Middleclass

This tag marks the middle-class-merit theme running through Benjamin Franklin — An American Life. The book casts Franklin’s “affection for the middle class and its virtues of hard work and frugality” as the root of a social philosophy blending conservatism (skepticism of welfare laws that “led to dependency”) and populism (opposition to “the privileges of inheritance and to wealth idly gained”). Franklin “trusted the hearts and minds of his fellow leather-aprons more than… any inbred elite,” seeing middle-class values “as a source of social strength, not as something to be derided” — a comfort with democracy few of his fellow founders shared “so intuitively.” Kyle’s #middleclass tag attaches to the Versailles vignette where Marie Antoinette dismisses Franklin as a former “printer’s foreman” who could never have risen so high in Europe — and the narrator notes Franklin “would have proudly agreed.” Kyle links the theme to The American Dream.

Noah Smith’s I Have Never Been Working Class extends this with a “class is about potential, not a present-day snapshot” argument — his family was materially modest but “upwardly mobile,” which he says is why he never considered himself working class despite mowing lawns and picking cotton as a kid.

Where this appears

• Benjamin Franklin — An American Life — Franklin’s pride in his “printer’s foreman” origins and his middle-class-merit social philosophy; tagged #middleclass and linked to The American Dream.
• I Have Never Been Working Class — Noah Smith’s potential-vs-snapshot theory of American class, and his critique of PMC socialists claiming working-class status.