The futile quest to define class in America
The economy is way more complicated than workers vs. owners.
The implosion of Graham Platner’s Senate campaign has spurred an interesting discussion of class in America. I think there are two reasons this episode is revealing, both of which stem from the Platner campaign’s decision to characterize him as a working-class candidate with working-class appeal.
One reason is that while Platner is unambiguously “working class” in the sense that he “does not have a college degree,” he’s an odd fit for the role in a lot of other ways. He’s a small-business owner whose mom also owns a small business and whose dad is a successful country lawyer. He went to private high schools and to George Washington University in D.C. Yes, he dropped out of G.W. and thus qualifies as a non-college person — which really is how political demographers characterize the working class — but does this actually make sense?
When I first started working in political journalism, I found the idea of a definition of working class that included Bill Gates (at the time the richest man in the world) somewhat absurd. But I was beaten down by convention and have generally used the term the way everyone else does.
The Platner experience, though, puts this question back on the table.
The other reason is that while Platner had a good chance of beating Susan Collins before being derailed by scandal, there was no evidence that he was beating benchmarks in appealing to non-college voters.
Zohran Mamdani’s strength in the New York City mayoral race was with younger and better-educated voters. In Michigan, Haley Stevens is winning with non-college voters while Abdul El-Sayed is dominating with better-educated ones. You even see this internal to labor unions. The current leadership of the United Auto Workers is a left-wing faction within the union that was able to prevail in the most recent internal election largely thanks to the strength of unionized graduate-student instructors rather than people who work in the auto industry. It’s just clearly true that the audience for left-wing politics is primarily college graduates.
One way of squaring both of these circles is to adopt a line that Platner himself used in an interview: The working class is anyone who works for a living.
“My definition of working class these days is essentially anybody who makes money from wages,” he told the New York Times in May. “If you work for a living and you go out and put in hours and you pay taxes just like everyone else, I think that’s quite fair.”
When I first saw he said that, I thought it was idiosyncratic. But over the past couple of months, it’s become clear this definition appeals to a lot of people. It helpfully squares the circle — the kinds of left-wing people who are most inclined to talk about working-class politics tend to be college-educated professionals, and they naturally want to define the adherents of their own movement as working class. And it makes semantic sense. What is the “working” in “working class” if not a reference to the fact that people are working for a living?
This definition of working class is so expansive that it’s not actually useful, though.
Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Slow Boring to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.