Recentering the Middle Class in American Politics
By focusing on the hyperpolarized extremes, we’ve lost sight of the vast middle class that is quietly protecting liberal democracy
One of the most overlooked truths in American politics today is not the polarization at the extremes, but the vacuum at the center. The middle—both economically and culturally—is not just neglected but actively erased from our national conversations. And that neglect, I’d argue, is one of the most destabilizing forces we face.
I saw this vacuum clearly in a David Brooks New York Times op-ed in May arguing that Gen Z is the “most rejected generation.” Crucially, Brooks’ evidence of wholescale generational rejection came entirely from conversations with and experiences of students at elite universities. These students bemoaned their rejection from other elite universities, elite internships and even elite clubs. Both they and Brooks seemed entirely unaware of the basic principles of math, which dictate that application to elite institutions—which are elite in large part because they reject most people who apply—will result in far more rejections than acceptances. Getting rejected by Harvard isn’t any more of an existential crisis than a varsity college athlete not making it to the Olympics or the NBA. It’s not a societal failure. It’s literally how math works.
Rejection is far worse and far more existentially damaging for those at the bottom 10% of the income distribution who lack access to stable and affordable housing, quality public education or decent healthcare. But the good news most of us don’t hear is that most people don’t occupy extremes of elitism or vulnerability (though the latter population is growing thanks in part to our political dysfunction). The students at the university where I teach, which accepts over 70% of applicants, go on to lead lives of meaning and purpose. Some even go on to become Fulbright scholars, Pulitzer Prize winners, millionaires and even, in a few cases, billionaires (if that matters).
The rise of populism is often framed as a revolt against elite rule, but we’re facing a new paradox: The populism we’re witnessing is itself increasingly elite-driven. From Trump to J.D. Vance to the think tanks ghostwriting national policy, the leaders of the so-called anti-elite movement are Ivy League graduates and credentialed insiders. What we’re really seeing is not a populist uprising—but an elite appropriation of populist language, weaponized to consolidate power. And an overlooked tool in that weaponization is the erasure of the vast American middle class, a group that tends to get into college, make a decent living and hold reasonable, middle-of-the-road political views on everything from abortion to immigration to criminal justice.
The Mirage of Fragmentation
The erasure of the middle is important for a number of our conversations, particularly surrounding polarization. We’re told (by elites) that we’re hopelessly divided. And yet, most Americans still share far more in common—on values, on goals, even on policy preferences—than our discourse suggests. The divide is not so much between left and right, but between those who benefit from polarization and those exhausted by it.
This disconnect is magnified by digital life. Online, it’s easy to believe that your Trump-supporting neighbor is your enemy, or that the person with the “Never Trump” yard sign is a political alien. But offline, in real communities, people still show up to the same school board meetings, wait in the same grocery lines and care about the same potholes. Most Americans want what most other Americans want: good-quality and reasonably priced healthcare, a sensible immigration policy and a criminal justice system that balances people’s individual rights against public safety.
The mirage of fragmentation and the erasure of the middle class that this mirage requires are necessary components of our current political dysfunction. It’s easy to argue that we don’t need bipartisan solutions or commonsense policy approaches if we can convince people that the American people are deeply polarized—economically and politically—and that agreement on even basic values is impossible.
A Political Theory of the Middle
Political theorists have long understood the stabilizing role of the middle, but here as elsewhere, the importance of a middle class for stabilizing liberal democratic institutions seems to be so obvious that it’s entirely overlooked.
But theorists have emphasized the importance of the middle class for grounding, balancing and moderating political discourse for millennia.
Most famously, Aristotle emphasized the “middling element” as essential to a well-ordered polis in his “Politics.”
Madison, in Federalist 10, saw the proliferation of factions and interests not as a threat, but as a safeguard for democracy, one that naturally fosters a broad, pluralistic middle class.
In “The Spirit of the Laws,” Montesquieu pointed to the middle class as a central facet of every balanced regime, arguing that their middling habits of temperance, discipline and restrained ambition are fostered by a moderate lifestyle where people feel generally secure but understand the need to work hard to take care of their families.
Adam Smith understood that national prosperity depended not on elites or populists alone, but on an entrepreneurial middle—on the ordinary people building lives through trade, work and trust.
Tocqueville, writing on the early American experiment, marveled at a society lacking a permanent aristocracy. America’s strength, he argued, was its middle: not just a middle class, but a cultural center—shared values, modest ambitions and mutual respect.
More recently, Deirdre McCloskey traces the solidity and import of the middle class throughout her work “The Bourgeois Virtues.” While her emphasis is commercialism broadly, she would agree with Montesquieu and Madison that one of the benefits of commerce for liberal democracy is the strong middle class it creates.
That middle still exists. But it’s harder and harder to see—not because it’s not there, but because elite-dominated institutions intentionally ignore it.
Who Benefits From Ignoring the Middle?
Both elite and populist narratives rely on caricature. Elites point to the dangers of the unwashed masses; populists rail against ivory towers. Meanwhile, both sides ignore the millions of Americans who are simply trying to live decent, meaningful lives in between.
This isn’t accidental. Political and media elites benefit from conflict. Algorithms reward outrage. So both ends of the spectrum conspire, in effect, to erase the middle entirely—leaving us with a false binary and a fractured civic imagination.
But the data don’t support this apocalyptic vision of American life. And they don’t support Brooks’ picture of catastrophic rejection. The middle class is still doing okay, politically, economically and culturally. Surprisingly for many, most CEOs of Fortune 500 companies come from the middle class and attend, not elite undergraduate institutions, but good state schools. They make the leap—if they do at all—to elite education primarily in graduate school, once they’ve already sharpened their skills in the world of business. In fact, meritocracy seems to be protected within the competitive sphere of business, if not in academia and the political elite.
More broadly, while a 2024 Pew report on the state of the American middle class shows a few areas of concern, those areas are not about total growth of the middle class but about the relative growth of the upper class. It’s not that the middle class has lost ground, but that it’s not growing quite as fast as the upper class is. There are also positive signs in the younger generations Brooks seems so worried about, with Gen Z and millennials on pace to outstrip previous generations in terms of homeownership.
The middle class is hardly withering away. But given our political dysfunction, middle-class Americans are feeling increasingly squeezed in areas where we urgently need reform, including housing and healthcare.
Refocusing on the middle class doesn’t mean we should ignore the needs of the most vulnerable among us. Far from it. We should be actively looking for policy levers that allow more vulnerable people to move into the middle class. Those levers include not only educational access and healthcare reform that reduces the medically induced economic precarity, but also attention to the kinds of regulatory blockades identified by Ezra Klein in his book “Abundance” (and many others before him).
Education, housing, healthcare and regulatory reform are not policy issues that will be solved by the culture wars instigated by our nation’s elite. They are boring, bourgeois policy problems that will require sober, disciplined and conscientious attention to find solutions. Fortunately, we have a lot of boring and bourgeois people to draw from, if they can only be heard above the elite fray.
The Middle and the Local
How do we recenter the middle in our national conversations?
First, we need to refocus our storytelling and narratives around the standard American experience, not the experiences of those at the extremes. While we have a strong duty to tell the stories of people in need in part to catalyze policy changes, we also have a duty to accurately reflect the makeup of the American people. This means, in part, decentering elite universities from their centrality in narratives about higher education and instead focusing attention on the vast middle of higher educational institutions that educate 99% of American students. This would have the double effect of highlighting the excellent work done in these spaces, but also defanging the culture wars, which are centered around elite institutions because those institutions are the only ones with the funding to waste time on these kinds of distractions.
Refocusing storytelling on the middle is more likely in local news than in national media, where airspace is consumed by the outrageous and extreme. It’s only really local news that can tell the stories of welders, civil servants, CEOs, plumbers, professors, entrepreneurs and landscapers who didn’t go to schools with a 3% acceptance rate or land internships at Goldman Sachs. They’re the ones starting businesses, clearing trails at public parks, fostering dogs, caring for elderly neighbors and generally keeping civil society afloat.
Additional good news is that local news also commands much higher levels of trust than national news, so prioritizing these outlets and the stories they tell can help us foster greater levels of middling, moderate trust at the same time.
Second, we can and should do more to prioritize local action, which is where the silent majority often shines. The people who are volunteering at their churches and PTSAs or earning Eagle Scout badges by maintaining local trails are also those who are quietly sidestepping toxic polarization to maintain relationships with neighbors of all stripes. This is the kind of boring, middling relationship-building work that democracy depends on.
Prioritizing local action instead of national dysfunction can help create a different—and more accurate—narrative about American cohesion. It would serve two other crucial purposes at the same time: supporting further depolarization by helping people connect face-to-face to solve local problems, while also improving our communities.
The recent defunding of AmeriCorps is heartbreaking to me as an AmeriCorps alum, not just because the program does a lot of good in local communities, but also because it’s a way to support the face-to-face, solution-oriented work that will help refocus us on the local.
A Humane and Middling Revolution of Attention
The real challenge is not polarization itself, but the institutional neglect that fuels it. When media, policy and public discourse center on the loudest voices at the edges, they ignore the majority of Americans who want real solutions: pragmatic reforms in housing, education, public safety and healthcare.
They also ignore the most important asset to the future of liberal democracy that we possess: a stable, boring, bourgeois middle class that is quietly at work across the nation.
We don’t need a centrist ideology. We need a centering of attention—on the people, institutions and communities that hold society together.
This means reinvesting in local journalism that tells the stories of everyday Americans. It means increasing attention and resources on community colleges and public universities that serve the vast middle of our student population. It means rewarding local governance that delivers results, not rhetoric. Most of all, it means recognizing that moderation isn’t a lack of conviction—it’s a commitment to complexity. And to each other.
 | A guest post by
|