The State School Upper Middle Class

Analyzing the runner-up elites

For a full decade now, American society has been discussing either the Ivy League elites who have lost touch with salt-of-the-earth Americans or the hoi polloi themselves; those denizens of Rust Belt towns slowly collapsing under the weight of globalization and shifting demographics. We’ve talked about how the Ivory Tower has descended into navel-gazing wokeism. We’ve talked about the sense of spiteful anger that fuels the lower classes to revolt against the elites in a populist backlash. But we haven’t talked a lot about a very large, influential, and important segment of American society: the state school upper middle class.

As the middle class disintegrates, it recombobulates in two new segments of society: a downwardly-mobile lower middle class that has more in common with “the poor” and an upper middle class, which can be viewed as either upwardly mobile or as static in their relative socio-economic position. It’s clear that the former make up a large segment of the Trump/MAGA political movement, but who are the latter group? What do their lifestyles look like? What are their political leanings? This post is intended to reflect on this new group, who I call the state school upper middle class, in an attempt to start asking questions I don’t see getting answered.

You know these people

You know these people. His name is Tyler or Ryan or something, her name is Lauren or Megan, but maybe it’s spelled a little stupid. They met in college—University of Michigan, unless I’m remembering it wrong, maybe it was Minnesota. He first tried to study economics before realizing that it was too hard, so he switched to something in the business school and went on to work in corporate. She tried to convince her parents that psychology was her passion, but since they were the ones footing the bills, she gave in and switched to nursing under their persistent pressure, which ended up working out alright in the end because she met her best friend in nursing school.

They gave the city life a good try after graduation—living in an apartment, going out all the time, living the life of a twenty-nothing. But they’re sensible people and they instinctively follow the success sequence, which means they had a weird nagging feeling pushing them to get engaged, get married, buy a house, get a dog, and have kids. That’s exactly what they did, in exactly that order. He proposed on vacation somewhere abroad—Italy or Ireland or Iceland—and their wedding was as large as it needed to be to accommodate her mother’s preferred guest list. The dog is a doodle, his name is Huxley. They now live in the suburbs of a large metropolitan area somewhere in the US. Hard to tell exactly where, the parking lots all look the same. They have two of the 2.5 children they will have, on average.

You know these people. State schools across the country are pumping them out by the thousands annually. They are the descendants of the middle class from the 1950s—not only in the sense that many of them have ancestry in the American middle class from seventy years ago, but also in the spiritual sense. There is no longer a true middle class. Instead, the middle has split into lower and upper sections that are increasingly foreign to one another. The separation is powered in large part by the fact that the UMC goes to college to obtain a four year degree, a mechanism that shaves a portion of society off and isolates them within a bubble of people from similar backgrounds, similar tastes, and similar IQ levels.

Like the middle class from the ’50s, they are content. They have a house and two cars and their lives are generally fairly stable. Their 401k is funded and their kids have a 529 account the grandparent throw some money in every Christmas. Their student loans, car payments, and mortgage are not a burden that will cause them bankruptcy. They’re prudent, so they pay off their debts and only use credit cards as intended—for cash back rewards. Unlike the lower middle class, they’re going to be fine and they feel it deep in their bones. That sense of doing okay is why they are the spiritual descendants of the old middle class, and it’s why the have-nots that happened to end up in the other category cause a disproportionate amount of concern in the pundit class.

“I’m alright, how about yourself?”

The state school upper middle class are not rich in the traditional sense. They haven’t inherited large sums from their parents, they had to take out some student loans to pay for college, and they can’t afford to live a life outside of their means. Instead, their within-the-means lifestyle is perfectly mediocre: shopping at Trader Joe’s and buying a new Toyota. Compared to the old middle class from the last century, they’re undeniably more wealthy; their houses are bigger, their TVs are flatter, and they can afford to throw away the plastic toys their kids get from the grandparents so that the kids aren’t tempted to stop playing with those expensive wooden Lovevery toys their pseudo-crunchy millennial mother bought them.

In inflation-adjusted terms, this cohort earns slightly more on a per-household level than their socio-cultural ancestors. With that money, they can afford to live a life that’s similarly slightly better in relative terms. What I mean by that is that the level of expectations, in terms of the lifestyle you can afford on your income, have moved in parallel with the rising standard of living. A middle class family in the ‘50s expected a small house, one car, and a refrigerator that would last them a lifetime. Their modern day descendants expect a large McMansion, two cars (a van and a crossover), and their double-door refrigerator with built-in icemaker and filtered water dispenser will have to be replaced before their youngest graduates middle school (which is fine, they can afford it).

Where has the middle class gone? It leveled-up.

That sense of doing okay is an important component of analyzing this group of people because it informs their worldview. Their reality meets expectations; the life they expect to have is the life they do have. Even if the actual individuals that make up the millions of people who inhabit this zone are from immigrant backgrounds like myself, or moved up from being born in a trailer park, they are the inheritors of the American dream, the torch has been passed to them. Through hard work, good decisions, and a heavy dose of sheer luck, they managed to find themselves working an email job that pays them enough to go on vacation twice a year. As a result, they have none of the grievance their lesser halves hold. They don’t feel an intrinsic need to revolt against the powers that be. Why would they? They’ve got it good.

Left-of-center, right-of-woke

The state school upper middle class is economically moderate, they stick to traditional family structures, and they are allergic to political extremism. Who else if not these people are the modern day equivalents of the suburban home with a Reagan sign out front from the ‘80s? In some sense, the Silent Majority has split into a red-aligned element that holds on to the anti-elite, anti-establishment attitudes from the last century and a blue-aligned element that holds on to the small-C conservative cultural traditions that somehow evaporated from the lower classes.

That is not to say that the people who attended Illinois State University and now live in the suburbs of Rochester, MN are politically conservative. In my estimation, as a group, they consistently lean blue. I think they voted for Obama in both elections, assuming they were eighteen in 2008 (remember, many of these people are millennials born in the early ‘90s). I think they instinctively despise Trump due to his abrasive personality. I think their time at college, while not exactly the same as the experience of those who went to Columbia, was still time at college, which means they were exposed to the same mechanisms that suck up highschoolers from across the country and spit out people who have been “awakened” to the injustices of the past.

That is not to say that the people who went to an Ohio State University regional campus and now live in the suburbs of Cleveland or Toledo are woke. They certainly think that the murder of George Floyd was awful and that Harvey Weinstein is gross, but that doesn’t mean they’ve fully devolved into defunding the police and acknowledging the violence against black and brown bodies inherent to late-stage capitalist society. No, I think they posted a black square in the summer of 2020 because they think racism is bad and I think they also don’t like rioting. In short, they’ve absorbed the messages that have been thrown at them by childhood Disney movies, modern Netflix shows, and op-eds in the New York Times, and they believe them sincerely.

The Great Realignment that American society has undergone has upended our old definitions, and we’ve struggled to find new labels that appropriately describe what people currently believe. As part of that split, small-C conservatism is now found more often among politically blue-leaning Americans. (See LastBlueDog for more on this line of thinking.) These people don’t want massive disruptions, they don’t want revolution. They want stability, consistency, and competence. Moreover, the ideas that the state school upper middle class exhibit in their lived experience—marriage, children, stable employment, education—that used to be associated with red-leaning voters are now likely to be found among reluctant, unenthusiastic Kamala Harris voters.

This UMC is moving to the suburbs and buying real estate with 30-year mortgages with the school district in mind. As such, many suburbs are turning purple or blue-ish like the WOW counties of suburban Milwaukee in my home state of Wisconsin. I know some of these people personally. As a matter of fact, I am them, which is why I find this group of people interesting to think about. What I see among my peers is a generally moderate disposition that, according to the current balance of the political scales, means that they prefer to vote for Democrats, regardless of any admitted excesses on the left. In my opinion, this is largely cultural. As I’ve written elsewhere, if you drive a truck and think Applebee’s is the pinnacle of cuisine, you’re Team Red. If you wear a Patagonia vest and dress sneakers to the office, you probably know what (actually good) restaurant to book a reservation at for Valentine’s dinner, and you’re probably Team Blue.

Politics is downstream from culture

The state school upper middle class shops at Costco and is concerned about their exposure to microplastics. They drive a normal gas-powered car and try to minimize screentime for their kids. That time they spent at college was the entry point for receiving the trickle-down cultural preferences that are held in more extreme versions by coastal elites. They haven’t gone full Erewhon, but they certainly avoid Walmart. My guess is that a large part of Instagram’s ad revenues come from the woman in the state school upper middle class family clicking on algorithm-fed ads for Montessori toys, merino wool clothes, and guides on how to correctly discipline their kids without causing long-term trauma.

The purchasing and consumption habits of this cohort reflect their moderate, slightly-left-of-center politics: their house is devoid of kitschy clutter their parents collected, they eat meat like normal people, and they’re kind of proud that one of their two cars is a hybrid. Their green walls have art from local indie artists they bought at an overpriced boutique store, prints they impulse-bought from targeted ads, and trendy Chinese-made decor they bought at Target. They would prefer to shop at Whole Foods, but mostly because that store’s patronage reflects their own demographics. The shows they watch range from trashy reality TV to high-quality HBO dramas their coworkers keep recommending to them. They like craft beer, but can appreciate a domestic brew. Of course they’ve smoked weed, and they sometimes still do.

These people are the reason so many cleaning products are now “natural.” They are the reason children’s toys are now pastel-beige-colored. They are the number one source of Peloton’s monthly memberships. What I’m trying to say is that, while the state school upper middle class may not be the elites who set trends and determine morals, they are the ones who make up a large share of home purchases across the country, they are the ones to whom corporations pander, they are the ones who can break the tie in an off-season election. In short, these people are important, and I get the sense that, due to their relatively silent existence, they are being underdiscussed in the intellectual space.

My goal isn’t to fully dissect this group of people—my group of people—but to simply point out that they exist, to put a finger on their mode of existence, and to wait for the moment when their ballots decide who the next president is so that I can point to this post and remind everyone that I told you so. I already know everything there is to know about the opioid crisis in West Virginia. I already know everything there is to know about the leftist indoctrination of Yale. What I think we don’t know is this large, missing chunk of American society that’s fairly well-off and self-sufficient. A chunk that hasn’t been in the limelight, but is undeniably a large and important segment of American society.