Thread by @ezraklein

One thing I've been thinking about since my podcast with @tressiemcphd is the difference between status and class, and how a focus on class often confuses issues of status 🧵 nytimes.com/2021/04/13/opi…?

There's been this debate in recent years about whether class should be measured by education rather than income. Or maybe by occupation rather than income.

Michael Lind wrote a whole book making this argument from the right: penguinrandomhouse.com/books/607661/t…

There's something to this: A tech CEO and an English professor at Berkeley experience more similar worlds, and vote more similarly, than the tech CEO and the owner of a plumbing company in Akron — even if the CEO and the small biz owner have closer incomes.

But when you make that move, you begin ignoring economic power in a way that really messes with your analysis.

I've come to think class is just too limited a concept, and has too much historical baggage, for what we're trying to get at.

And a really important limit of class is that we treat class as fixed: you have one class, as measured by annual income, or degree, or job, or whatever.

I think @tressiemcphd's approach to status fixes a lot of these problems.

First, people get that status has multiple streams. It's related to your job, your income, your education, your family, etc.

Second, as she says, "it operates a little differently everywhere you're standing."

In her most searing essay, it changes as she moves from the classroom to the hospital bed. But there are far smaller changes than that too. It's always changing.

Class feels fixed, stable. Status doesn't.

And I think that gets at something really important in our politics right now, which is that America's status hierarchy is unstable.

For basically the entirety of American history, political and cultural and economic power were highly correlated. The same group held all three.

But they've become less correlated in recent years.

That's particularly true for cultural and political power.

White, older Christians hold political power far beyond their numbers. Young, diverse, secular, educated urbanites hold much more cultural power.

Economic power is a little more mixed. Wealth gaps aren't closing. Some are widening.

But corporations are changing who they side with in these fights. Both sides feel like they're losing economic power, and there's something to that.

But all of this comes together in a fight for status, which is driven by all of these (and more), not just one of them.

And right now, different sides are winning some parts and losing other parts of the status wars.

There's not a new, settled hierarchy of status to replace the old one.

There's just a country where power is in flux, and status is in flux, and lots of people feel like they're losing, but no one quite feels like they're winning.

Anyway, I have a lot more thinking to do here, and I need to relisten to the conversation to do some of it. But lots more on this question here: nytimes.com/2021/04/13/opi…