The Comfort Class

Recently, I accidentally overdrew my checking account. That hadn’t happened to me in years—the last time was in 2008, when I was running a small business with no safety net in the middle of a financial crisis. Back then, an overdrawn account meant eating canned soup and borrowing cash from friends only slightly better off than me. This time, I didn’t need to worry—I was able to move money from a different account. And yet all the old feelings—heart palpitations, the seizure of reason in my brain—came right back again.

I have one of those wearable devices that monitors my heart rate, sleep quality, activity level, and calories burned. Mine is called an Oura ring, and at the end of the day, it told me what I already knew: I had been “unusually stressed.” When this happens, the device asks you to log the source of your stress. I scrolled through the wide array of options—diarrhea, difficulty concentrating, erectile dysfunction, emergency contraceptives. I could not find “financial issues,” or anything remotely related to money, listed.

According to a poll from the American Psychiatric Association, financial issues are the No. 1 cause of anxiety for Americans: 58 percent say they are very or somewhat anxious about money. How, I wondered, was it possible that this had not occurred to a single engineer at Oura?

For all of the racial, gender, and sexual reckonings that America has undergone over the past decade, we have yet to confront the persistent blindness and stigma around class. When people struggle to understand the backlash against elite universities, or the Democrats’ loss of working-class voters, or the fact that more and more Americans are turning away from mainstream media, this is why.

America is not just suffering from a wealth gap; America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a “comfort class.” These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.

Take, for instance, those lawmakers desperately workshopping messages to working-class folks: More than half of congressional representatives are millionaires. In academia, universities are steered by college presidents—many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year—and governed by boards of trustees made up largely of multimillionaires, corporate CEOs, and multimillionaire corporate CEOs. (I know because I serve on one of these boards.) Once, a working-class college dropout like Jimmy Breslin could stumble into a newsroom and go on to win the Pulitzer Prize; today, there’s a vanishingly small chance he’d make it past security. A 2018 survey of elite newsrooms found that 65 percent of summer interns had attended top-tier colleges.

College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. Seventy percent of people who have at least one parent with a bachelor’s degree also have a bachelor’s degree themselves. These graduates out-earn and hold more wealth than their first-generation college peers. At elite schools, about one in seven students come from families in the top 1 percent of earners. Graduates of elite colleges comprise the majority of what a study in Nature labeled “extraordinary achievers”: elected officials, Fortune 500 CEOs, Forbes’s “most powerful,” and best-selling authors.

What we have is a compounded problem, in which people with generational wealth pull the levers on a society that they don’t understand. Whether corporate policies or social welfare or college financial aid, nearly every aspect of society has been designed by people unfamiliar with not only the experience of living in poverty but the experience of living paycheck to paycheck—a circumstance that, Bank of America data shows, a quarter of Americans know well.

The dissonance between the way the powerful think and how the rest of America lives is creating a lot of chaos. It can be seen in the rejection of DEI and “woke-ism”—which is about racism, yes, but also about the imposition of the social mores of an elite class. It can be seen above all in the rise of Donald Trump, who won again in part because he—unlike Democrats—didn’t dismiss the “vibecession” but exploited it by addressing what people were feeling: stressed about the prices of eggs.

These phenomena might not be rational. But anxiety isn’t rational. Studies have found that working through a challenging financial time can affect one’s brain as much as missing an entire night’s sleep, or a loss of 13 IQ points. Financial anxiety is linked with higher rates of depression and psychological distress, which can manifest in physical health issues such as heart disease and reduced immune response. The feeling of scarcity can also affect people’s ability to make sound decisions and retain information—not helpful when you can’t afford the late fee on a bill. In short, the haves are literally in a different head space than the have-nots.

Exacerbating this problem is widespread class dysmorphia. One reason so many well-off Americans feel capable of opining about less well-off Americans is because they don’t realize that they are, in fact, well-off in the first place. The explosion of the American billionaire class—from 272 individuals in 2001 to 813 in 2024, according to Forbes—has made millionaires feel relatively poor. There are more of them too. The number of Americans worth $30 million or more grew by 7.5 percent in 2023 alone. And still, according to a survey of millionaires done that year, two-thirds of them did not consider themselves wealthy.

Here’s the broader situation: 30 percent of American households are classified by Pew as low income, and 19 percent are upper income. And yet a 2024 Gallup survey found that only 12 percent of Americans identified themselves as “lower class” and just 2 percent as “upper class.” In short: No one wants to be perceived as poor, and no one rich ever feels rich enough.

As a result, the very term middle class has become a meaningless catchall for a disparate range of lived financial experiences. No wonder so much policy and rhetoric geared toward this group fails to stick. Who are these policies actually for? And what theoretical problems do they aim to address? Those of the third-generation college-educated social worker, whose parents helped her with a down payment on a house? Or those of the first-gen woman with student loans who holds the same job and lives in a rental apartment? Technically they earn the same wage and both likely see themselves as middle class, but they have extremely different lives because only one is a member of the comfort class.

Members of the comfort class are not necessarily wealthy. Perhaps one day they will earn or inherit sums that will put them in that category. But wealth is not the marker of the comfort class. Security is. An emergency expense—say a $1,200 medical bill—would send most Americans into a fiscal tailspin; for the comfort class, a text to Mom and Dad can render “emergencies” nonexistent.

This helps explain why the comfort class tends to vote differently. Someone who feels they don’t fundamentally need to worry about money if things go south will be more willing to vote on their values—issues like democratic norms or reproductive rights—than someone whose week-to-week concern is how inflation affects her grocery budget.

Many things drove voters to Trump, including xenophobia, transphobia, and racism. But the feeling that the Democratic Party had been hijacked by the comfort class was one of them. I recently saw—and admittedly laughed at—a meme showing a group of women from The Handmaid’s Tale. The text read: “I know, I know, but I thought he would bring down the price of eggs.”

To many Americans, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.

Even when Americans of different classes are in close proximity, they tend to talk past one another. I still remember, my freshman year of college, coming back to my dorm to discover that my roommate had eaten the leftovers I’d saved from dinner the night before. I flew into a rage, and she had no idea why. She came from a household where leftovers were disposable. From her perspective, all she’d done was have a harmless drunken snack. From my perspective, she’d eaten my next meal, and I couldn’t afford another one.

I move in circles now where everyone’s zip code and alma mater alludes to a homogeneity of experience, but when I start discussing policy or politics with people—be they on the left or the right—I often feel that invisible gap yawn between us.

Just the other day, in honor of Indie Bookstore Day, I was asked to share a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. But I did not have a childhood memory of an independent bookstore. I grew up going to the library because there was no bookstore—independent or otherwise—in my blue-collar Brooklyn neighborhood. I didn’t go to a bookstore until I was a teenager, roaming Manhattan with my friends. For a moment, I felt embarrassed. But then I remembered how much unexamined presumption was behind the question. Most authors come from the comfort class, raised in homes full of books in quaint neighborhoods with local bookstores.

That’s a harmless example. But in the past eight weeks, life for working-class Americans has deteriorated in real ways. Millions of senior citizens are nail-biting about their Social Security benefits. People are worried for their jobs. The costs of eggs, orange juice, and utilities are on the rise. Mortgages and medical bills need to be paid. Rents will be due. Blood pressures will spike; judgments will be clouded; debts will no doubt be incurred. And the pundits and politicians, on all sides, will watch it from a safe, comfortable distance.