does squire things (but if he buys a country home he's high risk for getting typical hobbies). And while there's the potential for them to send kids to Eton or Rugby and produce little Camerons, most will send them to whatever local school is good with the intention of school->university-> white collar professional or the rich doctor / prestigious professor type of AMC.
> Corbyn and co are an odd bunch, who don't quite fit into a category. Corbyn in particular seems to be a hereditary left-wing campaigner, McDonnell's father came up from the unions and he went straight into politics, and Benn was upper class. I agree that the more general group you're referring to would be in the AMC.
I was thinking more about the general movement around Corbyn. Young, university educated, eager participants in imported American culture wars. But I think you got that from your last sentence?
I think you're in the group I'd be rounding off into the MMC (your brother particularly). I've never met a white-collar professional who didn't seem on one side of the line or another, but I'm slightly worried I might just be conflating a partisan divide with a broader social one. I've also no idea what the children of successful techies will be like!
I'm reluctant to type this, and am completely willing to defer if I'm very wrong, but I've also noticed that Jews seem to filter into the MMC less. This may be small sample size, but the handful of Jewish MMC I've met have all been at least third-generation. It must happen, but I suspect (possibly based on lazy stereotyping) that the slight contempt for academia that partly drives the division from the MMC side may generally be absent if your Jewish, so assimilation becomes more gradual absorption and hence more multi-generational...? I base that only on the fact that business-people whose kids I was at school with (massive selection bias there) would be horrified if their children went into academia.
The Corbyn clique themselves are very weird. I'd argue the Corbyn-supporting young are distinct from them (cf. Europe, coal-mining, Russia etc), and I'd assume are just young AMC and the political divide rounds off to age - young Liberal Democrats do exist, but they tend to make Young Conservatives seem normal by comparison.
Exactly. Almost every other culture has more complicated class system than America. There are really no classes in America, compared to UK, or Asia, or any other country except Canada and Australia. In America, the difference between top and the bottom class is like the difference between a white poodle and a black poodle. Everywhere else, it's like the difference between an ant and an elephant.
I think the CMC often looks down on the AMC also because of a view that they don't expose themselves to the risk and rewards of the market. That is certainly the case for my personal corner of the CMC filled with people who could have been academics but chose business. The view is that AMC develop theories without testing them in the real world like the CMC. The CMC has skin in the game.
Melvin, please share if you ever find that article
The Chattering Class has taken over from the X Class (forget who said it first), and the result is not good.
"Harry Potter" writ large. The books treat the Dursley's with undisguised class contempt; fat, materialistic, and having bad fashion sense to boot.
So unlike the sensitive, intelligent and cultured wizardfolk.
Pragmatically, you couldn't film a show in a typical NYC apartment. You wouldn't be able to get more than a couple of people in the frame without a room that's deeper (along the camera--subject axis" than the frame is wide.
True, but take a look at the apartment that Jackie Gleason's bus-driver salary afforded him in the 1950s "Honeymooners." I've lived in apartment buildings with nicer laundry rooms.
Americans got a lot richer between, say, 1945 and 1970.
Academia is now a 100% class signals game. The research activity does matter only via the number and place where the articles are published. Everything is optimized for the profit of publishers, in exchange for signals of value, as measured by academic bureaucracy.
On a tangent, even the (relatively) new phenomena, like Open Access, are already rotten by this class game. For those working in academia, how many time have you heard that huge article processing charges are OK, because why? if you can't pay the APC it means that your project is not funded, therefore not valuable. What if I don't want to pay the APC, when is clearly money for nothing? Class signals.
Fussell's Class X is more or less what we used to call bohemians. The closest modern equivalent are hipsters, but even that term is faded. What he's picking up on are traits of well-educated countercultures like ironic poverty.
David Brooks coined (or popularized?) the term "Bohemian Bourgeois" or Bobo. Although his take on them is far more positive than mine overall.
... which is what I think the X Class has become.
"Sure I'm the Assistant Director of Student Affairs for *InsertCollegeName*, but I'm cool and reuse my bags at the Organic Farmer's Market, and take 3 intercontinental/international trips by air per year (which totally cancelled out any benefit of not using plastic bags several times over at least in terms of CO2 Emissions). Last year we went to the Amazon and saw Pachamama statues..."
I think NPR subscriber. Although maybe the X Class has been subsumed into the UMC.
That Simpsons reference is deeply bubbled imo. There is a generation/subculture of people who grew up, went to a useless college, and don't have good jobs, but 65 percent of Americans are homeowners and the Simpsons are not astonishingly wealthy or anything by current standards, just by journalist/media studies person standards
It makes me very happy to see so many ACX commenters are casually familiar with Simpsons lore. I feel at home.
The story of small town America on Big Media is written by people who hated it, left, and nurse a grudge against the place they left. How many there genuinely like where they live? Those people aren't storytellers.
The only exception that comes to mind (which might reflect the fact I've not watched many shows set in small town America) is Stargirl. Blue Valley is portrayed as a very friendly place if slightly retro whose only major problem is supervillains; which are of course entirely necessary for the show to exist. I'd even say the show has some modest red-tribe coding (alongside plenty of blue). Pat Dugan strikes me as a small c-conservative. A mechanic who likes old cars and makes his son get a paper route to teach him responsibility; and sticks a Made In Detroit Stars&Stripes shield on his homemade giant robot.
Now granted (rot13 encoded spoilers) Gur fhcreivyynvaf ner jul gur gbja vf guevivat. Ubjrire gur fhcreivyynvaf ner irel oyhr pbqrq (fb ner zbfg bs gur urebrf; jura gurl urne jung gur ivyynvaf cyna gb qb gurve ernpgvba vf "ner lbh fher jr'er ba gur evtug fvqr"; hagvy gurl ernyvfr zvyyvbaf jvyy qvr).
All that said: for pro-small town America stories I strongly recommend Stargirl.
Wynonna Earp qualifies as smalltown too (although it does have a hugely disproportionate number of gay people).
The small town it's in is also more or less on the boundary of hell, so it's not an exception.
Agreed. Homer has a union job watching dials at a nuclear power plant, and does not live in a major metropolis. His kids go to public school, and his entire savings is often in a jar maintained by Marge.
I'm not surprised he can make the payments on a modest sized suburban home, even on one income. (It was less modest thirty years ago, but it hasn't gotten any bigger or, AFAIK, added any bathrooms since.)
technically it has gotten bigger over the years because simpsons continuity is not super well tracked so they've accidentally added rooms when people making episodes felt the need
The "does not live in a major metropolis" thing is big. People don't have to kvetch nearly as much about housing prices in Urbana as they do in Chicago.
Just for kicks, I went looking for a four-bedroom house in the America's various Springfields on Zillow.
You can get this one in Springfield OH for $140K. Four bedrooms, two bathrooms, 2000 sqft, two-car garage, and it even looks a bit like the Simpson house. No trouble affording this for middle proles like the Simpsons: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2643-Lindair-Dr-Springfield-OH-45502/33295516_zpid/
Homer's basic lifestyle isn't unreasonable for someone who got in on a good union job in a boom (when they first built the nuclear plant), particularly when he was given the down payment. Sure, he's got two cars the whole time, but neither is new (and we don't know if he bought either new). One's a Plymouth (a "Junkerolla") the other a Chevrolet.
That he can somehow keep making payments and keep his job despite his extreme irresponsibility and incompetence is another matter, but if you take that away you have no show.
I think the last part is the most believable one, actually. Source: been at companies, seen things.
A replica Simpsons' house was built in Las Vegas and sold for $120k in 1997. But at 2200 square feet, it's clearly smaller than the one on TV, which I would guess is a little under 3000 sf.
The Simpsons house is at 742 Evergreen Terrace, presumably a reference to Evergreen State College in Olympia, WA where Matt Groening went to college. The most similar house in Olympia that I could find on Zillow in 2019 was a 2755 sf house on a 10,500 sf lot. It looks a little smaller than the TV house. It had recently sold for $500k.
https://www.unz.com/isteve/how-much-would-the-simpsons-house-cost-in-2019/
You need to pick a town that contains a nuclear plant maybe? I know here in Canada the housing around these places is crazy expensive because you’ve got all these high wage workers moving into a town far enough from a big population.
In the Lisa's First Word, it is indicated that Grandpa sold his house so that he could give Homer the money to buy his. So the no-inheritance is a bit of a stretch.
Also in Homer's Enemy, Grimy/the writers rub in our face just how fantastical it is for Homer to have the lifestyle he has. Even just the size of his house, his two cars, and the number of kids was realistically unfeasable. This was Season 8, so maybe the change happened between Seasons 1 and 8 or the better explanation is the TV shows have always shown the characters being able to afford a better dwelling than they'd reasonably be able to.
I think some of it depends on what you consider home ownership.
My dad was a Silent Generation Department of Transportation Engineer with only a HS Diploma and a few college courses the state put him through as part of job training, my Mom was a hairdresser with a cosmetology degree who had to retire in her 40s due to arthritis. In the Early 70s, they moved into a 3 bedroom, 2 bath Ranch with my older siblings, then about 5 and 1. They would host my maternal grand parents for the last few years of their lives, and by the tim I came along in the mid-80s and had grown old enough to be aware of my surroundings, the house had been expanded with a three-car garage with a second floor "mother-in-law's apartment over it and a large den on the back with a large back porch... From the time I turned 4 in 1990 to the time we lost the house to foreclosure in 2012, my dad was the primary bread winner, and for most of that time, the house was home to on average 7 people(My parents, me and my older sister, my brother-in-law,my sister's 2 daughters) and sometimes hosted as many as 12 during holidays. We didn't live high on the hog, but we lived comfortably for the most part, and while my mom drew disability, and I drew disability once my father started drawing social security and my sister was consistently employed, it was always my dad's income that provided the safety net for the rest of the family.
In a technical sense, my Dad never owned that house, having taken out a second mortage to build those additions and probably refinancing at least one other time, was about 31 when my family moved in, and while he was like the only government employee I can ever recall reporting a good wage, he made as much as he did thanks in large part to having worked for the NCDOT from his late teens until retirement... and then went back to work for them part time while drawing retirement pay until he was laid off. He was already in his mid-40s when I came along, and by the time he retired, he had just shy of 40 years after tacking on unspent sick leave.
Admittedly, my father was far more competent(and persumably, the only reason Homer keeps his job from an in-universe standpoint is that Burns doesn't want a competent safety inspector as having to keep the plant up to code would cut into profits), but aside from Homer and marge being maybe10-20 years younger than my parents, based on the stated dates of the earliest flashback episodes, as originally concieved, I don't think the Simpson's situation when they first moved on to Evergreene Terrace is too dissimilar from my own family's situation when they moved into my childhood home. Of course, this is ignoring the show's sliding timeline and that time stamps on flash backs and flash forwards always seem to assume the show's present is when the episode aired(E.g. Early episodes gave 1984 for when Bart was a preschooler and Lisa was a baby, while later episodes put Marge and Homer's college years in the 90s(and arguably retconning Homer from highschool drop out to college drop out)... and i'm pretty sure the show has increased the amount of debt the Simpsons struggle with over time. The show's always played a bit loose with reality, but the original premise doesn't seem all that outlandish fora older 30s couple with two school-aged children and a baby circa the early 90s.
For homeownership, millennials are "still 5 to 10 percentage points behind where Generation X and baby boomers were at the same age."[0] Homer and Marge don't have college degrees, which makes them even less likely to own a home, 48% in 2015 versus 58% in 1995 [1], with much of that remaining fraction being older people. Plus it's a single income household, which I'm sure drops the fraction again, although I don't have statistics.
[0]: https://www.marketplace.org/2021/02/23/millennials-continue-to-lag-behind-in-home-ownership-rates/
[1]: https://www.redfin.com/news/homeownership-and-education/
Sure but you realize that 48 percent of people owning a home is still a far cry from "this is an impossible dream" right?
48% of people without a college degree own a home, but 80% of baby boomers own a home (and people even older are presumably even more likely)[0] while baby boomers and older are much less likely to have a college degree [1]. That 48% is going to be largely baby boomers and older who bought their house when it was much more plausible.
[0]: https://blog.firstam.com/economics/are-baby-boomers-the-key-to-the-housing-market-shortage
[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/05/16/todays-young-workers-are-more-likely-than-ever-to-have-a-bachelors-degree/
So if you sample one group defined by age and another group defined by a social marker who average out younger, which group do you expect to display higher levels of homeownership, an attribute that is correlated to age since you can save more money if you are older?
OK, there's more to it, but your comparison lacks rigour if it doesn't correct for age. Or the fact that a young person today is more likely than a young boomer to have a degree, so that's not a like-for-like comparison either. There's a reason why good social science is difficult and agitpop opinions are easy.
So long as you can show that the price of housing has increased versus earning power, your underlying point is likely valid though.
According to Zillow, the median age for first home purchase was 34 in 2019 (the most recent I could find with a quick search). In the 70s and 80s it was about 30. http://zillow.mediaroom.com/2019-04-30-Coming-Wave-of-Young-Millennial-Home-Buyers-Expected-to-Further-Tighten-Market-for-Starter-Homes?mobile=No
The amount of time it takes to save up for a down payment has also gone up significantly due to various factors (rising home prices, increased rent, more money going to student loans), so we can expect this trend to continue. https://www.zillow.com/research/how-many-years-down-payment-21734/
So it's not just that older people own homes more often because they've had more time to accumulate wealth, it's also become more difficult for younger generations to accumulate the wealth needed.
Does that 48% actually own their homes, or does that include those paying on a mortgage? If it refers to true ownership, it makes some sense that older people would be ahead in ownership, they've had time to actually pay of their mortgages... if that includes people paying on a mortgage, I wonder how much of the discrepency is income going to student loan repayments eating up income previous generations would have put towards a mortgage.
By my understanding it includes mortgage holders, or else I'd expect the home ownership number to be essentially zero for millennials (given that most mortgages have a 30 year payoff period and millennials are all under 50)
Since a mortgage is a secured loan, not a staged purchase, mortgage lenders do not own property other than where a default has occurred. On that basis I think you are correct.
Also I have a mortgage but am legally a homeowner (e.g. it is me, not my bank, who is primarily responsible for the maintenance of the boundaries of the property).
I wonder how many of that percent *purchased* the home they own, versus whether they inherited it?
If there is a substantial proportion of the younger generation who have hand-me-down housing, then it's not unthinkable that purchasing housing now might be more difficult than 48% sounds.
If that's the issue, then when the boomers die off the discrepancy should be mostly resolved pretty fast right?
I would be very interested in reading about how much of the boomer/millennial wealth gap can be explained by longer life expectancy. (and possibly the potential for people today to spend that wealth living the retirement dream)
Mostly resolved in the least equitable fashion possible...
I think we are comparing apples and oranges here. Millennials have different priorities now. They marry significantly later than older generation, they want to "explore themselves" by traveling and buying nice things and by living in vibrant urban centers as opposed to smalltown suburbs with wife as the older generations did. The millennial lifestyle is better suited to living in rented place with roommates.
As another example: homeownership rate varies widely from country to country. In former eastern bloc countries the homeownership rate often exceeds 90%. In Switzerland it is 43.36. On the other hand for instance Swiss have vastly higher financial wealth than Eastern Europeans.
A lot of these statistics reflect changes in preferences which are vast over last few generations to put it mildly.
I don't have any statistics at hand here, but an informal survey of the millennials I know shows that it's not a change in preference but a feeling of inability to own a home. If you don't think you'll be able to own a home, then you'll prioritize goals that don't require owning a home, but that doesn't mean you don't want to own a home.
And I'm not sure the Eastern European example helps you here, since the reason for higher homeownership rates in Eastern Europe is that the USSR (and other Eastern European communist governments) provided essentially free housing to almost everyone. Everyone owns a home because it's easy to own a home, while in Switzerland owning a home is expensive and so Swiss people don't prioritize it
I can comment on Eastern bloc as I am from Slovakia. Now it is true that people owned their homes during socialism - but that was more than 40 years ago. The culture in my country is definitely aligned with the concept that the true independence also means owning your own house/condo. It also has a lot of good downstream effects: people care more about what is happening in the neighborhood and more active in local politics.
The Simpsons is also a fantasy cartoon. Despite what the author of that tweet says, it was never believable that someone with a high school degree could become a safety officer at a nuclear plant, let alone retain that job while being caught on camera sleeping all the time.
It's completely useless to use the world of the Simpsons as a measure of income inequality.
It is completely *true to life* even if not believable by you.
I worked at a Fortune 500 medical devices company with lots of fancy lab in Boulder, CO. 500+ employees working onsite, a big machine shop with 2 full-time union machinists, plus loads of fun chemicals and drill presses/emergency showers/cutting lasers sprinkled all around the campus, and literally dozens of PhD engineers at the top of their game making prototype battery-powered sonic cut-and-cauterize tools with exotic metals like tungsten.
The lead "materials safety" guy (in his own special lane, a dept that tracked all the active chemicals/dangerous equipment onsite, responsible for safe disposal I think) separate from a bigger team of folks who handled safety for *spaces* like this-or-that-lab space. He had been there for decades, no way he'd get hired there now (and in fact they didn't hire me directly, but as a temp, and would never since I don't have an engineering degree.) He got hired on the strength of having previously been a lead materials safety guy at... Rocky Flats, a nuclear weapon assembly facility in Colorado. He had his high school diploma only.
Interesting, and laudable (credentialism sucks). Was this recent?
In my defense, though, I'm guessing he didn't sleep on the job and narrowly avoid a meltdown using eeny, meeny, miny, moe :-)
(Also, *technically* Homer hadn't even graduated from high school when he was hired because he failed remedial science -- he just showed up the day the opened the panner plant and he got the job)
Of course Homer's mannerisms and level of incompetence is exaggerated. Wouldn't be much of a show if he didn't. But his material wealth relative to his occupation and social class is not exaggerated - that part is plausible.
He wasn't Homer, no... but IDK whether it's a small difference or a large one. He did have a huge gut and seemed to have no actual responsibilities and spend all his time doing nothing. Once in a while a PhD would deputize the lowest-ranking person available for the job of going to hassle him until he'd give the OK to change the assignments/passcodes so a different team of engineers would have access/authority over this or that lab space. One time I got that job, of going and asking him for something, which is the main reason I ever interacted with him enough to have an impression. My impression was... I have no idea what this guy's job is or why he's the person I'm asking about this. He seems... mean and sleepy?
I have no idea if the guy I'm talking about was generally competent or not--it was a big enough company that had for a very long time been "growing research team of kindly dorky nerds in HR environment that gives them toys and lets them play". I was only at the company a year, as a lowly tech.
Also, do you know very much about Rocky Flats? They pretty commonly noticed a room had become so dangerous there'd be no safe way to clean it, so they'd just brick up the doorway. Started causing cascading problems when things started dripping through walls & etc. At different points there was a big fire affecting floors w/ plutonium, a serious ground-water contamination concern, and more.
And you didn't even mention that Rocky Flats is a Superfund site that irradiated half of Denver!
Agreed. My father left college (football scholarship) after one year to get married and support a family. He worked in the stockroom for about a decade, and then was promoted to Facilities Manager without completing so much as an Assoc Degree.
As you say, it was indeed possible in that era. The responsibility of training and certifying him was borne by the institution, not by him personally, so any training in dealing with chemicals, security, etc. was paid by his employer.
For background, he was at the tail end of the Silent Generation.
Correct. That Homer is rankly unqualified is one of the show's central gags; he's the only person to be fired when the plant is bought by Germans, and his workplace successes own either to dumb luck or the intervention of others. It's made quite clear that he was not hired on merit.
Yeah, I grew up in a town called Springfield—capital of Illinois! plenty of stuff to do there, two huge hospitals, University of Illinois branch—and you can absolutely become Homer Simpson if you want. There's even a power plant (coal, alas). Here's a three-bedroom house near where I was born for under $100,000: https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/1121-N-5th-St-Springfield-IL-62702/75499034_zpid/ . If you're patient and can get up to $150k you've got a ton of options; you can buy a house near a park in a beautiful old neighborhood filled with tall trees, etc.
It's not Detroit, either—there was no huge boom and no huge bust, and there are no emptied-out neighborhoods where the houses are falling down—it's just a place that both housing bubbles mostly ignored. (All the expensive houses, because it's a fairly red city that hasn't had the millennial move-back-to-the-city, are big mcmansions on the historic edges of town, which got built out in the 80s.)
As someone who’s driven through Springfield countless times: yes, there is absolutely a power plant of some sort in the city. It’s really hard to miss.
Maybe, but you can get the true Springfield effect in one of the few areas of Pennsylvania there isn't a Springfield. US 422 West heading towards Reading, you go up a small rise and...
https://goo.gl/maps/oqKyHsVVGRAKCx1n6
I used to drive that route a lot, and every time I'd see that I'd hear the Simpson's theme in my head.
Mr. Burns could afford to pay Homer a living wage because his nuclear plant was not burdened with safety regulations. Maybe that is the lesson.
Assuming that Homer got the job and the house when the show started in 1989 makes the whole thing a lot more plausible. Standard union pay scale for a 40+ year career and staying in the same house for that long would be enough to let anyone live comfortably.
While not 'rap' specifically, there's a large literature on the migration of lower class language to the middle and upper class. Particularly African-American English. From 'high-fives' to 'cool' to the word 'rap' itself, not to mention 'straight up', 'lit', 'woke'. These have all migrated to standard English, through what linguists call 'covert prestige'. Put simply (and crudely and simplistically), it's cool to be gangsta, even for rich people.
Also on the level of accent. In the U.K., while Received Pronunciation is replacing a lot of regional languages among the middle classes, it’s also been very much affected by features of those accents, and that applies to the RP of even the high aristocracy. Prince William’s accent has numerous features like widespread glottal stops and l-vocalisation that traditional TO lacked, and others like linking /r/ that we’re present but disparaged. Interestingly (possibly?) Kate Middleton has a somewhat more traditional version of the accent, suggesting maybe that as an upper-middle-class person she is having to “try harder”, to echo the book under review here.
“that traditional *RP* lacked”
It's a pity Substack doesn't let you edit comments.
And of course "traditional" RP is just mid-late 20th Century BBC English, which in turn would differ from the upper and upper middle class accents of earlier periods. If you read The Forsyte Saga, you'll find Galsworthy (via one of his characters) musing on the differences between the accents of members of different generations of the same upper middle class family and their close associates in the 1920s.
Absolutely. I think the version you hear in period dramas is usually the mid-century version you describe - with /əʊ/ for the GOAT vowel rather than the earlier /oʊ/. But the version in some textbooks and online sources can still be pretty close to the early 20th-century version described by Daniel Jones. It can have weird results - I once met a Polish film director whose flawless English was in an accent that I don't think I had ever heard from a living English person, only from old Pathe news broadcasts!
As for modern RP, I think Geoff Lindsey describes it right -
https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/british-vowels/
- though he insists on calling it "Standard Southern British" which seems weird to me. I’s clearly an English accent.
What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?
Pure RP accents are a thing of the past, but there are still recognisable public school accents (that is, what you get after attending a given public school followed by Oxbridge, or being socialised to speak as if you did).
My issue with it is that British doesn't make sense as a description of a group of accents. Obviously people talk about British accents in normal usage, but in linguistics it's not very coherent: RP has more features in common with Australian accents than with Highlands Scottish accents, and Northern Irish accents have more in common with North American ones than with southern English. Contrast this with North America, for example, where there is a wide variety of accents but the vast majority share more features with each other than they do with any other major accent group.
British English <I>grammar</I>, on the other hand, is a coherent category, so I dare say I'm fighting a losing battle on this one.
"What is southern Britain if not the Home Counties?"
I imagine there are some Cornish people who would take issue with this characterization.
Ah, but that’s the southwest. Totally different.
Elleston Trevor, who also wrote as Adam Hall for the Quiller books, once mentioned that after living in the US for decades and thinking the British Upper Class was still what he'd grown up with. he listened to the Queen on television in the 1990's and- she didn't quite sound upper class any more.
The Queen’s accent has indeed changed considerably. Compare her in 1957 to today:
https://youtu.be/mBRP-o6Q85s
https://youtu.be/OZbCRN3C_Hs
Nevertheless, she definitely still sounds upper class! She has about as high an RP as you will hear spoken today.
Interestingly (or not) I don't think this is conscious modulation on her part as a result of coaching from PR types. I grew up in the village where Diana Cavendish (Claire Foy's character from Breathe) lives, and she sounds pretty similar to the Queen now and I suspect sounded pretty similar to the queen 50 years ago.
Oh I'm certain that's right. Most people's accents change a fair bit over the course of their lives. Hardly anyone has the RP of the 1950s anymore, so it would be hard to maintain it.
I don't understand the technicalities of this stuff, but here's a story that backs up Geoff Nathan's take fairly well: My closest grad school friend is pretty posh: private (though not "public" i.e. super-elite) school in Cambridge, successful academics for father and uncle (at least one of whom was Oxbridge at one point I think), can trace her ancestry back to major 18th century Scottish aristocrats who were disposed after backing the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745, her aunt once tried to donate the family sword that she will inherit to a museum. After schooling in Cambridge, she went to University College London (to do Classics, perhaps inevitably). A few years later, when she met up with high school friends again, they, who had all also been to university in London had all mysteriously managed to acquire *London* accents. Which is to say, relatively speaking, more working class accents. (In the UK, the more your accent is tied to a place and the more specific that place is, the more working class your accent, generally speaking.) She knew that this was obviously not just a natural process, since she sounded as posh as ever. (I can confirm that she does not remotely have anything like a London accent.)
This isn't the only incident of accent suspiciously failing to match class background I can remember from Oxford either. The poshest sounding guy I met there was a second-generation Greek immigrant from, by his own account, a pretty rough area of Birmingham. Meanwhile, there was at least one pretty damn rich guy from Brighton was a suspiciously strong London accent. Having said that, traditional snobbery DEFINITELY still exists as well. A philosopher of maths from Glasgow (so very strong working-class accent, even though her family weren't all *that* badly off) told me that she was teased mercilessly at Cambridge as an undergrad. (This would have been maybe 2003-11 depending on exactly when she went.) And also told by friends that since she could pull of a convincing imitation of RP, it was a mystery why she didn't choose to speak that way all the time.
I don’t really get what your friend means by not a natural process. It’s completely typical to pick up the accent of people around you. I started at a state school and had a somewhat North London accent, then moved to a posh-ish school and developed a modern RP. I may switch a bit depending on setting, but the basic process is largely subconscious for most people.
The fact that it affected your friend less could be less “natural”, not more! She may be deliberately resistant to change. But of course it also just affects different people differently. I knew a woman from
California who lived in London for 30 years and never, to my ear, lost her accent at all.
You're right of course that I can't *prove* my friend is right. But 3 years is really quite a short amount of time for a big shift. And I don't think she meant that they had absolutely consciously switched exactly, as that they were driven by a desire to sound cooler, even if that wasn't conscious. It's worth saying here that specifically London accents would not necessarily be all THAT dominant at a good London university, given how international they are.
I see your point. Three years is plenty, but I think it's probably impossible to disentangle "desire to sound cooler" from being subconsciously influenced by the accent of people who you think are cool. My hunch remains that it's largely subconscious, just because most language change is, but I don't know.
One thing I've noticed is that the younger brothers and sisters of my privately-educated peers tend to have accents much more touched by Multicultural London English (MLE), the working-class London accent that has largely displaced Cockney and other traditional ones within the city. MLE emerged in the late 70s / early 80s, and affected that cohort from around the mid-nineties, while leaving us (inevitably less cool) older siblings with unaffected modern RP accents. Modern RP includes things like lots of glottal stops and l-vocalisation (something like "animu" for "animal" before a consonant) but lacks many of the distinguishing MLE features. At the time I assumed that the younger siblings were "trying to sound cool," but I think that was oversimplifying the dynamic a lot.
My best friend - who I met at Oxford - is the son of a motor mechanic from the North-East. When I met him in his first year, his Northumbrian accent was fairly mild (certainly milder than his father's) but very much noticeable. Over the course of the following couple of years in Oxford, his masters year in Cambridge, and his professional career in the arts in London, it's receded to the point of being a barey noticeable twinge - except when he speaks on the phone to his parents, at which point (without any conscious choice on his part) it returns. People who meet him now assume he's just posh. I also knew a Canadian girl who went to an English boarding school from 13. She sounded RP as all get-out until she phoned home, when she started abooting like a South Park character.
Sometimes it's very much conscious. My friends from the American South tried hard to get rid of those accents.
Is there a hypothesized mechanism here? Countersignalling? ("I'm using this word to demonstrate that I can use the word and still be unambiguously considered high class")
I think it's just kids growing up. 30 years ago, I was all about Snoop smoking blunts and talking about how much he didn't love hoes. Now I'm the boss and kids think I'm a nerd. Whatever they're into now will be boring and bougie in 2050.
I wonder if this is perhaps an example of what's called Nostalgie de la Boue:
<i>"Nostalgie de la boue is a nineteenth-century French term that means, literally, ‘nostalgia for the mud.’" "Nostalgie de la boue tends to be a favorite motif whenever a great many new faces and a lot of new money enter Society. New arrivals have always had two ways of certifying their superiority over the hated ‘middle class.’ They can take on the trappings of aristocracy, such as grand architecture, servants, parterre boxes, and high protocol; and they can indulge in the gauche thrill of taking on certain styles of the lower orders. The two are by no means mutually exclusive; in fact they are always used in combination.”</i>
https://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/phrase-day-nostalgie-de-la-boue/
"Likewise, there are typical working-class vacations (cruises), gadgets (those watches with all the dials), and so on and so forth. None of these seem too weird on their own, but taken together they suggest a picture where lots of working-class people have lots of money and go on Caribbean vacations all the time."
Bias disclosure: I'm likely in Fussell's upper upper, so claiming that I'm more in touch with the working class than you is laughable. That said, I think Fussell is right here; working-class people *do* go on cruises. They just go into credit card debt to do it. A good treatment of class in the modern day would have to have an entire chapter on debt, and each class's treatment of it.
The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to. The middle class is extended credit and treats it carefully and responsibly. The working class is extended credit and abuses it. The lower class is not extended credit at all.
The lower and lower-working classes are preyed upon by payday lenders, Bridgecrest, and Capital One.
Although I personally have no prior knowledge of what a "bridgecrest" is, this checks out.
Or in the UK, BrightHouse, which sold overpriced household goods on hire-purchase at exorbitant interest rates.
The lower classes prey on payday lenders and credit card companies in a zesty spirit of 'good luck getting blood from this stone'.
"The lower class is not extended credit at all."
Huh? There is an entire class of bail bondsmen, appliance salesmen, used cars, and payday lenders that make a mint off loans to the "lower" class. I can see you've never had a neighbor who had to stop parking his car in his driveway to avoid it being repossessed.
I'm new to posting on this blog and...wow. It's true, you people really do have no idea whatsoever how the other half lives. You just make something up and believe that. :-(
Hi, new person. Phrases like “you people” are basically verboten here. Also, “I can see you’ve never...” is bad form. You can’t actually see that: you just get the sense that this person is out of touch. But they said that: the identified as upperest class. So being aggrieved at their ignorance doesn’t add a lot to the discussion. It’s sufficient and preferable just to point out they they’re substantially wrong, and explain why.
Welcome!
I'll take this as confirmation of my membership as The Other. Which was pretty much the point.
I think that would be a serious misread. There are communication norms in this space that can be adhered to by anyone of any class, and they’re certainly not native to any particular class. I’m pretty much doing the opposite of othering you: I’m taking the time to inform you of the social norms, and trusting in your fundamental reasonableness and good faith. You’re rather othering crotchety crank by taking one silly thing he said and creating a grand theory of “you people” out of it. Baseless assumptions are the heart of objectification
Uh, this is tricky. Harland isn't wrong. In "prole" culture you say it loud and brash and then fight about it. Metacogging about social and conversational norms while going out of your way to carefully signal welcomeness is a class marker from Harland's perspective.
I feel rather like a longhaired greasy freak who just drove into town with out-of-state license plates, and got pulled over right away by Cletus the county mounty. "Bwah, y'ain't from 'round here, are ya, bwah?" he says, shining his maglite into my eyes to check if they're bloodshot. Having had my license run through the computer and a momentary detention while a K-9 unit is called so it can sniff over my car, I'm being released with a friendly admonition that "this how we do things in this-sheah parts." Thanks kindly for your time, officer! I then immediately proceed to the nearest convenience store to purchase a "Blue Lives Matter" bumper sticker.
To be frank, almost everything you've described in this thread is a class norm. You think conflict, brashness, "rude" behavior, etc. are inimical to the development of healthy discourse. Taking a measured, faux-polite rhetorical position that is desperate to signal its rationality, calmness, and willingness to engage is at the absolute core of the educated elite's conception of the world. Those norms get elided on the internet, where a counter-norm of genuine acrimony and animosity on the part of the educated *young* elite is more predominant, but it doesn't mean what you describe is not a traditionally higher-class phenomenon.
The difference between the *young* elite's version (which is characterized by GENUINE disdain) and the "prole" perspective on discourse is that in the latter, being strong, brash, and having fights about everything is just... normal. People do it all the time. You and your best friend have furious arguments, maybe even physical fights on occasion. That's just life. Doesn't mean you don't like somebody -- in fact, you probably do it most with the people you love.
If I'd been writing more carefully, I would have added "...by banks." I was thinking of "loan" in the sense of mortgage rather than payday lending or used car loans, although you'll see in my response to Lexie that as soon as this other group of creditors was pointed out, I acknowledged it.
That's how absolutely everyone is. You only get a real sense of things in your environment.
The upper middle class is extended credit and treats it responsibly. The middle class varies a lot in that department, which is one reason they're precarious.
> The upper class refuses to go take loans, since they have no need to.
The upper class doesn't *take* loans, they are *given* loans, which are used (by financial planners and other "servants") to turn illiquid wealth into funding for day-to-day expenses. Most importantly, the upper class and upper-middle class have no need of *unsecured* credit (a true upper probably having no concept of it; upper-middle knowing about it but avoiding it), putting them almost entirely out of reach of the kind of debt spiral that can ruin other classes.
Actually, the truly wealthy use quite a lot of debt, because as you acquire assets, many of them are illiquid. It's a middle-class conceit that economic safety is being debt-free.
This is right! Similarly only the middle class are obsessed with owning everything. The proles can't afford to and the upper often can't be bothered with the upkeep!
A real upper-upper, that's like sighting Bigfoot. Do you think his treatment of you guys was fair? (modulo 1983)
Sadly, I'm too young to know! I'll ask my grandparents.
While I hardly grew up in the upper-upper world Fussell is describing (though my grandparents and to a lesser extend parents surely did), a lot of the particulars stood out to me as right on the money (the food, names, boring social scene almost by design, locations, house/furniture descriptions). However, in my life I've seen less of the "nothing to prove" attitude, as even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage) among people who don't have to ever think about money. I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
This is a concern I've had about UBI in the future as well. People seem to assume freedom from work will lead people to commit their time to artistic passions or other virtuous ends, but the (admittedly not at all representative of the general populace) people we currently see experiencing freedom from work are hardly living this utopia, despite their piles of money.
Sigh...artistic passions. Only a tiny number of us humans have such desires, those of us high in the personality trait of Openness. The rest of us might make things, but according to our wants and needs, not because we have some burning passion inside. The real tragedy occurs when discussion is dominated by high Openness individuals who assume that anyone who doesn't feel the need to create art must be some kind of soulless insect. :/
In my career I’ve had periods of intense pressure when you’re super busy and periods of downtime, both at the same compensation level; as well as periods of genuinely worrying about money. Of the three, well compensated downtime is in my experience the most likely to result in depression and substance abuse.
I suspect in the UBI laden u/dys-topia, some clever entrepreneur would gamify daily life in a manner that would give people meaningful goals to shoot for in cases where people are not creative enough to fill their time in useful ways. Ideally something smarter than "how many likes can I get on instagram".
I'm hoping they'll spend a lot of time keeping each other entertained (throwing parties, gaming with each other, social media, etc.).
I fear that they'll spend most of their time trying to cancel each other.
It will still give them a sense of purpose.
Here's a video by The History Guy about John B. Calhoun and the real Rats of N.I.M.H. Fascinating research that predicted the rise of hypersexuality, sociopathic elites, soyboys, incels and ultimately the end, as young rats didn't learn courtship behaviors and could not breed. Afterwards the rats never recovered, even when introduced to a healthy society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Kqti3tDz-M
That might explain why Brunner's _Stand on Zanzibar_ is nominally about overpopulation, but actually about crowding.
I've read some heavy criticism of thatt experiment; that Calhoun only got that result once in all his rat and mouse experiments, and that particular one started with four mice that were already closely related and all he ended up with was some unlucky effects of inbreeding and mutational load.
Sources?
You mean like the legions of starving artists, pre-tenure academics and other people who - in present day - sacrifice status and material comfort to work on things they're actually interested in?
I think we'll manage just fine, really, though there'll probably be a "lost generation" of people who were so used to getting orders they'll have no idea what to do with themselves.
This is a good reason why we need to legalize hallucinogenic drugs. At least you can alter your state in a manner that doesn't cause your liver permanent damage or send you into a bad addiction spiral.
>even the upper class scene I'm a part of is full of social jockeying (particularly around marriage)
I'd be interested to hear more about this
>I'd also anecdotally report sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
Why don't they become philanthropists?
Because they have nothing to prove :)
I think there's actually a surprisingly large gap between the amount of wealth that precludes one or one's children and grandchildren from needing to work and the amount of wealth that can sustain philanthropy as a full-time, decades-long endeavor.
Specifically, a US stock market index fund can historically get you, say, 3.5% return on average after inflation, meaning that you you can invest $4M in one and live forever on the increases, but only if you're willing to live on $120k/year. Of course, the stock market is high variability, so you'll have smarter forms of wealth management (which means more money to start with). You also will probably want more than that total if you want to live the upper class life style. But it's still in the range of $10M to live a very comfortable life without ever working. However, that amount will not fund a charity for very long, especially not indefinitely.
Fair enough... maybe they could volunteer for philanthropic organizations full time? Making the world a better place is a great way to acquire a sense of purpose ;-)
They absolutely could! But that might put other class signals at risk, such as 'not looking like you're trying' and 'not getting too much education'. Plus, ignoring what a mess the world is in, and especially ignoring the people who are suffering the most from that mess is also a long-standing highest-class tradition. Stepping out of that bubble is a slippery slope ....
Interesting on the "nothing to prove" attitude.
I suspect Fussell has a lot of blind spots due to his own middle class position. It might look like the Upper Class has nothing to prove, but that's not true, it's just that they have nothing to prove to the likes of _you_. Their status games are invisible and incomprehensible to your middle-class mind.
I'm thinking that the Lower Class and Upper Class have just as many status games going on as the Middle Class, but Fussell is only sensitive enough to detect Middle Class signals.
You're right – but they're just different 'games', and they're such a tiny numerical minority, that it's all basically incomprehensible to outsiders.
theres writings on status games among the american lower classes, both white and black. some of them involve boasting and whatnot,
The way Scott describes Fussell describing the upper class gives the impression that they often have no conception of money whatsoever. It seems like this could lead to an embarrassing situation where, for example, someone with a net worth of $50 million accidentally buys a $100 million Pollock painting because they don't realize that they don't have $100 million. Have you ever heard of something like this happening? Or is there a mechanism to prevent it?
I think the mechanism is that the uppers don't really _do_ anything themselves, so whomever it is that handles their money (or the team of people that do, or even the several _companies_ that do) would prevent a faux pas like you describe (mostly).
And at that level – buying million dollar paintings – you definitely _can_ return it if, somehow, you couldn't pay for it. And there would be lawyers on retainer to protect against any consequences (tho possibly by paying the aggrieved 'merchant' off for their trouble).
Update: both generations above mine have already read it! One referred affectionately to "old fussy Fussell." They read it as somewhat satirical, and certainly inaccurate/unfair in places (for example, one person specifically objected to the "bland food" quip), but unfair in the same way that the Onion is unfair to the targets of its satire: even when it's exaggerated, it's exaggerated in a revealing direction. Could say much more, but maybe I'll save it for an open thread.
Do post a link to the OT comment here when you have it.
Some of my family were definitely in Fussell's working-class, especially back in the 80s, and it seems to be 100% accurate to me. They'd go to Vegas instead of on a cruise, but just about every description matches perfectly.
These days Vegas has been transformed until it resembles nothing as much as a stationary cruise ship. The buffets, the casinos, the shows, the comedians, the foreign underpaid labor...they're scarily alike.
I think Vegas also draws from plenty of middle class as well - at least compared to somewhere like Atlantic City or Reno. But lots of aspects of Vegas do seem to be the pinnacle of upper-prole.
Cruises and Disney vacations are certainly affordable (in the literal sense) for Fussell's "proles." It's just something you save up for over a longer time horizon or a special treat rather than something you just sorta do without putting much prior thought or planning into it.
I'd have to agree. Growing up in a very prolley household we went on vacation every year, but only to Disneyland twice. At the time (and still now, in my heart of hearts) I considered it the apex of all possible vacation destinations. You certainly can't afford to go there every year!
Working at Disneyland was my first real job and the employees (who are largely quite poor) go on Disney vacations themselves all the damn time because they can get into the parks for free and get gigantic discounts on hotels, flights, and yes, cruises (lest people forget that Disney also owns a cruise line).
I've never been to Disney Land... but my older brother worked at Disney World when I was a young child and my family went to Disney World several times during his tenure. I was too young to really remember much of those trips, but when me and my parents went in my teens, I remember it being a lot of quantity over quality... I personally find A day at Bush Gardens a superior vacation to a week at Disney World, or at least my teenaged self did... and being from North Carolina, Williamsburg is a much shorter car ride than Orlando.
I'm pretty sure at least some people do it – and I mean go several times a year – without quite 'saving up' for it in the normal way I think you intended. But I could be wrong – there are lots of ways to live more frugally, if one is willing to ignore at least some 'class expectations' (even as a prole).
I can confirm that they do go on cruises. I had a cruise line as a client once, and went on it for research, and was flabbergasted!
There are of course different cruise lines for different classes. Carnival or Disney is different to Cunard or Viking, say.
Non-prole cruises are generally filled with 80+ year olds who still want to travel to exotic destinations but find that air travel and dragging suitcases everywhere is getting a bit too exhausting at their age.
Anecdotally, the people I know who go on cruises can be divided into (a) proles, and (b) elderly middle-class.
It's official: Reading SSC is something upper upper class people do!
(Had to write this comment to restore classiness balance)
Now that you'd said that, they'll leave, because they have nothing to prove.
No, they'll lurk, that would be the highest class! Dabbling is very upper-upper.
I don't think a working class person, even if poor and a high school dropout, is necessarily "low" class. As I said in another comment, the restraint in what you do...speech, clothes, decor...all that defines class.
Trump, for example, was wealthy and had (on paper) a fancy education. His manners, speech, tweets...these were what made him "low class". He showed no restraint.
Recall that in this model you can have rich, successful or poor, low-achieving members of any class.
I hope links are ok here, because if so, the beginning of this John Mulaney bit is the most illuminating thing I can offer on the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dBNBAgtjYV8
Important line: "Donald Trump is not, like, a *rich man*. He's what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." So, "working class aesthetics" with "upper class" results.
Thanks. I watched it. Mulaney's disdain for lower class people is also, Fussell would say, lower class. But I don't think Mulaney realizes that!
The disdain, as such, is not even a nice thing (never mind what class it makes one). It is basically like laughing at the plight of a homeless guy.
Interesting - I interpreted amusement instead of disdain. Maybe that's just because it was communicated through comedy. I agree that he doesn't express any kind of understanding for a class perspective outside his own.
Trump talks and acts like a kid from Queens. That's part of why the elite hate him so much. He may have gone to Wharton and be a billionaire who lived on Central Park but he still acts like the guy in a working class bar who will slap the shit out of someone who gives him lip or disrespects him.
To many progressives and indeed elites of all persuasions, Trump is also the Prince of Anti-culture: mindlessly naïve American boosterism; conspicuous, 1980s-style unapologetic Democrat patriotism; repetitive and limited vocabulary; fast-food culinary tastes; Queens accent; herky-jerky mannerisms; ostentatious dress; bulging appearance; poorly disguised facial expressions; embracing rather than sneering at middle-class appetites; a lack of subtlety, nuance, and ambiguity.
In short Trump's very essence wars with everything that long ago was proven to be noble, just, and correct by Vanity Fair, NPR, The New Yorker, Google, the Upper West Side, and The Daily Show.
On the other hand, if Trump represents working-class culture (I don't think he really does) just why shouldn't that be a mark against working class culture? Like, Trump is someone who boasted about using the fact that he is famous to sexually assault people! That really is shameful, and if working class people really are more likely to ignore it in their judgment of him *as a person* (I'm not talking about deciding in whose interests he'd govern) then surely this reflects badly on working class culture. Ditto his attempts to constantly belittle and dominate everyone around him. These aren't neutral-in-themselves status signals that happen to be considered gauche because they have been adopted by particular social classes, but behaviors that genuinely and predictably hurt others.
I find a lot of people on the populist right *love* to entertain 'shocking' generalizations about the culture of various groups that liberals and social justice types consider oppressed, but then try to leverage exactly the same sort of 'don't punch down' norm that they otherwise mock when the criticism is aimed at the white working class. So you get a lot of 'but black people in cities really do have a culture that tolerates crime!' 'Muslim are more likely to be terrorists', but then moralistic shock about how snobby Jon Stewart is if he suggests people in West Virginia often believe dumb conspiracy theories. (This cuts both ways obviously, a lot of liberals want everyone to respect the 'don't punch down norm' except when liberals are talking about the white working class, which is equally hypocritical.)
Punching down is a concept in which you're assumed to have a measurable level of power and you're looking for a fight. Now, you can either go after the big guy who might hurt you, or go after the little guy who has absolutely no shot. Either way, you've picked a fight, but one fight is remarkably more noble and worthwhile than the other. Going after the big guy, punching up, is an act of nobility. Going after the little guy, punching down, is an act of bullying.
You comfort the afflicted, not the other way around!
Donald Trump is not afflicted, he's comfortable. He's not "the little guy," he just claims to represent them. Like every politician does. Dismissing criticism of a famous former president as "punching down" just because he shares an aesthetic with the working class makes no sense.
I wasn't slagging off the idea of punching down by being bad (often you shouldn't punch up either-i.e. judge-y tabloid gossip about the rich and famous is often just gross), just it's hypocritical deployment in a 'don't punch down against the groups I like, but it's fine if you do it against the ones I don't like'-way.