I’ve been thinking about the influence not just of the top 1% but of the broader professional classes and how their perspectives and preoccupations dominate and shape popular culture and dialogue.
For instance, let’s think about travel. Anyone who grew up in a house that was even slightly left of center likely grew up with a negative view of those who drove “gas-guzzling” trucks and SUVs. These judgments were and are common in well-off suburbs and urban neighborhoods, places where one is likely to see a variety of electric and hybrid vehicles. At the same time, this critical judgment is almost comical given the fact that air travel, which has an enormous carbon footprint, is entirely the province of the better off. Here’s a simple schematic reality check: the poor don’t fly at all. The middle classes fly occasionally for vacation. The professional classes and the rich fly regularly for both business and pleasure.
And yet until recently there was very little awareness or public attention payed in influential venues to the carbon footprint of air travel. This is not an accident. It very clearly reflects the class bias of the professional class doing all the traveling, a professional class which incidentally is increasingly the base of the Democratic Party and the source of influential liberal commentators. Here I want to consider a few ways in which this is not a positive development.
Who are in the professional class? The professional classes refers broadly to the top quarter of so of Americans who have at least bachelor’s degrees (many have graduate degrees as well) and have secure, well-compensated jobs as doctors, lawyers, realtors, a wide range of corporate figures, consultants, journalists, tenured professors, and so on. (Richard Reeves’ Dream Hoarders offers a damning critique of the disproportionate influence of the professional classes).
The simple truth here is that to be green, the professional classes would have to travel much, much less and when they do they would have to take Greyhound or carpool. Because there is one green way to travel—mass ground transportation But good luck with that. Anyone who has actually taken a Greyhound bus long distance in the US knows that its clientele and its bus stations look absolutely nothing like the airport crowd and infrastructure. Bus travel, especially long distance bus travel, is the transportation mode of the poor. But the professional classes will no more give up on their constant air travel than rural conservatives will stop driving pick-up trucks. Both groups do what they want, the first merely pays lip service to sustainability. The popular exoneration of the professional class mode of transit and the condemnation of the more rural, red-state mode of transit is an example of professional class bias.
(Now one could argue that the scope of climate change, deforestation, and extinction—the broad ecological issues of our time—are so enormous that individual behaviors do not matter, for they are merely a drop in the bucket. But to adopt this perspective one must adopt what comes with it—a refusal to judge the individual behaviors of red state citizens as well. You can either condemn or absolve ecologically damaging individual acts, not pick and choose based on personal preference.)
Some of these behaviors are so ingrained that it is hard to imagine a cultural change. International travel is a key lifestyle of the professional classes. The same households and cultural sites that condemn gas-guzzling cars will celebrate, even pressure, their members to fly around the world. Can you imagine, for instance, a tenured professor at a a major research university who doesn’t fly overseas regularly for both professional activities and vacations? I can’t. Such travel is a signifier of identity (sophistication, worldliness, et al.) among the educated professionals.
I originally considered naming this blog post “Yes, Liberal Hypocrisy is a Problem.” That is both too incendiary and not the right way to frame the problem. As with so many issues, it is a matter of class.
There is a broader class cluelessness embodied in the professional classes and, as they have shifted heavily into the Democratic Party in recent decades, it is clearly reflected within the framing of the mainstream Democratic Party and its most prominent voices. We see this play out in liberal efforts to tax soda at a higher rate because of the harmful effects that heavy sugar consumption has on kids. These problems are real and need to be addressed. But as Bernie Sanders has pointed out, such efforts reflect a serious class bias. The professional classes drink much less soda than the working classes and the poor but they do drink coffee. And not just the healthy kind but Frappuccinos, macchiatos, and other sugary drinks that are more milkshake than coffee. Where are the proposed taxes on these unhealthy consumption habits of the rich?
As a graduate student in Irvine, California you could walk into any Starbucks and find dozens of teens, from middle school through high school, lining up to drink the most sugary, unhealthy treats imaginable. Yes, this is an anecdote, but one that reflects basic sociological truths about class in America. The professional classes, however, are not going to vote for candidates who will raises taxes on their preferred drinks. But the soda of the poor? By all means, tax away.
Or consider a little remarked on habit during the height of the Covid pandemic from 2020-2021. Many conservatives refused to wear masks and also criticized mask mandates but when the CDC cautioned against traveling and gathering with family for the holidays in 2020 and 2021, this recommendation was largely ignored by liberals. (I can count on one hand the number of people I know who refused to travel during the pandemic to reduce the spread of Covid).
Some of this is admittedly impressionistic but there are important truths here. The Democratic Party has increasingly become a party of well-off professional class members and it reflects their class biases. The corollary to this is that the Republican Party has made inroads among working class voters, including blacks and latinos. We are seeing this dynamic in the 2024 Presidential election as the Republican Party makes a serious effort to woo non-college educated voters of color. For more information on this dynamic, see, of course, Thomas Frank’s Listen, Liberal for the definitive indictment on this count. Matt Karp has also written several extensive pieces on this phenomena for Jacobin. A somewhat comical example of how out of touch wealthy liberals can be is found in the New York Times advice column, The Ethicist, powerfully critiqued here.
Consider this recent evidence: the top 10% of income earners cast more votes for Clinton than Trump in 2016 and did the same for Biden in 2020. These were likely the first two times that this has happened in the past century, due to the simple fact that the wealthy used to be overwhelmingly Republican. While the top 1%, and especially the smaller number of oligarchs within that 1%, may continue to be ultra-conservative, as we move into the top 10% and top 20% we encounter a professional class of Americans that is now heavily Democratic, well-off, and relatively powerful. They are also far removed from the bottom half of the income distribution. This is a new and deeply significant development. The Democratic Party, and the general liberal-left spectrum of American politics, used to be much more rooted in labor unions and the working class, whose life experiences are increasingly alien and incomprehensible to this new professional class base.
Why does this matter? Professional class voters may be liberal Democrats on some issues but they are also more focused on symbolic change. (See Fredrik de Boer’s criticism along these lines in How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement). In addition, condescension, cluelessness about ordinary life, and hypocrisy matter because they reduce the ability of the Democratic Party and its supporters to persuade people to change their minds and behaviors, join important movements, and vote for candidates and issues. A party of condescending, wealthy elites talking down to ordinary Americans is a great recipe for losing popular support, failing to persuade, and ultimately losing elections. It yields weak candidates like Hilary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2024 partly because party elites, and the professional class base that votes in primary elections, are insulated from the widely felt unpopularity of these figures. (This recent piece in Current Affairs paints a damning portrait of condescending and clueless Democratic Party elites).
To return to the opening point, class bias blinds people to hypocrisy. Professional class Democrats condemn certain (supposedly) unsophisticated red state behaviors as unsustainable while living in ways that themselves are almost comically bad for the environment. Focusing on hypocrisy doesn’t mean certain arguments are wrong. We should be more green in our personal lives as well as in our collective policy decisions. But glaring hypocrisy matters. It turns people off and it screams of condescension. It’s hard to convince someone that they shouldn’t smoke while your cigarette blows smoke in their face.