America doesn't really have a working class

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an

exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

--John Steinbeck

“socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

For me, a telling anecdote that first clued me into this hypothesis was when I debated Jacobin writer Meagan Day in 2018. When I pointed out that very few Americans are financially destitute, she responded that “it’s not just destitution, it’s disappointment”, and proceeded to describe her own frustration with the two unpaid internships she went ... See more

I sometimes wonder if there is some implicit classism in people’s worries about unemployment: the rich will know how to use their time well, but the poor will need to be kept busy. I suppose we’ll soon find out.

Poor citizens observed rich ones at close quarters and trusted that they too would one day follow in their footsteps. They were not always wrong. A number of fortunes were made by people from humble backgrounds. However, exceptions did not make a rule. America still had an underclass. It was just that, unlike the poor of aristocratic societies, the

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There’s another way to understand Just America, like the other three narratives, and that’s in terms of class. Why does so much of its work take place in human resources departments, reading lists, and awards ceremonies? In the summer of 2020 the protesters in the streets of New York were disproportionately white millennials with advanced degrees m

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African Americans need another way to a comfortable life and some wealth other than the path technocracy offers. And the children of the industrial working class are thought of as the moral descendants of the Scots-Irish, a class that was once despised. Because this class is about 30 percent of the American population while African Americans are 13

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