The New White Flight

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Thursday, January 20, 2022

 

The white upper middle class is deranging American politics. We should have seen it coming.

 

In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund. They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was a lawyer at the conglomerate 3M but no corporate cutthroat. He biked to work and was in the outreach-and-philanthropy department. The Berglunds were “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”

 

Freedom is a moving and sometimes scabrous portrait of the liberal white upper middle class in the George W. Bush years, when this genteelly progressive vision was failing them, not just politically but personally. It is a portrait of a class whose members prize their own savvy — their way of doing good for others while doing well for themselves. Their gift to the world is their cleverness and broadmindedness, and they seek greater freedom to exercise these gifts upon the world.

 

But Freedom portrays something darker. The Berglunds are increasingly conscious that they are completely losing their connection to others. Their son goes to live with downwardly mobile and — to the Berglunds’ eyes — louche Republicans. The Berglunds remain somewhat ignorant and dumbfounded in the face of political criticism from black Americans. Their class is Coming Apart from the rest of the country. And their aspirations have a dark side. Franzen writes as a judgment of one character a line that is prophetic of the Berglunds: “The personality susceptible to the dream of limitless freedom is a personality also prone, should the dream ever sour, to misanthropy and rage.”

 

And it all comes to pass. Walter Berglund turns apocalyptic about the environment. “We are a cancer on the planet!” he screams on social media. He goes to Washington and earns a massive salary at a nonprofit. His renewed and now superzealous commitment to the cause leads him to collude with a wealthy Texan to evict poor families from a Virginia mountaintop in order to preserve a habitat for birds that aren’t even endangered.

 

Franzen’s work correctly anticipated that the internal psychodrama and aspirations of this class — his own — were warping American life. He anticipated the turn toward doomsday moodiness and punitive moralism. But he could not foresee how the election of Barack Obama, and the resistance he met, has brought upper-middle-class whites to radicalize on issues of race rather than of the environment.

 

College graduates started voting more for Democrats in the 1980s. High-education voters are now a crucially important part of the Democratic coalition. According to a survey of the available data, Democrats have been constantly expanding their advantage among those with high education. In 2016 the trend was still gathering strength. Thomas Piketty writes:

 

Above high-school level, the relation between education and Democratic vote is strongly increasing: in particular, 70% of voters with Master degrees (11% of the electorate) supported the Democratic candidate, and 76% of voters with PhD degrees (2% of the electorate), vs 51% of voters with Bachelor degrees (19% of the electorate) and 44% of high-school graduates (59% of the electorate).

 

Also in 2016, Democrats for the first time won a majority of high-income voters. Subsequent surveys have seen the reported political affiliation of other professional classes shift leftward, notably that of doctors.

 

White upper-middle-class liberals are bidding for national political dominance of the Democratic Party as a way of crowning their dominance in other culture-shaping institutions. Their gift to the world is not their cleverness over the ignorant, but their righteous fury at the wicked. And it fuels a toxic politics that is zealously attached to protecting their economic privilege.

 

These are the “dream hoarders” described by the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves. The top 20 percent of American earners — the ones beneath the 1 percent, but doing better than four-fifths of their countrymen — voraciously organize to protect their economic privileges. They protected from Obama’s proposed revision the tax privileges for “529” college savings accounts. Through the new congressional majority of 2018, they demanded a full restoration of state- and local-tax deductions. Their congressional representatives demand student-loan forgiveness. All of these are forms of welfare for the upper middle class.

 

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At the same time, it is white upper-middle-class liberals in particular who have undergone the “Great Awokening” and adopted beliefs on racial politics that fall to the left of those held by racial minorities. Sociologist Zach Goldberg at the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology has demonstrated that white Democrats are significantly more likely than non-white Democrats to prioritize the use of “inclusive” language to avoid offending people with different backgrounds. White Democrats are more likely than blacks and Hispanics to say that citizens should not be allowed to vote on how many immigrants are allowed to move to the U.S. and from which countries.

 

Where upper-middle-class whites have the upper hand, they are the ones defunding the police — even as many police forces are now majority-minority in their composition. It was upper-middle-class white politics that led Seattle to cut the wages of its first black female police commissioner, and funding for the department as a whole. The subsequent exodus of qualified cops and the deadly disorder of the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone riots were the result.

 

One could charge the white upper middle class of America as committed to a form of ruthless meritocracy in some areas of life and to ruthless egalitarianism in all the others. Debt relief and minimum-lot-size regulations for the households in their neighborhoods. Lawlessness in the name of advancing equality for your neighborhoods. The speech codes that this class invents and adopts in the name of easing the burdens on “the marginalized” are wielded as weapons in an open form of class warfare on the lower-middle-class and working-class kids who do not have the breeding to master that form of politesse.

 

The bastion of political sanity among Democrats is with their non-white voters and their working-class voters. It was Manhattan, by far the richest borough of New York City, that elected a district attorney in Alvin Bragg who was committed to a soft-on-crime agenda, including emptying the jails of nearly any perp who had not committed a serious assault or murder. The far more diverse outer boroughs provided the electoral heft for Eric Adams’s tough-on-crime campaign.

 

Similarly, in the national party, it was black voters and black members of Congress who helped steer the Democrats away from cortado socialists and toward Joe Biden in the Democratic primaries of 2020.

 

Now, it would be easy to leave the matter here and end on the summary judgment. Every politically revolutionary class has been populated by the “guilty bourgeoisie,” who are in­capable of handling privilege with grace or success with generosity. Overwhelmingly employed by larger firms, or in the professions, the members of this class lack the confidence or delusion of being self-made. In a strange way, our radicals are institutionalists.

 

And what is the quality of these institutions? Cutthroat and luxurious. Matt Feeney, who authored the new book Little Platoons: A Defense of Family in a Competitive Age, documents how the college-admissions process has colonized the life of middle-class families, even those containing only young children. Ivy League schools have expanded their admissions numbers much more slowly than the population of possible applicants has grown. According to Jeffrey Selingo, “Ivy League colleges grew by 14 percent over the last 30 years, lagging far behind the 44 percent rise in the number of high school graduates.”

 

With the Common Application swelling the ranks of students who apply, the admittance rate drops to well below 10 percent at the top schools. This lack of growth at the top — and the proliferation of non-top-tier schools, whose names investor Peter Thiel has said read like a “dunce cap” on a résumé — has led to ferocious competition even at the pre­school level among parents. In this environment, second-tier schools — the Swarthmores, Dukes, and NYUs — can raise their tuition rates to levels that make them ultra-luxury products, as expensive as an exclusive golf club. In a memorable anecdote, Hamilton College admissions officials included an example of the kind of essay they like to see,  the first line of which was, “On the day my first novel was rejected, I was baking a pie.” The essay concluded with the successful signing of the applicant’s book contract.

 

These dynamics vastly increase the perceived value of admission to a top-tier school. And it subtly reinforces a dark message for the nation’s elites: Your children will have to work much harder than you did to achieve even the relative status you have at present.

 

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The American dream included the bedrock faith, which in previous ages most parents had, that today’s children will be better off than their parents. The institutions of American life to which America’s upper-middle-class white liberals are loyal and on which they depend have arranged themselves in a way to destroy that faith in progress and positive-sum outcomes. And what enters the scene if the American dream sours? Misanthropy and rage.

 

This explains, in part, how political correctness has become a status competition, one that is spreading from college into the corporate workforce through the lateral imitation of administrators. What is a Human Resources administrator but a private-sector member of the dean’s office? It is yet another layer of competition and a sorting mechanism.

 

Especially as woke ideology expands the number and type of sexual minorities, it also expands the opportunities of white children to obtain a coveted status as a transgressed minority, a kind of work-around for the drudgery of meritocracy. Previous generations of young people saw the phenomenon of “lesbians until graduation,” but the institutions of American life are conspiring to create the “transgendered until admitted.”

 

And if the American dream feels like a perishing fantasy in the present even for those as blessed as upper-middle-class whites, it is not surprising that they would increasingly adopt and propagate a revisionist history and view of their country — such as that offered by the 1619 Project — that damns America as a set of illusions covering over a substance of capitalist oppression.

 

What this class desperately needs, perhaps what the country needs, is a credible belief in America’s abundance of opportunities, alongside the security of knowing that failures or shortcomings do not forever doom one to a life of misery or exile from the way of life you knew as a child. The virtue of America’s upper middle class is its fastidiousness and inexhaustible energy and ambition. Those virtues deserve and require institutions that channel their energy into enterprises that are truly productive, or at least more productive than being an extension of Human Resources. Perhaps these enterprises would even bring white upper-middle-class liberals back into sympathetic contact with their countrymen — the blacks who resist gentrification, or the deplorables they once wished to leave behind in St. Paul.