vox--2020-12-15--How Trump intensified the GOP’s war on reality

The Trump administration is careening towards its inglorious end , but Trump , the political force , likely isn ’ t going away .
It ’ s possible — maybe even probable — that Trump runs for the Republican nomination again in 2024 .
It ’ s just as possible that Trump ’ s children grab the baton and run for office themselves ( at least two of them have already hinted at this ) .
Or maybe Trump launches his own media empire and terrorizes the Republican establishment from the outside .
In all of these scenarios , the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ for years to come .
And that , more than anything , is why American democracy ’ s long-term prospects seem so gloomy to many .
Regardless of what Trump does post-presidency , his impact on the conservative base has been profound .
According to one poll , 70 percent of Republicans don ’ t believe the 2020 election was free and fair .
That ’ s not all that surprising considering the leader of the party is telling his followers that the process was rigged and illegitimate .
So whatever direction the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ with a Trumpian base and that might be the defining constraint for the party over the next four years .
To talk through what comes next , I reached out to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat .
Douthat is consistently one of the more thoughtful observers of contemporary conservatism and just an insightful voice on the broader ideological landscape .
We discuss why a conspiratorial mindset prevails on the right , if Republicans have an insoluble demand-side problem with their base , and if the GOP has a coherent ideological future with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ transcript of our conversation follows .
Why do you think so many “ normal conservatives , ” to use your phrase , continue to believe that the election was rigged ?
We ’ re talking about 70 percent of the Republican Party , not just a minority of Birthers or QAnon fantasists .
I wrote a piece that tried to lay out some of the reasons Republicans might believe this that aren ’ t just “ because right-wing news is whipping up the narrative.
” Part of it has to do with how @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Many see it as a justification for liberal overreach .
It ’ s almost become the conservative equivalent of liberal fears about Trump ’ s authoritarianism .
I don ’ t think that reading of the situation is correct to be clear , but I think you can see where it comes from .
What has happened under pandemic conditions has been genuinely weird in all kinds of ways .
Beyond that , there ’ s always been this phenomenon on the right where you have self-conscious outsiders who think of themselves as @ @ @ @ @ @ @ reality and bringing fresh eyes to every scenario and rejecting conventional wisdom at every pass .
These are the people generating a lot of the data analyses claiming to show fraud or whatever .
There ’ s a whole class of people dedicated to throwing off the “ consensus ” of academia or media discourse and that can send people in bizarre directions .
But look , I think a lot of this is overdetermined .
We ’ ve never had a losing presidential candidate spend so much time claiming that the election @ @ @ @ @ @ @ election was close , or close enough , to really raise the stakes of all these claims .
And the fact that we ran an election under incredibly unusual conditions with a massive experiment in mail-in balloting that we ’ ve never done before .
And while all that ’ s going on , you ’ ve got all these right-wing competitors to Fox News invested in the fraud narratives and working to make it look more plausible than it is .
American elections are big , messy , sprawling , localized events @ @ @ @ @ @ @ part of the reason why you should assume there isn ’ t massive fraud .
Because they are so sprawling and decentralized and complicated , the idea any kind of centralized conspiracy could figure out the right way to switch votes under these rules and this voting machine and this area and those rules and that voting machine , that just seems implausible to me .
I ’ ll just say briefly that there ’ s a difference between a healthy skepticism and a persistent commitment to baseless conspiracy theories , and I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ here is overwhelmingly the latter .
Right , but I think skepticism is the place people fall back to when you have arguments with them .
It ’ s that idea that when people argue they move back and forth between strong claims that are weakly defended and weaker claims that are strongly defended .
I don ’ t think it ’ s the case that all those 70 percent [ of Republicans who believe that fraud occurred ] are 100 percent committed to the idea that there was fraud .
It ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of them who will tell pollsters that they think there was fraud and then if their friend challenges them , they will say , “ Well , I ’ m just asking questions , ” or , “ I ’ m just being skeptical and I just want the media to cover these stories.
” There ’ s also a performative aspect to this .
One of the responses I got to my column from people who are vocal in saying they think there was fraud was that you also have to see @ @ @ @ @ @ @ narrative about Trump being an illegitimate president .
So some of this rests on sincere beliefs .
Some of it rests on generalized skepticism .
And for some people , it rests on an automatic distrust of liberal narratives and feeling that they have to fight to delegitimize Biden the way the Democrats delegitimized Trump .
All of those things are going on at the same time .
“ The problem for Republicans is they represent the grievances of 48 percent of the country ” Yeah , there ’ s a lot going @ @ @ @ @ @ @ fundamentally a demand-side problem on the right that ’ s helping to create this permanent conspiratorial mindset .
Is this something that ’ s been engineered by conservative media or is it more complicated than that ?
I think it ’ s fair to say that a big chunk of conservative media have leaned hard into a long-running message of total distrust of anything that comes out of establishment organs and the mainstream liberal media .
So in that sense , it ’ s something that has clearly been nurtured and furthered by @ @ @ @ @ @ @ your point about the demand side , you can see it with people abandoning Fox News for these startups or long-running nonentities that nobody was watching , and I think you can see it more generally in the original turn to Trump .
Trump was not the candidate of Fox News or conservative media when he started running in 2016 , but there were a lot of people on the right who wanted to hear what he was selling .
He found a niche that wasn ’ t representative of all of conservatism @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people thought .
Some of this goes back to your first question about what broke the Republican Party .
To me , this demand-side problem has always been a part of conservatism , going all the way back to the John Birch Society and this fear of the liberal establishment and desire for narratives that make the liberal establishment seem more dangerous , more menacing , and more Communist than reality suggests .
It ’ s always been there .
In that sense , you won ’ t get a Republican Party whose @ @ @ @ @ @ @ leader of that party who inspires trust .
But it ’ s a circular problem , because you can ’ t get that leader as long as the base of the party is drawn to conspiracy theories and figures like Trump .
I guess that brings us back to Trump and the future of this party .
I think Trump ’ s political genius was his ability to be for everything and nothing at the same time .
“ Make America Great Again ” is so perfect precisely because it ’ s so @ @ @ @ @ @ @ avatar so that people can project onto him whatever they want .
But his policy imprint is weak and I guess the question is what does the GOP stand for now that the avatar is gone ?
Does it have a coherent ideological future ?
Well , the GOP stands for the idea that liberals are wrong .
Whatever liberals want is wrong — that ’ s what the GOP stands for .
That ’ s an instinct , not an ideology , Ross .
Yeah , but it ’ s a unifying @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think liberals are wrong and being a party that says “ liberals are wrong ” can bring a lot of people together , certainly enough to maintain the GOP as a viable political force , even if it ’ s short of a majority .
The interesting thing is that Trump ’ s persistent presence in the GOP actually freezes the real debate about how to build on his populist gestures or instincts , because he ’ s such a dominant force .
The party can ’ t really move on .
I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ has been substantial at least in the sense that he shifted the Republican Party away from Paul Ryan ’ s vision of entitlement reform in a way that ’ s going to be hard to undo .
You will obviously have born-again deficit hawks attacking some of Joe Biden ’ s policy proposals , but I don ’ t think you ’ re going to see a re-emergence of full Ryanism in the next four years .
Trump ’ s populism , even if it never manifested into anything substantial , changed the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ sure about that .
Trump did show that there ’ s space for a genuine economic populism on the right , but in the end he mostly outsourced his economic policies to the business wing of the GOP .
Not totally .
You could say that Trump sort returned to what Bush did in his first term , which is to say tax cuts for the business wing and more spending for voters who like spending .
So it wasn ’ t a radical turn to populism , it was more of a @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
But there was a clear and I think irreversible turn away from the Romney-Ryan proposal to reform Social Security and basically end entitlement-friendly conservatism .
I think Trump killed that completely .
If a Republican comes along who really is an economic populist , and who doesn ’ t couch it in nativist appeals , could he or she win ?
Does the populism only work if it ’ s tied to the nativism ?
I don ’ t think the populism has to be tied to the nativism .
I think @ @ @ @ @ @ @ work if it isn ’ t tied to a celebrity businessman figure who plays the outsider role ?
I don ’ t think racism was Trump ’ s secret sauce as much as celebrity was .
I think the race stuff helped him build his base in the early going , but later it became a liability .
But if you want to understand how Trump won over a certain kind of white working-class voter who used to vote Democrat , or a certain kind of middle-class Hispanic or African-American voter , I @ @ @ @ @ @ @ celebrity was very powerful .
That ’ s the thing that any would-be inheritor of Trump will be missing .
“ Whatever liberals want is wrong — that ’ s what the GOP stands for ” Whatever happens , it ’ s hard to see a path forward for the Republican Party that doesn ’ t recognize anti-elite grievances as a core animating principle .
Can you be a “ grievance ” party without also being a reactionary party ?
The Republican Party is destined to be a reactionary party , but that @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
If you think America has taken a wrong turn and needs some serious changes , that ’ s certainly reactionary , but that doesn ’ t mean it ’ s wrong .
Reactionaries can sometimes be right .
The grievance question is hard , though .
There are conservatives like Julius Krein , who edits the American Affairs journal , that are trying to make something substantive out of Trumpism .
Krein , for example , arggues that populists need technocrats , too .
You can ’ t just run a government @ @ @ @ @ @ @ who know how the government works and can take the somewhat inchoate grievances of the populists and turn them into a policy agenda that actually answers those grievances .
I think that ’ s absolutely right , but it ’ s really , really hard to pull off because a politics of grievance alienates the people you need to join it in order to turn it in this constructive direction .
The problem for Republicans is they represent the grievances of 48 percent of the country .
If you represent the grievances of @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s easier to govern .
But the grievances of a not-quite-majority is a very different thing .
It ’ s a lot harder to build anything with 48 percent support .
That ’ s not exactly a Reagan-level coalition .
What do you expect Trump ’ s relationship to the party to look like the next four years ?
He ’ s going to act as if he ’ s running again for a long period of time .
I don ’ t think it ’ s guaranteed that he runs @ @ @ @ @ @ @ likely that a member of his family runs .
Like if you ask me for odds that either he or Don Jr. will run , I would say we ’ re at 75 or 80 percent .
I think the fact that he ’ s going to act as if he ’ s running means that he ’ s going to consider himself the leader of the party and the people involved in the party establishment are going to act loyal to him .
Absent an alternative center of gravity for the out-of-power @ @ @ @ @ @ @ a lot of success just casting himself as the leader of the opposition and having parts of the RNC and other institutions like that in his corner , whether they want to be or not .
Then the question is whether he can run a Tea Party-style insurgency campaign against people who he feels were insufficiently loyal to him .
But 2022 is a long way away and it ’ s possible that his star will fade once he ’ s out of power .
But if you look at the dynamic right @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Republicans want to believe that he didn ’ t really lose the election puts him in a much stronger position to claim to be the leader of the party moving forward .
Whoever takes the helm for the GOP will have to reflect Trumpism one way or the other .
Who is best positioned to fill that vacuum ?
The honest answer is I don ’ t know .
It ’ s not that hard to imagine that if Trump dropped back , or if the Trump kids are embroiled in legal or @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Trump on the ballot , someone like Pence or Nikki Haley appropriating just enough populism to ride their name recognition and connection with Trump to some kind of victory .
I just don ’ t see any way they go back to Romney-Ryan Republicanism .
But a world where it ’ s the same old establishment , only they ’ re just saying a bunch more Trumpy things , I don ’ t think that world is impossible to imagine .
I think it ’ s a little more likely than my preferred @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Josh Hawley succeed in creating something genuinely new out of what Trump failed to build .
But in a world where Trump is still here , I have no idea how there could ever be a Trump-like alternative in the GOP .
I just can ’ t see it .

The Trump administration is careening towards its inglorious end, but Trump, the political force, likely isn’t going away.
It’s possible — maybe even probable — that Trump runs for the Republican nomination again in 2024. It’s just as possible that Trump’s children grab the baton and run for office themselves (at least two of them have already hinted at this). Or maybe Trump launches his own media empire and terrorizes the Republican establishment from the outside.
In all of these scenarios, the specter of Trump hangs over the GOP for years to come. And that, more than anything, is why American democracy’s long-term prospects seem so gloomy to many.
Regardless of what Trump does post-presidency, his impact on the conservative base has been profound. According to one poll, 70 percent of Republicans don’t believe the 2020 election was free and fair. That’s not all that surprising considering the leader of the party is telling his followers that the process was rigged and illegitimate. So whatever direction the GOP goes, they’re going with a Trumpian base and that might be the defining constraint for the party over the next four years.
To talk through what comes next, I reached out to New York Times columnist Ross Douthat. Douthat is consistently one of the more thoughtful observers of contemporary conservatism and just an insightful voice on the broader ideological landscape. We discuss why a conspiratorial mindset prevails on the right, if Republicans have an insoluble demand-side problem with their base, and if the GOP has a coherent ideological future with or without Trump.
A lightly edited transcript of our conversation follows.
Sean Illing
Why do you think so many “normal conservatives,” to use your phrase, continue to believe that the election was rigged? We’re talking about 70 percent of the Republican Party, not just a minority of Birthers or QAnon fantasists.
Ross Douthat
I wrote a piece that tried to lay out some of the reasons Republicans might believe this that aren’t just “because right-wing news is whipping up the narrative.” Part of it has to do with how conservatives have experienced the pandemic era. Many see it as a justification for liberal overreach. It’s almost become the conservative equivalent of liberal fears about Trump’s authoritarianism. I don’t think that reading of the situation is correct to be clear, but I think you can see where it comes from. What has happened under pandemic conditions has been genuinely weird in all kinds of ways.
Beyond that, there’s always been this phenomenon on the right where you have self-conscious outsiders who think of themselves as completely outside of the official consensus about reality and bringing fresh eyes to every scenario and rejecting conventional wisdom at every pass. These are the people generating a lot of the data analyses claiming to show fraud or whatever. There’s a whole class of people dedicated to throwing off the “consensus” of academia or media discourse and that can send people in bizarre directions.
But look, I think a lot of this is overdetermined. We’ve never had a losing presidential candidate spend so much time claiming that the election was stolen from him. And the election was close, or close enough, to really raise the stakes of all these claims. And the fact that we ran an election under incredibly unusual conditions with a massive experiment in mail-in balloting that we’ve never done before. And while all that’s going on, you’ve got all these right-wing competitors to Fox News invested in the fraud narratives and working to make it look more plausible than it is.
American elections are big, messy, sprawling, localized events and to me, that’s part of the reason why you should assume there isn’t massive fraud. Because they are so sprawling and decentralized and complicated, the idea any kind of centralized conspiracy could figure out the right way to switch votes under these rules and this voting machine and this area and those rules and that voting machine, that just seems implausible to me.
Sean Illing
I’ll just say briefly that there’s a difference between a healthy skepticism and a persistent commitment to baseless conspiracy theories, and I think what we’re talking about here is overwhelmingly the latter.
Ross Douthat
Right, but I think skepticism is the place people fall back to when you have arguments with them. It’s that idea that when people argue they move back and forth between strong claims that are weakly defended and weaker claims that are strongly defended. I don’t think it’s the case that all those 70 percent [of Republicans who believe that fraud occurred] are 100 percent committed to the idea that there was fraud. It’s more that there are a lot of them who will tell pollsters that they think there was fraud and then if their friend challenges them, they will say, “Well, I’m just asking questions,” or, “I’m just being skeptical and I just want the media to cover these stories.”
There’s also a performative aspect to this. One of the responses I got to my column from people who are vocal in saying they think there was fraud was that you also have to see this as payback for the Democrats’ narrative about Trump being an illegitimate president. So some of this rests on sincere beliefs. Some of it rests on generalized skepticism. And for some people, it rests on an automatic distrust of liberal narratives and feeling that they have to fight to delegitimize Biden the way the Democrats delegitimized Trump. All of those things are going on at the same time.
“The problem for Republicans is they represent the grievances of 48 percent of the country”
Sean Illing
Yeah, there’s a lot going on. But there’s also fundamentally a demand-side problem on the right that’s helping to create this permanent conspiratorial mindset. Is this something that’s been engineered by conservative media or is it more complicated than that?
Ross Douthat
I think it’s fair to say that a big chunk of conservative media have leaned hard into a long-running message of total distrust of anything that comes out of establishment organs and the mainstream liberal media. So in that sense, it’s something that has clearly been nurtured and furthered by the narratives in right-wing media.
But your point about the demand side, you can see it with people abandoning Fox News for these startups or long-running nonentities that nobody was watching, and I think you can see it more generally in the original turn to Trump. Trump was not the candidate of Fox News or conservative media when he started running in 2016, but there were a lot of people on the right who wanted to hear what he was selling. He found a niche that wasn’t representative of all of conservatism but it was way more powerful than people thought.
Some of this goes back to your first question about what broke the Republican Party. To me, this demand-side problem has always been a part of conservatism, going all the way back to the John Birch Society and this fear of the liberal establishment and desire for narratives that make the liberal establishment seem more dangerous, more menacing, and more Communist than reality suggests. It’s always been there.
In that sense, you won’t get a Republican Party whose voters trust again until you have a leader of that party who inspires trust. But it’s a circular problem, because you can’t get that leader as long as the base of the party is drawn to conspiracy theories and figures like Trump.
Sean Illing
I guess that brings us back to Trump and the future of this party. I think Trump’s political genius was his ability to be for everything and nothing at the same time. “Make America Great Again” is so perfect precisely because it’s so empty. Trump positions himself as an avatar so that people can project onto him whatever they want. But his policy imprint is weak and I guess the question is what does the GOP stand for now that the avatar is gone? Does it have a coherent ideological future?
Ross Douthat
Well, the GOP stands for the idea that liberals are wrong. Whatever liberals want is wrong — that’s what the GOP stands for.
Sean Illing
That’s an instinct, not an ideology, Ross.
Ross Douthat
Yeah, but it’s a unifying force, right? Lots of people think liberals are wrong and being a party that says “liberals are wrong” can bring a lot of people together, certainly enough to maintain the GOP as a viable political force, even if it’s short of a majority. The interesting thing is that Trump’s persistent presence in the GOP actually freezes the real debate about how to build on his populist gestures or instincts, because he’s such a dominant force. The party can’t move on.
I do think Trump’s policy imprint has been substantial at least in the sense that he shifted the Republican Party away from Paul Ryan’s vision of entitlement reform in a way that’s going to be hard to undo. You will obviously have born-again deficit hawks attacking some of Joe Biden’s policy proposals, but I don’t think you’re going to see a re-emergence of full Ryanism in the next four years. Trump’s populism, even if it never manifested into anything substantial, changed the party.
Sean Illing
I’m not so sure about that. Trump did show that there’s space for a genuine economic populism on the right, but in the end he mostly outsourced his economic policies to the business wing of the GOP.
Ross Douthat
Not totally. You could say that Trump sort returned to what Bush did in his first term, which is to say tax cuts for the business wing and more spending for voters who like spending. So it wasn’t a radical turn to populism, it was more of a return to Reagan-era deficits-don’t-matter thinking. But there was a clear and I think irreversible turn away from the Romney-Ryan proposal to reform Social Security and basically end entitlement-friendly conservatism. I think Trump killed that completely.
Sean Illing
If a Republican comes along who really is an economic populist, and who doesn’t couch it in nativist appeals, could he or she win? Does the populism only work if it’s tied to the nativism?
Ross Douthat
I don’t think the populism has to be tied to the nativism. I think the big question is, does it work if it isn’t tied to a celebrity businessman figure who plays the outsider role?
I don’t think racism was Trump’s secret sauce as much as celebrity was. I think the race stuff helped him build his base in the early going, but later it became a liability. But if you want to understand how Trump won over a certain kind of white working-class voter who used to vote Democrat, or a certain kind of middle-class Hispanic or African-American voter, I think the fusion of populism and Apprentice-style celebrity was very powerful. That’s the thing that any would-be inheritor of Trump will be missing.
“Whatever liberals want is wrong — that’s what the GOP stands for”
Sean Illing
Whatever happens, it’s hard to see a path forward for the Republican Party that doesn’t recognize anti-elite grievances as a core animating principle. Can you be a “grievance” party without also being a reactionary party?
Ross Douthat
The Republican Party is destined to be a reactionary party, but that’s not necessarily a negative thing. If you think America has taken a wrong turn and needs some serious changes, that’s certainly reactionary, but that doesn’t mean it’s wrong. Reactionaries can sometimes be right.
The grievance question is hard, though. There are conservatives like Julius Krein, who edits the American Affairs journal, that are trying to make something substantive out of Trumpism. Krein, for example, arggues that populists need technocrats, too. You can’t just run a government on anti-elite grievances. You need people who know how the government works and can take the somewhat inchoate grievances of the populists and turn them into a policy agenda that actually answers those grievances. I think that’s absolutely right, but it’s really, really hard to pull off because a politics of grievance alienates the people you need to join it in order to turn it in this constructive direction.
The problem for Republicans is they represent the grievances of 48 percent of the country. If you represent the grievances of 60 percent of the country, then it’s easier to govern. But the grievances of a not-quite-majority is a very different thing. It’s a lot harder to build anything with 48 percent support. That’s not exactly a Reagan-level coalition.
Sean Illing
What do you expect Trump’s relationship to the party to look like the next four years?
Ross Douthat
He’s going to act as if he’s running again for a long period of time. I don’t think it’s guaranteed that he runs again. I think it is very likely that a member of his family runs. Like if you ask me for odds that either he or Don Jr. will run, I would say we’re at 75 or 80 percent. I think the fact that he’s going to act as if he’s running means that he’s going to consider himself the leader of the party and the people involved in the party establishment are going to act loyal to him.
Absent an alternative center of gravity for the out-of-power party, I think Trump could have a lot of success just casting himself as the leader of the opposition and having parts of the RNC and other institutions like that in his corner, whether they want to be or not. Then the question is whether he can run a Tea Party-style insurgency campaign against people who he feels were insufficiently loyal to him. But 2022 is a long way away and it’s possible that his star will fade once he’s out of power.
But if you look at the dynamic right now, the fact that so many Republicans want to believe that he didn’t really lose the election puts him in a much stronger position to claim to be the leader of the party moving forward.
Sean Illing
Whoever takes the helm for the GOP will have to reflect Trumpism one way or the other. Who is best positioned to fill that vacuum?
Ross Douthat
The honest answer is I don’t know. It’s not that hard to imagine that if Trump dropped back, or if the Trump kids are embroiled in legal or financial troubles and there’s no Trump on the ballot, someone like Pence or Nikki Haley appropriating just enough populism to ride their name recognition and connection with Trump to some kind of victory. I just don’t see any way they go back to Romney-Ryan Republicanism.
But a world where it’s the same old establishment, only they’re just saying a bunch more Trumpy things, I don’t think that world is impossible to imagine. I think it’s a little more likely than my preferred scenario where a Marco Rubio or a Josh Hawley succeed in creating something genuinely new out of what Trump failed to build. But in a world where Trump is still here, I have no idea how there could ever be a Trump-like alternative in the GOP. I just can’t see it.


vox--2020-12-15--How America’s middle class got hollowed out

Delia did everything right .
She went to college , she got a teaching degree , she found a reliable job , and she got married .
She and her husband had two kids .
“ We followed the traditional path to middle class and economic security , ” she told me .
“ Or so I thought.
” As a teacher in New Jersey , Delia , age 41 , makes around $ 115,000 a year ; her husband , who works as a carpenter , makes $ 45,000 .
Their $ 160,000 combined family salary places them firmly @ @ @ @ @ @ @ boundaries of which are considered to be two-thirds of the US median household income on the lowest end and double that same median on the highest , and adjusted for location .
( According to the Pew Middle Class Calculator , Delia ’ s household income places her family in the “ middle tier ” along with 49 percent of households in the greater tri-state area . )
To most people , $ 160,000 sounds like a lot of money .
“ Middle tier ” sounds pretty solid .
So why does Delia @ @ @ @ @ @ @ able to put $ 150 a month into a retirement account , but the family ’ s emergency savings account hovers at just $ 400 .
Going on vacation has meant juggling costs on several credit cards .
“ I don ’ t feel like I ’ ll ever have a day that I won ’ t be worried about money , ” she said .
“ I ’ m resentful of my partner for not making more money , but more resentful of his crappy employer for not paying him more.
” @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of people whose income technically places them within the middle class of American earners but whose expenses — whether for housing , medical costs , debt payments , child care , elder care , or the dozens of other expectations that attend supposed middle-class living — leave them living month to month , with little savings for emergencies or retirement .
Pre-pandemic , middle-class Americans modeled the belief that everything was fine .
Unemployment was low ; consumer confidence was high ; the housing market had “ recovered.
” In 2019 , 95 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ $ 100,000 a year reported they were “ doing okay ” financially , a 13 percent increase from 2013 .
But those positive economic indicators obscured a larger reality .
Forty years ago , the term “ middle class ” referred to Americans who had successfully obtained a version of the American dream : a steady income from one or two earners , a home , and security for the future .
It meant the ability to save and acquire assets .
Now , it mostly means the ability to put your bills @ @ @ @ @ @ @ stability that once characterized the middle class , that made it such a coveted and aspirational echelon of American existence , has been hollowed out .
It ’ s difficult to tell if someone ’ s part of the hollow middle class because they ’ re still performing all the external markers of middle-classness .
Before the pandemic , they were ( and largely still are , absent a layoff ) buying and leasing cars , purchasing homes , going on vacation , covering their kids ’ education and activities .
They ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debt to do so .
As journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out , it ’ s very expensive to be poor .
It ’ s also increasingly expensive to be middle class , in part because wages for all but the wealthy have remained stagnant for the past four decades .
Most middle-class Americans seem to be making more — getting raises , however small , sometimes billed as “ cost of living ” increases .
Yet these increases largely just keep pace with inflation , not the actual cost @ @ @ @ @ @ @ this question is the heavy , confounding issue of American middle-class identity and the psychological and social wreckage that comes with losing it Basic costs are taking up bigger chunks of the monthly middle-class paycheck .
In 2019 , the middle class was spending about $ 4,900 a year on out-of-pocket health care costs .
More middle- and high-income people than ever are renting , and 27 percent are considered “ cost burdened , ” paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent , particularly in expensive metro areas .
Then @ @ @ @ @ @ @ of child care .
In Washington state , for example , which ranks ninth in the US for child care costs , care for an infant and a 4-year-old averages $ 25,605 a year , or 35.5 percent of the median family income ; you can find costs in your state here .
Many middle-class households try to figure out what expenses they have to cover immediately with cash and what can be put on a credit card , financed , or delayed in some fashion .
In March 2020 , household debt @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it ’ s been since the 2008 financial crisis , when it reached $ 12.7 trillion .
In the first quarter of 2020 , the average loan for a new car was a record-breaking $ 33,738 , with an average monthly payment of $ 569 ( the average payment for a used car is $ 397 ) .
And then there ’ s student loan debt , which , for Americans , currently totals $ 1.56 trillion .
Not everyone has student loan debt , but among those who do — many with @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in the middle class — the average debt load is $ 32,731 .
The average monthly ( pre-pandemic ) payment is $ 393 .
Some of these costs have shifted slightly since the beginning of the pandemic ; federal student loan payments , for example , have been paused since February .
But in January , just under 12 million renters will owe an average of $ 5,850 of back rent and utilities .
And some costs , like child care , are poised to escalate even more once the pandemic is over @ @ @ @ @ @ @ people just curb their spending ?
At the heart of this question is the heavy , confounding issue of American middle-class identity and the psychological and social wreckage that comes with losing it .
“ I don ’ t know that I could shake this identity regardless of how much money I do or don ’ t have , ” Leigh , who makes $ 80,000 a year and spends all her take-home pay on rent and credit card bills , told me .
“ It ’ s ingrained within me.
” If @ @ @ @ @ @ @ become middle class , there ’ s great bitterness in rescinding that status ; if your parents worked years to enter the middle class , falling from it is often accompanied by great shame .
There ’ s also the difficulty of significantly shifting your family ’ s consumption patterns .
Once set , many find it impossible to change their own expectations for vacations , activities , and schooling — let alone those of their partners or children .
Why ?
Because the middle class is spectacularly bad at talking honestly about @ @ @ @ @ @ @ worst habits , our most convenient lies , our most cowardly selves .
Some say Americans writ large are bad at talking about money , but truly rich people talk about money all the time , as do truly poor people .
Kids who grow up poor learn the refrain “ we can ’ t afford it ” at an early age ; as Aja Romano pointed out in this Vox discussion of all that Hillbilly Elegy gets wrong , “ when you ’ re poor , you know every cent you have @ @ @ @ @ @ @ last penny , and you have already calculated exactly how much gas you can put in your car and how far that gas will get you before you get out of money.
” It ’ s middle-class people , or people who still cling to middle-class identity even if they ’ ve risen above it or fallen out of it , who don ’ t know how to talk about money .
They don ’ t know how to talk about it with their peers or their parents or their children , and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ Instead , so many of us allow ourselves to default to the vast middle , the typical , the median , the democratic “ we ” that shows up in television commercials — a place in the American imaginary that ’ s venerated by politicians and overwritten with narratives of bootstrapping , hard work , and meritocracy .
In truth , the American middle class has become less of an economic classification and more of a mode : a way of feeling , a posture toward the rest of the world , predicated @ @ @ @ @ @ @ why it ’ s so untoward to talk about the economic realities ; the rising panic over medical bills exists on a different plane than the ineffable feeling of “ normal.
” Normal is defined less by what it is than by what it is not .
Put differently , no matter how precarious your middle-class existence might be , it feels essential to distance from or disidentify with the precarity of the poor or working class .
You maintain your middle-class identity by defining yourself as not poor , not working class @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the ease with which you could descend into financial ruin .
So many are so obsessed with defining themselves as not poor that they can ’ t grapple with the changes in spending habits that would actually prevent them from becoming so .
Solidarity — especially solidarity across classes — has been declining for decades .
When the middle class first began to expand in the United States in the mid-20th century , it did so in large part through the work of unions , which advocated for salaries and benefits that allowed @ @ @ @ @ @ @ payment and save for the future .
There are still hundreds of thousands of union workers in the middle class ( teachers , nurses , tradespeople ) , but much of the solidarity with workers outside your profession , or even your specific workplace , has evaporated .
The American middle class has become less of an economic classification and more of a mode : a way of feeling , a posture toward the rest of the world What ’ s more , most politicians have done a spectacularly poor job of framing @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They talk vaguely about expanding the middle class , and single out specific high costs like medical premiums , but when was the last time you heard a politician talk about credit card debt ?
The less these kinds of problems are talked about , the more individual they feel , as opposed to a reality for millions of Americans .
Delia , for example , is a real person , but Delia ’ s not her real name ; she doesn ’ t want others knowing her family ’ s business @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and neighbors are in a better financial situation than she is .
They don ’ t ever talk about it , but she thinks they have better rates on their mortgages , more equity in their homes — how else could they drive $ 60,000 SUVs and put pools in over the summer ?
But someone on the outside might look at Delia ’ s life and think something very similar .
That ’ s how you get the hollow middle : when a bunch of people are terrified of being poor , @ @ @ @ @ @ @ others about money , and have no political will to advocate for changes that would alter their position .
When I first attempted to describe the condition of much of the middle class today — moderately high income , but with bills and debt that make it difficult to weave a safety net for their families — I wanted a word for it , an evocative term .
The term “ hollow middle ” eventually came , via Twitter , from Carina Wytiaz , but the vast majority of people who responded said @ @ @ @ @ @ @ , well , being middle class .
Tons of debt , tons of bills , very little leftover .
However , the middle class only really started to hollow out over the past 20 years .
Back in 1960 , the personal savings rate ( the percentage of income households were saving after taxes ) was 11 percent .
In 1990 , it was 8.8 percent .
By 2000 , it had dropped to 4.2 percent , before eventually hitting a nadir of 3.6 percent in 2007 .
That number grew in the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ at 12 percent in 2012 before falling again as consumers gained more “ confidence ” in spending .
This is because consumer confidence doesn ’ t mean more savings ; it means more people with access to credit are confident about using it , and low interest rates disincentivize savings .
One irony of the hollow middle is that attempts to secure your children ’ s class stability often reproduce debt patterns for the next generation We ’ ve been normalizing low savings rates at the same time that we ’ ve become @ @ @ @ @ @ @ debt — a symptom , as financial analyst Karen Petrou put it , of “ deep economic malaise.
” In the early ’ 80s , the income-to-debt ratio hovered between 0.55 and 0.65 , which meant that a household ’ s overall debt level amounted to between 55 percent and 65 percent of their income after taxes .
The ratio first hit 1.0 in 2003 , and rose all the way to 1.24 before the 2007 crash .
Now it ’ s stabilized at just under 1 , so a middle-class family making @ @ @ @ @ @ @ in debt .
Until relatively recently , the majority of that debt would have been mortgage debt .
Over the past decade , the proportion has begun to shift toward student loans , auto loans , credit card debt , and medical debt : so-called “ bad ” debt .
More people are retiring with debt , too — or unable to retire , or coming out of retirement to service debt .
In 2016 , the median debt for a household headed by someone 65 or older was $ 31,300 , more @ @ @ @ @ @ @ it was in 1989 .
These debts come from mortgages , but also student loans taken out for their children or for themselves when they went back to school , mid-career , during one of the recessions of the 2000s , or credit card debt trying to cover costs when they were out of work .
“ The jobs came back after the recession of 2001 , ” economist Christian Weller , whose research focuses on middle-class savings and retirement , told me .
“ But the wages never really grew .
Benefits @ @ @ @ @ @ @ hit with yet another massive recession in late 2007 , and job growth doesn ’ t really come back until 2010 .
That ’ s a long period of a lot of economic pain for a lot of people.
” When the jobs did come back , a lot of them weren ’ t great .
People became employed as gig workers or independent contractors , precarious roles with few benefits and little stability .
Those who had gone into debt to get through the Great Recession were now accumulating more debt in @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to try and provide a middle-class future for their children .
More than a decade later , only the top 20 percent of earners have actually recovered from the Great Recession , in part because the percentage of the middle class with appreciating assets — whether in the form of a home or stocks — has continued to decline .
Here , Delia ’ s story is instructive .
Back in 2005 , she had her teacher ’ s job , and her husband had a promising construction company .
They were on @ @ @ @ @ @ @ and decided to do what a lot of people in that position do : buy a house .
The problem with their strategy revealed itself only in hindsight ; they bought at the height of the mid-2000s housing bubble .
They hung on to their house as long as they could , but by 2012 , they were drowning .
They ended up shutting down her husband ’ s business and short-selling the house , leaving them with no equity .
Their home hadn ’ t been foreclosed on and their credit was @ @ @ @ @ @ @ seven years behind .
They moved in with Delia ’ s parents , only to discover that they , too , had for years been struggling to pay their mortgage and had taken a bad modification in order to stay in their house .
Delia and her husband started covering the mortgage payment , which is now $ 3,300 a month , and most monthly costs .
Eight years later , they ’ re still there .
Though Delia ’ s teaching job is steady , her husband is making less than he @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
They ’ re also paying private school tuition for their two daughters , which takes up a “ huge chunk ” of their income .
They could pull their kids from private school and put them in public , but the kids have made their friends , and Delia ’ s intent on giving them the opportunity to get out of the same claustrophobic town where she grew up .
“ If the girls want to come back and live here , that ’ s fine , ” Delia explained .
“ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to write their own story and invent themselves as they see fit .
Private school might give them access to better colleges , by which I mean better job opportunities or travel opportunities or meeting-different-people opportunities.
” One irony of the hollow middle is that attempts to secure your children ’ s class stability often reproduce debt patterns for the next generation .
Delia ’ s middle-class in-laws are living in a paid-off house in Texas , but Delia ’ s parents , in her words , “ have never made a good @ @ @ @ @ @ @ they found themselves years behind on their mortgage , and that ’ s why Delia and her husband have been forced to take it on .
Her parents have no savings , and Delia and her husband will continue to provide and pay for care for them as they age .
If nothing about their financial situation or America ’ s exorbitant higher education costs changes over the next decade , either Delia and her husband or their children will likely take on large amounts of student debt to pay for college .
@ @ @ @ @ @ @ , wealth and assets reproduce wealth and assets .
For the hollow middle class , debt reproduces debt .
The major difference between the ostensibly middle class and the poor is that one group began life with access to credit and had just enough support and funds to keep accessing it .
Over the months to come , I ’ ll be focusing on different aspects of the hollow middle class for this column : people who ’ ve been unable to uphold the performance of middle-class status in the shadow of Covid-19 @ @ @ @ @ @ @ “ cultural ” middle class but whose wages place them barely above the poverty line ; whose parents immigrated to the US to obtain and pass down middle-class stability but now struggle to sustain what they worked so hard to provide .
I ’ ll be talking to those who feel ambivalent about , shut out from , or trapped in homeownership ; those who are struggling to pay for elder care and child care at the same time ; and others who are now supporting members of their extended family after reaching @ @ @ @ @ @ @ many intersecting and complicated ways to be part of the hollow middle today , and I want to go deep into the economic shifts , governmental policies , and lived experiences that inform them .
The suffering of the housed , the fed , and the employed is not to be equated with the suffering of those facing eviction , hunger , and chronic unemployment .
But if the middle class is the backbone of America , what does it communicate about the state of the nation — psychologically , politically , sociologically @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to support its own weight ?
If savings are shorthand for promise and potential , what does it mean that we have so little of it ?
At what point do we abandon the farce of the stable , secure American middle class and start talking about ways to make life more secure for everyone , up and down the actual income scale ?
The more we insist on obscuring the economic realities of middle-class existence , the harder it is to muster the political and social might to actually confront income inequality @ @ @ @ @ @ @ struggles as personal , and shameful , and our responsibility alone , instead of as symptoms of systemic failure , the result of broken ideals of the past jury-rigged to the present .
“ The walls are closing in , ” Nicole , who lives in South Carolina on $ 65,000 a year with no savings and no support system , told me .
“ The chasm between income and expenses just grows .
I don ’ t know where the system will break .
But it will , if we don ’ @ @ @ @ @ @ @ you ’ d like to share your experience as part of the hollow middle class with The Goods , email annehelenpetersen @ vox.com or fill out this form .

Delia did everything right. She went to college, she got a teaching degree, she found a reliable job, and she got married. She and her husband had two kids. “We followed the traditional path to middle class and economic security,” she told me. “Or so I thought.”
As a teacher in New Jersey, Delia, age 41, makes around $115,000 a year; her husband, who works as a carpenter, makes $45,000. Their $160,000 combined family salary places them firmly in the American middle class, the boundaries of which are considered to be two-thirds of the US median household income on the lowest end and double that same median on the highest, and adjusted for location. (According to the Pew Middle Class Calculator, Delia’s household income places her family in the “middle tier” along with 49 percent of households in the greater tri-state area.)
To most people, $160,000 sounds like a lot of money. “Middle tier” sounds pretty solid. So why does Delia feel so desperate? She’s able to put $150 a month into a retirement account, but the family’s emergency savings account hovers at just $400. Going on vacation has meant juggling costs on several credit cards. “I don’t feel like I’ll ever have a day that I won’t be worried about money,” she said. “I’m resentful of my partner for not making more money, but more resentful of his crappy employer for not paying him more.”
Delia is part of an expanding group of people whose income technically places them within the middle class of American earners but whose expenses — whether for housing, medical costs, debt payments, child care, elder care, or the dozens of other expectations that attend supposed middle-class living — leave them living month to month, with little savings for emergencies or retirement.
Pre-pandemic, middle-class Americans modeled the belief that everything was fine. Unemployment was low; consumer confidence was high; the housing market had “recovered.” In 2019, 95 percent of people in households making over $100,000 a year reported they were “doing okay” financially, a 13 percent increase from 2013. But those positive economic indicators obscured a larger reality.
Forty years ago, the term “middle class” referred to Americans who had successfully obtained a version of the American dream: a steady income from one or two earners, a home, and security for the future. It meant the ability to save and acquire assets. Now, it mostly means the ability to put your bills on autopay and service debt. The stability that once characterized the middle class, that made it such a coveted and aspirational echelon of American existence, has been hollowed out.
It’s difficult to tell if someone’s part of the hollow middle class because they’re still performing all the external markers of middle-classness. Before the pandemic, they were (and largely still are, absent a layoff) buying and leasing cars, purchasing homes, going on vacation, covering their kids’ education and activities. They’re just taking on massive loads of debt to do so.
As journalist and social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has pointed out, it’s very expensive to be poor. It’s also increasingly expensive to be middle class, in part because wages for all but the wealthy have remained stagnant for the past four decades. Most middle-class Americans seem to be making more — getting raises, however small, sometimes billed as “cost of living” increases. Yet these increases largely just keep pace with inflation, not the actual cost of living.
At the heart of this question is the heavy, confounding issue of American middle-class identity and the psychological and social wreckage that comes with losing it
Basic costs are taking up bigger chunks of the monthly middle-class paycheck. In 2019, the middle class was spending about $4,900 a year on out-of-pocket health care costs. More middle- and high-income people than ever are renting, and 27 percent are considered “cost burdened,” paying more than 30 percent of their income on rent, particularly in expensive metro areas. Then there’s the truly astronomical price of child care. In Washington state, for example, which ranks ninth in the US for child care costs, care for an infant and a 4-year-old averages $25,605 a year, or 35.5 percent of the median family income; you can find costs in your state here.
Many middle-class households try to figure out what expenses they have to cover immediately with cash and what can be put on a credit card, financed, or delayed in some fashion. In March 2020, household debt hit $14.3 trillion — the highest it’s been since the 2008 financial crisis, when it reached $12.7 trillion. In the first quarter of 2020, the average loan for a new car was a record-breaking $33,738, with an average monthly payment of $569 (the average payment for a used car is $397).
And then there’s student loan debt, which, for Americans, currently totals $1.56 trillion. Not everyone has student loan debt, but among those who do — many with degrees and jobs that seemingly place them in the middle class — the average debt load is $32,731. The average monthly (pre-pandemic) payment is $393.
Some of these costs have shifted slightly since the beginning of the pandemic; federal student loan payments, for example, have been paused since February. But in January, just under 12 million renters will owe an average of $5,850 of back rent and utilities. And some costs, like child care, are poised to escalate even more once the pandemic is over.
So why don’t middle-class people just curb their spending? At the heart of this question is the heavy, confounding issue of American middle-class identity and the psychological and social wreckage that comes with losing it. “I don’t know that I could shake this identity regardless of how much money I do or don’t have,” Leigh, who makes $80,000 a year and spends all her take-home pay on rent and credit card bills, told me. “It’s ingrained within me.” If you’ve grown up poor and become middle class, there’s great bitterness in rescinding that status; if your parents worked years to enter the middle class, falling from it is often accompanied by great shame.
There’s also the difficulty of significantly shifting your family’s consumption patterns. Once set, many find it impossible to change their own expectations for vacations, activities, and schooling — let alone those of their partners or children. Why? Because the middle class is spectacularly bad at talking honestly about money. Readily available credit facilitates our worst habits, our most convenient lies, our most cowardly selves.
Some say Americans writ large are bad at talking about money, but truly rich people talk about money all the time, as do truly poor people. Kids who grow up poor learn the refrain “we can’t afford it” at an early age; as Aja Romano pointed out in this Vox discussion of all that Hillbilly Elegy gets wrong, “when you’re poor, you know every cent you have in the bank, down to the last penny, and you have already calculated exactly how much gas you can put in your car and how far that gas will get you before you get out of money.”
It’s middle-class people, or people who still cling to middle-class identity even if they’ve risen above it or fallen out of it, who don’t know how to talk about money. They don’t know how to talk about it with their peers or their parents or their children, and oftentimes not even with their partners. Instead, so many of us allow ourselves to default to the vast middle, the typical, the median, the democratic “we” that shows up in television commercials — a place in the American imaginary that’s venerated by politicians and overwritten with narratives of bootstrapping, hard work, and meritocracy.
In truth, the American middle class has become less of an economic classification and more of a mode: a way of feeling, a posture toward the rest of the world, predicated on privilege of place. Which is why it’s so untoward to talk about the economic realities; the rising panic over medical bills exists on a different plane than the ineffable feeling of “normal.”
Normal is defined less by what it is than by what it is not. Put differently, no matter how precarious your middle-class existence might be, it feels essential to distance from or disidentify with the precarity of the poor or working class. You maintain your middle-class identity by defining yourself as not poor, not working class, regardless of your debt load or the ease with which you could descend into financial ruin. So many are so obsessed with defining themselves as not poor that they can’t grapple with the changes in spending habits that would actually prevent them from becoming so.
Solidarity — especially solidarity across classes — has been declining for decades. When the middle class first began to expand in the United States in the mid-20th century, it did so in large part through the work of unions, which advocated for salaries and benefits that allowed millions of workers to afford a down payment and save for the future. There are still hundreds of thousands of union workers in the middle class (teachers, nurses, tradespeople), but much of the solidarity with workers outside your profession, or even your specific workplace, has evaporated.
The American middle class has become less of an economic classification and more of a mode: a way of feeling, a posture toward the rest of the world
What’s more, most politicians have done a spectacularly poor job of framing policy that speaks frankly about class realities. They talk vaguely about expanding the middle class, and single out specific high costs like medical premiums, but when was the last time you heard a politician talk about credit card debt? The less these kinds of problems are talked about, the more individual they feel, as opposed to a reality for millions of Americans.
Delia, for example, is a real person, but Delia’s not her real name; she doesn’t want others knowing her family’s business. She also thinks all her friends and neighbors are in a better financial situation than she is. They don’t ever talk about it, but she thinks they have better rates on their mortgages, more equity in their homes — how else could they drive $60,000 SUVs and put pools in over the summer? But someone on the outside might look at Delia’s life and think something very similar.
That’s how you get the hollow middle: when a bunch of people are terrified of being poor, have no idea how to talk with others about money, and have no political will to advocate for changes that would alter their position.
When I first attempted to describe the condition of much of the middle class today — moderately high income, but with bills and debt that make it difficult to weave a safety net for their families — I wanted a word for it, an evocative term. The term “hollow middle” eventually came, via Twitter, from Carina Wytiaz, but the vast majority of people who responded said that what I was explaining was just, well, being middle class. Tons of debt, tons of bills, very little leftover.
However, the middle class only really started to hollow out over the past 20 years. Back in 1960, the personal savings rate (the percentage of income households were saving after taxes) was 11 percent. In 1990, it was 8.8 percent. By 2000, it had dropped to 4.2 percent, before eventually hitting a nadir of 3.6 percent in 2007. That number grew in the aftermath of the Great Recession, peaking at 12 percent in 2012 before falling again as consumers gained more “confidence” in spending. This is because consumer confidence doesn’t mean more savings; it means more people with access to credit are confident about using it, and low interest rates disincentivize savings.
One irony of the hollow middle is that attempts to secure your children’s class stability often reproduce debt patterns for the next generation
We’ve been normalizing low savings rates at the same time that we’ve become more and more comfortable taking on consumer debt — a symptom, as financial analyst Karen Petrou put it, of “deep economic malaise.” In the early ’80s, the income-to-debt ratio hovered between 0.55 and 0.65, which meant that a household’s overall debt level amounted to between 55 percent and 65 percent of their income after taxes.
The ratio first hit 1.0 in 2003, and rose all the way to 1.24 before the 2007 crash. Now it’s stabilized at just under 1, so a middle-class family making $80,000 has somewhere around $80,000 in debt. Until relatively recently, the majority of that debt would have been mortgage debt. Over the past decade, the proportion has begun to shift toward student loans, auto loans, credit card debt, and medical debt: so-called “bad” debt.
More people are retiring with debt, too — or unable to retire, or coming out of retirement to service debt. In 2016, the median debt for a household headed by someone 65 or older was $31,300, more than four and a half times what it was in 1989. These debts come from mortgages, but also student loans taken out for their children or for themselves when they went back to school, mid-career, during one of the recessions of the 2000s, or credit card debt trying to cover costs when they were out of work.
“The jobs came back after the recession of 2001,” economist Christian Weller, whose research focuses on middle-class savings and retirement, told me. “But the wages never really grew. Benefits were cut, and then people were hit with yet another massive recession in late 2007, and job growth doesn’t really come back until 2010. That’s a long period of a lot of economic pain for a lot of people.”
When the jobs did come back, a lot of them weren’t great. People became employed as gig workers or independent contractors, precarious roles with few benefits and little stability. Those who had gone into debt to get through the Great Recession were now accumulating more debt in order to stay middle class, or to try and provide a middle-class future for their children. More than a decade later, only the top 20 percent of earners have actually recovered from the Great Recession, in part because the percentage of the middle class with appreciating assets — whether in the form of a home or stocks — has continued to decline.
Here, Delia’s story is instructive. Back in 2005, she had her teacher’s job, and her husband had a promising construction company. They were on solid economic footing for the first time and decided to do what a lot of people in that position do: buy a house. The problem with their strategy revealed itself only in hindsight; they bought at the height of the mid-2000s housing bubble. They hung on to their house as long as they could, but by 2012, they were drowning. They ended up shutting down her husband’s business and short-selling the house, leaving them with no equity.
Their home hadn’t been foreclosed on and their credit was still intact, but they suddenly felt seven years behind. They moved in with Delia’s parents, only to discover that they, too, had for years been struggling to pay their mortgage and had taken a bad modification in order to stay in their house. Delia and her husband started covering the mortgage payment, which is now $3,300 a month, and most monthly costs. Eight years later, they’re still there.
Though Delia’s teaching job is steady, her husband is making less than he did when he ran his own company. They’re also paying private school tuition for their two daughters, which takes up a “huge chunk” of their income. They could pull their kids from private school and put them in public, but the kids have made their friends, and Delia’s intent on giving them the opportunity to get out of the same claustrophobic town where she grew up.
“If the girls want to come back and live here, that’s fine,” Delia explained. “But I want them to be able to write their own story and invent themselves as they see fit. Private school might give them access to better colleges, by which I mean better job opportunities or travel opportunities or meeting-different-people opportunities.”
One irony of the hollow middle is that attempts to secure your children’s class stability often reproduce debt patterns for the next generation. Delia’s middle-class in-laws are living in a paid-off house in Texas, but Delia’s parents, in her words, “have never made a good financial decision.”
That’s how they found themselves years behind on their mortgage, and that’s why Delia and her husband have been forced to take it on. Her parents have no savings, and Delia and her husband will continue to provide and pay for care for them as they age. If nothing about their financial situation or America’s exorbitant higher education costs changes over the next decade, either Delia and her husband or their children will likely take on large amounts of student debt to pay for college.
For the top earners in our society, wealth and assets reproduce wealth and assets. For the hollow middle class, debt reproduces debt. The major difference between the ostensibly middle class and the poor is that one group began life with access to credit and had just enough support and funds to keep accessing it.
Over the months to come, I’ll be focusing on different aspects of the hollow middle class for this column: people who’ve been unable to uphold the performance of middle-class status in the shadow of Covid-19; whose education places them in the “cultural” middle class but whose wages place them barely above the poverty line; whose parents immigrated to the US to obtain and pass down middle-class stability but now struggle to sustain what they worked so hard to provide.
I’ll be talking to those who feel ambivalent about, shut out from, or trapped in homeownership; those who are struggling to pay for elder care and child care at the same time; and others who are now supporting members of their extended family after reaching the middle class. There are so many intersecting and complicated ways to be part of the hollow middle today, and I want to go deep into the economic shifts, governmental policies, and lived experiences that inform them.
The suffering of the housed, the fed, and the employed is not to be equated with the suffering of those facing eviction, hunger, and chronic unemployment. But if the middle class is the backbone of America, what does it communicate about the state of the nation — psychologically, politically, sociologically — that the backbone is too weak to support its own weight? If savings are shorthand for promise and potential, what does it mean that we have so little of it? At what point do we abandon the farce of the stable, secure American middle class and start talking about ways to make life more secure for everyone, up and down the actual income scale?
The more we insist on obscuring the economic realities of middle-class existence, the harder it is to muster the political and social might to actually confront income inequality. We continue to think of our struggles as personal, and shameful, and our responsibility alone, instead of as symptoms of systemic failure, the result of broken ideals of the past jury-rigged to the present.
“The walls are closing in,” Nicole, who lives in South Carolina on $65,000 a year with no savings and no support system, told me. “The chasm between income and expenses just grows. I don’t know where the system will break. But it will, if we don’t do something about it.”
If you’d like to share your experience as part of the hollow middle class with The Goods, email annehelenpetersen@vox.com or fill out this form.


vox--2020-12-15--This week in TikTok: When Walmart and Amazon employees go viral

Hello from The Goods ’ twice-weekly newsletter !
On Tuesdays , internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what ’ s been going on in the world of TikTok .
Is there something you want to see more of ?
Less of ?
Different of ?
Email rebecca.jennings @ vox.com , and subscribe to The Goods ’ newsletter here .
There ’ s a TikTok that ’ s stuck with me ever since I saw it earlier this fall .
It ’ s of a Walmart employee named Shana announcing all the racist and @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on the job over the store microphone , calling out her coworkers by name .
She ended with , “ I fucking quit.
” Shana later updated the nearly 35 million people who watched her video , saying that , yes , her speech was actually broadcast throughout the store in Lubbock , Texas ( there ’ s video proof ) and that as she walked out of the store she was met with tons of applause .
A few people told her they ’ d never shop at Walmart again .
It @ @ @ @ @ @ @ think about when reporter Michael Waters broke the news this week that the company is now trying to turn 500 of its employees into social media influencers who proselytize about Walmart ’ s unique greatness .
The program is called Spotlight and is only open to salaried , not hourly , employees , meaning that the vast majority of its 2.2 million workers are ineligible .
Popular posts are rewarded with cash bonuses .
Retail employees from megachains like Sephora , Chipotle , and Starbucks have been going viral on TikTok since the @ @ @ @ @ @ @ most part , companies have tried to shut it down .
A Panera employee was fired for her video “ exposing ” how its mac and cheese was prepared ; a Chik-fil-A worker was let go for her viral video on menu hacks .
Even when the content is inarguably innocuous — or positive !
— big brands have bristled at the idea of their image being out of their control ; just ask the Sherwin-Williams retail worker who was reportedly fired for simply sharing videos of how he mixed paint .
The @ @ @ @ @ @ @ rather ethically dubious influencer program is that it doesn ’ t appear to actually work : The two Walmart influencers Waters interviewed in his story have about 1,500 and 300 Instagram followers , respectively .
Other brands that have attempted to turn their workers into stars have only succeeded when they chose TikTokers who had already built up massive followings , as was the case with Dunkin ’ Donuts ’ “ Crew Ambassadors ” program .
( Consider Amazon ’ s laughable Twitter army of warehouse workers who flooded the site with pro-Amazon @ @ @ @ @ @ @ the golden rule of social media authenticity suggests , the videos that travel the furthest are the ones that portray employees ’ actual experiences .
One of the first videos I saw when I opened the app this week was of a woman working silently and quickly in what appeared to be an Amazon fulfillment center .
Her captions begged viewers to shop local instead , arguing that the company ’ s coronavirus safety measures are “ a joke , ” that its productivity tracking is “ inhumane , ” and that it @ @ @ @ @ @ @ to unionize .
In other videos , she said that she ’ d gotten two yeast infections in two months because she was so afraid of using the bathroom and lowering her productivity rates , and that the company has minimized the rising injuries among warehouse workers , especially during the peak holiday season .
“ Please support businesses who care about their employees ’ health and well-being , ” she wrote .
It ’ s clear why brands like Walmart are trying to take more ownership of employees ’ social media content @ @ @ @ @ @ @ effects of videos like this , ones that centralize the lived experiences of the lowest-ranking workers rather than burnishing a company ’ s image .
The problem , of course , is that this amounts to sponsored content , and nobody wants to watch that .
Hearing Target employees tell you about the brand ’ s alleged practice of “ letting people steal ” from them until the total amount of stolen goods is equal to grand larceny is a lot more interesting than watching a Walmart worker show you his favorite Funko @ @ @ @ @ @ @ TikTok is a platform driven by algorithmic popularity , the messy videos — the ones where employees leak secrets , quit on camera , or expose union suppression — will be the ones we ’ re most likely to see .
Of course , if Walmart manages to obtain a large enough stake in TikTok , all of this may be moot , and the platform could be reduced to an infinite scroll of creepily jubilant store greeters being forced to read from a corporate PR-approved script .
Until then , retail workers @ @ @ @ @ @ @ on .
• Oh , look , another TikTok-inspired Facebook app !
• The crowdsourced Ratatouille musical is going IRL on January 1 , when the production company Seaview hosts the digital event to benefit the Actors Fund .
It ’ s unclear how the dozens of artists who contributed music , choreography , graphic design , costumes , and even puppeteering to the musical as it existed on TikTok will be credited or compensated .
• Atlanta is now home to two all-Black TikTok creator mansions , and in the process is @ @ @ @ @ @ @ .
• TikTok stars are joining venture capital firms and investing in startups because they ’ re part of the generation who grew up on Shark Tank .
• This is a really honest depiction of how standup comics are succeeding on TikTok , even when they know their content is a little hacky — it ’ s because that ’ s what works !
• Welcome to SelenaTok , the place to study up on Selena ’ s life and music before watching the new Netflix series .
• Do not file @ @ @ @ @ @ @ even , or do anything else on this list of the worst TikTok health trends of the year .
Barely anyone in college turns their cameras on during Zoom lectures , but these students surprised their professor by showing their faces all at once .
Spoiler : The professor cried , and so did I .

Hello from The Goods’ twice-weekly newsletter! On Tuesdays, internet culture reporter Rebecca Jennings uses this space to update you all on what’s been going on in the world of TikTok. Is there something you want to see more of? Less of? Different of? Email rebecca.jennings@vox.com, and subscribe to The Goods’ newsletter here.
There’s a TikTok that’s stuck with me ever since I saw it earlier this fall. It’s of a Walmart employee named Shana announcing all the racist and sexist behavior she witnessed during her time on the job over the store microphone, calling out her coworkers by name. She ended with, “I fucking quit.”
Shana later updated the nearly 35 million people who watched her video, saying that, yes, her speech was actually broadcast throughout the store in Lubbock, Texas (there’s video proof) and that as she walked out of the store she was met with tons of applause. A few people told her they’d never shop at Walmart again.
It’s the only thing I could think about when reporter Michael Waters broke the news this week that the company is now trying to turn 500 of its employees into social media influencers who proselytize about Walmart’s unique greatness. The program is called Spotlight and is only open to salaried, not hourly, employees, meaning that the vast majority of its 2.2 million workers are ineligible. Popular posts are rewarded with cash bonuses.
Retail employees from megachains like Sephora, Chipotle, and Starbucks have been going viral on TikTok since the app has existed, and for the most part, companies have tried to shut it down. A Panera employee was fired for her video “exposing” how its mac and cheese was prepared; a Chik-fil-A worker was let go for her viral video on menu hacks. Even when the content is inarguably innocuous — or positive! — big brands have bristled at the idea of their image being out of their control; just ask the Sherwin-Williams retail worker who was reportedly fired for simply sharing videos of how he mixed paint.
The only saving grace to Walmart’s rather ethically dubious influencer program is that it doesn’t appear to actually work: The two Walmart influencers Waters interviewed in his story have about 1,500 and 300 Instagram followers, respectively. Other brands that have attempted to turn their workers into stars have only succeeded when they chose TikTokers who had already built up massive followings, as was the case with Dunkin’ Donuts’ “Crew Ambassadors” program. (Consider Amazon’s laughable Twitter army of warehouse workers who flooded the site with pro-Amazon sentiments in 2019.)
But as the golden rule of social media authenticity suggests, the videos that travel the furthest are the ones that portray employees’ actual experiences. One of the first videos I saw when I opened the app this week was of a woman working silently and quickly in what appeared to be an Amazon fulfillment center.
Her captions begged viewers to shop local instead, arguing that the company’s coronavirus safety measures are “a joke,” that its productivity tracking is “inhumane,” and that it spies on and retaliates against workers attempting to unionize. In other videos, she said that she’d gotten two yeast infections in two months because she was so afraid of using the bathroom and lowering her productivity rates, and that the company has minimized the rising injuries among warehouse workers, especially during the peak holiday season. “Please support businesses who care about their employees’ health and well-being,” she wrote.
It’s clear why brands like Walmart are trying to take more ownership of employees’ social media content: They want to cancel out the effects of videos like this, ones that centralize the lived experiences of the lowest-ranking workers rather than burnishing a company’s image.
The problem, of course, is that this amounts to sponsored content, and nobody wants to watch that. Hearing Target employees tell you about the brand’s alleged practice of “letting people steal” from them until the total amount of stolen goods is equal to grand larceny is a lot more interesting than watching a Walmart worker show you his favorite Funko Pop dolls. And as long as TikTok is a platform driven by algorithmic popularity, the messy videos — the ones where employees leak secrets, quit on camera, or expose union suppression — will be the ones we’re most likely to see.
Of course, if Walmart manages to obtain a large enough stake in TikTok, all of this may be moot, and the platform could be reduced to an infinite scroll of creepily jubilant store greeters being forced to read from a corporate PR-approved script. Until then, retail workers of the world: Keep your cameras on.
TikTok in the news
Oh, look, another TikTok-inspired Facebook app!
The crowdsourced Ratatouille musical is going IRL on January 1, when the production company Seaview hosts the digital event to benefit the Actors Fund. It’s unclear how the dozens of artists who contributed music, choreography, graphic design, costumes, and even puppeteering to the musical as it existed on TikTok will be credited or compensated.
Atlanta is now home to two all-Black TikTok creator mansions, and in the process is becoming the new influencer capital of America.
TikTok stars are joining venture capital firms and investing in startups because they’re part of the generation who grew up on Shark Tank.
This is a really honest depiction of how standup comics are succeeding on TikTok, even when they know their content is a little hacky — it’s because that’s what works!
Welcome to SelenaTok, the place to study up on Selena’s life and music before watching the new Netflix series.
Do not file your teeth to make them look more even, or do anything else on this list of the worst TikTok health trends of the year.
One Last Thing
Barely anyone in college turns their cameras on during Zoom lectures, but these students surprised their professor by showing their faces all at once. Spoiler: The professor cried, and so did I.