I Have Never Been Working Class

Author: Noah Smith URL: https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/i-have-never-been-working-class One-line: Class in America is really about future earning potential, not a present-day snapshot of income or lifestyle — which is why self-styled “working class” progressive champions and PMC socialists keep ringing false with actual low-income, low-education Americans.

Key claims

• Class in America tracks potential, not a present-day snapshot. Smith grew up materially modest but never considered himself working class, because his family was upwardly mobile (GI Bill-era grandparents, a father with a PhD, savings earmarked for college) — the household’s permanent income (per Milton Friedman’s Permanent Income Hypothesis) was always high even when current income wasn’t.
• Most low-income Americans call themselves middle class because they expect to move up; the share calling themselves “lower class” rose after the 2008 financial crisis as the potential for downward mobility became more visible.
• The Democratic Party has become the party of the well-educated professional-managerial class (PMC), not the working class — a dynamic Smith traces back to George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier critique of middle-class British socialists, and to Barbara and John Ehrenreich’s 1977 essay on the “professional-managerial class.” 80% of DSA members had college degrees in 2021, more than double the national average.
• Socialists have responded by trying to cast themselves, or hand-picked champions, as authentically working class — citing a UAW member (actually a Harvard grad-student instructor) wearing a union jacket, and the recruitment of Graham Platner, an oyster farmer and Marine veteran with a lawyer father and architect mother, as a Maine Senate candidate by “educated scions of rich families.” Smith calls Platner “a rich person’s idea of a working-class person.”
• Progressives have struggled to win over low-income, low-education voters, who broke solidly for Trump in 2024 even as the Democratic coalition has become more educated and affluent; the Teamsters refused to endorse Biden in 2024.
• The integrating institutions that once bridged class lines — church, the military, mixed-income schools — have waned, replaced by geographic and media sorting (knowledge workers in coastal urban enclaves, blue-collar workers in small towns) that leaves Americans increasingly unable to imagine how the other half lives.

Notable quotes

“I have never once considered myself part of the working class… Instead, I always thought of class as being about someone’s potential.”

“But on some level, everyone knows that class in America is really about the future.”

“As many people have said, if Trump is ‘a poor person’s idea of a rich person,’ Platner is basically the opposite — a rich person’s idea of a working-class person.”

“I read Tocqueville, and I miss the roiling, fluid, egalitarian young democracy that I never knew… Something happened between then and now. We let the Old World sneak up on us.”

Embedded tweets

donald trump is a poor person’s idea of a rich person graham platner is a rich person’s idea of a poor person

↳ quoting: all of this stuff makes a lot more sense when you realize that graham platner was a rich person’s idea of a poor person

— Armand Domalewski (@ArmandDoma) · Jul 10, 2026 · View on X

I have learned it’s normal and not DSA political posturing to wear a automobile manufacturing workers Union jacket with your name stitched on the front while only having worked as a Harvard Grad Student TA.

↳ quoting: It’s perfectly fine to be unfamiliar with labor history, but grad students didn’t wander into the UAW cosplaying as autoworkers.

The UAW actively recruited academic workers in the 2000s, as a strategy for growing in the knowledge economy. These people didn’t crash the party.

— Lee Kuan Yimby (@LeeKuanYimby) · Jul 11, 2026 · View on X

How it connects

• Noah Smith — author; Noahpinion Substack.
• Middleclass — the merit/mobility framing of class Smith argues for tracks the middle-class-as-potential theme already noted from Benjamin Franklin — An American Life.
• The Hollowing Out of the Middle Class — the flip side of the same class-anxiety terrain this piece surveys.