Chad meme in 1983? Also, why does my brain keep telling me these are John McCain and Donald Trump?Ī friend urges me to think of these not as 'rich/successful people' vs.

The section on the physiognomy of different classes has to be a joke, right? But then how did he come up with the Virgin vs. It’s impossible to tell when Fussell is serious vs. They have a certain kind of freedom, in that they don't have status anxiety and do what they want. Medium and low proles are more typical factory workers. High proles are skilled craftspeople like plumbers. Their yards and houses are maintained with a sort of 'someone who could change my status might be watching, better make a good impression' The middle middle and lower middle classes are marked by status anxiety. Jeff Bezos, for all his billions, is only upper-middle-class at best. The middle classes are salaried professionals, starting with the upper-middle class. The people you think of as rich and famous - tech billionaires, celebrities, whatever - aren't upper class. But I notice that everyone I know has them, and that people spend a completely unnecessary amount of time talking about how they have them and how they could never ever understand someone who has the opposite opinion, and it starts to feel kind of suspicious.Ĭlass separates people into three social classes with various subclasses. The meat of Class is ~200 pages of rankings like these, delivered authoritatively, and in almost Talmudic dialogueĪll of these preferences and opinions seem totally reasonable on their own. What is one to make of paragraphs like:Īnyone imagining that just any sort of flowers can be presented in the front of a house without status jeopardy would be wrong. Sometimes it's hard to know whether to take him seriously. He says he prefers the term ' caste system'. He believes America has one of the most hypertrophied class systems in the world, that its formal equality has left a niche that an informal class system expanded to fill - and expanded, and expanded, until it surpassed the more-legible systems of Europe and became its own sort of homegrown monstrosity. Scott Alexander: Book Review: Paul Fussell On Class (a 1983 book).

Fussell on class