Americans understand class better than you think
Socialist politics may be marginalized, but our ideas about class are the popular norm.
A new poll published in The Argument shows that the American public’s ideas about class are closely aligned with socialist thought. Some 77% of Americans group billionaires in “the elite,” including a full 70% of Trump voters in 2024. A 60% majority of Americans also place celebrities in that group.
As it happens, billionaires and celebrities are the only named groups who tend to have accumulated enough wealth to stop selling their labor — a standard definition of the capitalist class or “bourgeoisie” in Marxist thought.
Meanwhile, every other group is excluded from the ranks of “elites” by a majority of Americans. And it turns out that every other listed group does have to work to survive.
The edge cases
Perhaps the most fascinating result of this poll is that the public is generally getting the edge cases right too — refusing to lump in with elites groups that boutique theories of class often get wrong.
Americans do not, for example, necessarily place business executives among the elite. Some socialists tend to include executives among the ruling class because of the supervisory position they play for capital — but Americans have correctly recognized that the actual wealth and power held by executives varies considerably. Similarly, libertarians and anarchists may lump elected officials in with elites, but most people recognize that their actual power is also varied and extremely circumstantial.
Remarkably, Americans also seem to have healthy intuitions about the changing meaning of wealth. Just a few years ago, it was even controversial among socialists to insist that being rich doesn’t just mean making six figures. But today, very few Americans would consider you a part of the “elite” even if you were making $200,000 a year.
It’s the economy
Another stark finding from this poll is that Americans overwhelmingly reject ideas about class that have become extremely widespread among journalists and academics in recent years — ideas that have little to do with the economy.
New America’s Michael Lind, for example, has argued that both of those groups — journalists and academics — belong to a “new ruling class,” the “overclass.” But it’s really just an odd fringe that agrees: only about 10% of Americans rank journalists and college professors among the elite.
Similarly, the notion that class is primarily defined by degree-holding has become so widespread in political and media spheres that pollsters like YouGov have started asking respondents about their education and stopped asking them about their income. But evidently only a single-digit 9% of Americans think degree-holding has anything to do with whether or not one belongs to the “elite.”
The campaign to obscure class
Opinion polls don’t settle who is right about class, of course — but folks like Lind have rarely been content to insist that they are right. One can see this in his comment that “Only the most primitive Marxists believe that a tiny group of individual capitalists—to the manor born or self-made—controls modern societies,” and that “Anyone whose career does not depend on affirming” his critics agrees with him. The standard posture of those who peddle these alternative theories of class is that they are merely voicing the common sense of the silent majority in opposition to a tiny clique of obsolete socialist cranks.
So it’s notable that most of these post-Marx theories of class can’t even lay claim to popular approval. What we have really seen, over the last decade, is a small fringe of political journalists and think tank guys pushing back against rising class consciousness by trying to muddy the waters around class. Bernie Sanders runs in 2016 on a platform of class warfare against billionaires, and then we get, as Matt Bruenig recently put it, “a discursive mess.”
A lot of my writing since then has been an attempt to cut through that mess, but fortunately most Americans don’t need my help. Workers generally seem to have a good idea who the other workers are and who they aren’t.
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