Review: Class by Paul Fussell
There are three key pitfalls to reading Paul Fussell’s Class: A Guide Through the American Status System.
Readers fail to realize that, like George Carlin, Fussell is both joking and not joking.
Readers assume that the culturally-accepted status symbols of 1983 hold true today.
Paul Fussell assumes he and his cohort are rebelling against the American class system instead of replacing its status markers.
Fussell does the Steven Covey thing in which the core concept is about 15% of the book and the rest is examples to solidify the idea. The examples have started to slough into anachronism, so in 2024 they offer a fun window into what the 80s were like for day-to-day people. Remember that in 1983, the Baby Boomers were between 23 and 40, the Silent Generation were between 41 and 58, and the G.I. Generation were between 59 and 82. Fussell himself was in the G.I. Generation, having deployed in France in the last year of the European Theater, but he’s a self-described iconoclast in a rather conformist generation. We’ll get to generations.
The useful core of the book is a taxonomy of American classes and their motivations. Fussell splits the country into nine classes:
Top out-of-sight
Upper
Upper-middle
Middle
High proletarian
Mid proletarian
Low proletarian
Destitute
Bottom out-of-sight
Note that class has little to do with money. Mark Zuckerberg is upper-middle-class because he attended Phillips Exeter but did not inherit his billions. Taylor Swift is middle-class because she comes from nowhere and remains obsessed with status. Donald Trump is high proletarian because he spends his money like someone who’s never had money in his life.
Instead, class is a function of taste, esteem, and power—none of which can be bought.
Keep in mind that status games are inevitable—insofar as humans are social animals, we conceive of ourselves in the context of others. We by necessity show other people how we fit in and distinguish ourselves through status signals—even refusing to play the game is simply another strategy.
W. David Marx describes a variety of status signals in his book Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. The most obvious status signal is conspicuous consumption: luxury goods, ostentatious fashion, flagrant waste. It’s fast, it’s straightforward, and it imparts your high-status glow on even the dimmest bulbs in town.
But if the money lasts for generations, subtler strategies emerge. Flaunt worn-out heirlooms to show the longevity of your wealth. Wear plain clothing to mock the nouveau riche and evade the pitchforks. And even flout the rules of status, demonstrating that you’re so high-status that it doesn’t matter how you dress or act.
However, even these “stealth wealth” status symbols can be emulated by people with more education than wealth. Even if you don’t have old money, you can show off education and “good taste” by replicating the old money look with a helping of artsy flair.
But for people with neither literal nor cultural capital, Marx describes simpler and cheaper status signals in reach of everyone. You can indulge in kitsch—artifacts with the airs of high art without the price or complexity of high art—or in “flash”—artifacts with the airs of conspicuous consumption at a discount.
Different classes reach for different status signals. Arguably, the status signals you and your community reach for define your class position.
The top three classes are defined by inheritance—of property, of capital, of breeding and finishing. They act like they have nothing to prove, and compete over who cares least about status competition. The highest-status people in the United States are so high-status you don’t see them. Their surname may be recognizable, but they’re elsewhere. Staff manage their businesses, their homes, and their capital. These are the billionaires you don’t hear about. What you think is the top of the status ladder is simply the upper class you see. Failsons, owners of seventeen McDonald’s franchises, and influencers with unclear incomes.
The “elites” of America are really the upper-middle class. They’re the professional class, the creative class, the people who make money so they can work harder so they can make more money. This is the class that urban Americans aspire to, because they nail the American ideals of technical expertise, cosmopolitanism, and working for your money. In the early ‘80s, at the tail end of an American Awakening, these elites would be doctors, lawyers, and professors, spending impossible sums on suits that looked like nothing. In the mid ‘20s, as we approach the apotheosis of an American Crisis, these elites have become doctors, tech workers, and financial analysts, buying shockingly expensive grey T-shirts. One could keep 80% of the script of American Psycho while swapping New York for San Francisco, the suits for Patagonia Cotopaxi vests, and 1987 for 2024.
It’s the middle class that has changed the most since Fussell wrote this book forty years ago. They’re still motivated by pervasive status panic, but the “high-status” ideal they’re chasing has changed from the echoes of a late ‘50s High to the echoes of a late ‘90s Unraveling. In Fussell’s day, they clung to large corporations, terrified of losing their jobs. They lived in suburban developments, obsessed with living life correctly and fitting in. The women treasured friendliness, and the men sought anything they could call “executive.” People advertising their own lives in exchange for a crumb of status.
In the mid 2020s, the middle class scramble from gig to gig, terrified of falling behind in their careers. They’re moving into city centers with jobs and lattes, obsessed with optimizing their lives and networking well. The women treasure having the correct politics, and both men and women seek anything they can call “creative.” People posting about their own lives in exchange for a crumb of engagement.
Again, class has little to do with money. Even the most broke barista is middle class insofar as they dream of becoming an artist.
In 2008, software engineer and blogger Curtis Yarvin posted an “Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives,” a fourteen-part manifesto that could have been much shorter. In it, he provides a compelling model of ideological drift in the West, noting that Harvard, Yale, the New York Times, and the Democratic National Committee moved in ideological lockstep, while establishment conservatives consistently trailed one nostalgia cycle behind.
Less scrupulous talking heads call this the “Deep State,” but Yarvin was marginally smarter—he noted that no conspiracy was necessary to make the West increasingly progressive over time. Instead, the ideological lockstep came from the fact that academics, journalists, pop artists, and technocrats attend the same schools, read the same books, hang out in the same places, and believe in the same gospel of humanist, Whiggish progress.
Yarvin calls this phenomenon the Cathedral: a spiral in which educated liberals converge on ideas that justify having more educated liberals. His prescription is to “retire” all government employees (R.A.G.E.), install a “king,” and induce an institutional reset that the country hasn’t seen since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There will still be elites, but they should not be in the Cathedral.
Geopolitical analyst George Friedman might refer to this Cathedral as technocracy: the institutional model that was built under Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win The War. As described in his book The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond, the idea behind technocracy was that staffing a government based on documented expertise (as opposed to ideology) would enable the state capacity necessary to win an industrial war. It worked on both the Nazis and the Soviets. The problem is that “only an expert can deal with the problem” became an ideology unto itself, with its adherent experts already in the position to justify, fund, and empower yet more experts. Friedman expects the late ’20s will force an FDR-scale reset of the American government’s role and staff. There will still be elites, but they might not be technocrats.
The proletarian classes operate on a slightly separate class ladder than the upper four classes. Today, we’d consider the split between upper and middle classes versus the proletarian classes as “white collar versus blue collar” or “urban versus rural.” I’d split the difference based on whether one went to college. Again, class has little to do with money—one can make a lot of money without having (or wanting) a lick of culture. Fussell describes the proletarian experience as bondage “to monetary policy, rip-off advertising, crazes and delusions, mass low culture, fast foods, consumer schlock.”
High Proles are the class that rural Americans aspire to, because they nail the American ideals of entrepreneurial gumption, straightforwardness, and working for your money. These are the people who buy trucks that cost more than BMWs and spend literally thousands of dollars on guns. Many of them afford this “being their own bosses”—plumbers, machinists, traveling nursing aides. By contrast, Fussell categorizes people with less autonomy at work—linemen, cops, cosmetologists—as middle proles, and people with inconsistent and/or seasonal work as low proles. The distinction between different levels of proletarian isn’t clear to me because I’m not in that milieu. (Fussell speaks little of the destitute and bottom out-of-sight classes. Class is still somewhat about money, and Fussell didn’t have any wry jokes to make about the desperately poor.)
Crucially, rural proletarians are the people who voted for Trump, got consumed by QAnon, and post minion memes on Facebook. At their most secure, they scoff at the overeducated babbling of hoity-toity liberals. At their least secure, they seethe over the power and influence of distant coastal elites who parade their obvious yet inscrutable superiority over “real” Americans. A clique—that’s who runs things. Not them. Not yet.
On 15 July 2024, Sean O’Brien, General President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters in America, spoke on the Republic National Convention primetime slot, offering to parley with Republican politicians in an archetypal Wide Boston Man’s accent. He told the crowd that his mere presence on stage offended both the left and the right, but that he didn’t care. He still had his Commercial Driver’s License. Should he be ousted as a union leader, he would still be a teamster—he’s still more comfortable in a big rig than in his baggy suit and lopsided tie.
From an economic standpoint, the Democrats are still the party of proletarians—spend more on the poor, support unions, raise taxes on the rich. But class isn’t about money. In matters of culture, of taste, of caste, the Democratic Party is the upper-middle class. It uses ten-dollar words, assumes a cosmopolitan sensibility, and recoils at crudeness of all kinds. For Kamala Harris (or rather, her staff), it makes sense to embody the ironic kitsch-turned-art sensibilities of Charli XCX’s brat. But to a straightforward Morgan Wallen fan, the strobing beat of “Everything is romantic” is disorienting and ugly.
The redistributive, natalist, and protectionist populism outlined by Lyndon LaRouche and F. William Engdahl, popularized by Donald Trump, coalesced by think tanks like American Compass, and embodied by Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance is more adapted to the economic and social mores of the American working class than the Democratic Party platform. Marx, like so many modern economists, mistakenly assumed that workers were motivated by entirely material needs. Instead, American workers are just as much motivated by small-town cultural conservatism and a reflexive distaste of yuppies trying to correct their tastes in alcohol, diesel, and bawdy jokes. Trump didn’t appeal to this demographic only because of “economic anxiety.” He was like them.
Marx can’t explain Trump. Fussell can.
The worst-aging chapter of Fussell’s book is the last, describing himself and people like him within a category “X”—expatriates from the American class system, dressing down everywhere, seeking self-directed employment and growth, and engaging with “good” and “bad” taste with ironic remove. In his day, at the turning point between an outgoing Awakening and an incoming Unraveling, at the zenith of the G.I. Generation’s cultural influence, Fussell’s X cohort was countercultural. The “Xs” in 1983, specifically if they were older that 20, were the only people driving to a posh dinner in a deliberately ratty Saab, wearing an out-of-fashion suit with ratty tennis shoes, deriding the venue as a K-mart rendition of van der Rohe, and leaving early.
But in 2024, on the other side of the American saeculum, Fussell’s account of category X reads like Generation X.
William Strauss and Neil Howe’s generational theory, as described in books like The Fourth Turning is Here, is woo-woo for a sociological model, but its underlying mechanism is children making an equal and opposite reaction to their parents while forgetting the lessons of their grandparents. In 1983, the idealistic individualism and spiritualism of the Baby Boomers was still a youth movement maturing into the yuppie phenomenon and megachurch boom. The culture of adults was defined by the idealistic collectivism of the G.I. Generation and the grey-wool-suit pragmatism of the Silent Generation. The core of American culture was still extremely conformist. Not everyone went along with it—Paul Fussell was contemporary with writers like Norman Mailer, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs—but as Fussell himself notes in Class, the dissenters were few.
In 2024, everyone dresses down. Every upscale city has nice delicatessens, liquor stores with niche brands, and restaurants with health-conscious fusion foods. The middle-class ideal strives to the creative-class self-direction of Fussell’s X cohort, albeit with less of the intelligence and chutzpah required to actually counter cultural norms.
Strauss and Howe show the path from there to here—in the early ‘80s, Paul Fussell and his Beat-era contemporaries were the cool uncles and aunts for a disillusioned “latchkey” generation. These kids saw their little snippet of the class hierarchy, found it lacking despite all the hype, and found that Uncle Paul with his down vest and Coltrane records agreed. These latchkey kids found that the dissonant music, ratty clothes, and well-placed coarseness of their X forebears hit the exact note of cynical counterculture that offended their elders and filled a gaping hole in American culture. And thus the cultural vocabulary of Gen X became the model of counterculture.
But if Nirvana, Dr. Dre, Beavis and Butthead, and Banksy are now the things parents like, how do the youth of 2024 rebel?
The “countercultural” move now is to wear a suit to work, to have kids early, to go to Latin mass, to reject individualism in the name of blood-and-spirit cohesion. This is the dissident right, the reactionary feminists, and the alt-right before them. Ben Shapiro is right to call conservatism the “new punk rock.” Whereas the social progressivism of the left has waned from ‘80s counterculture to ‘00s mainstreaming to an exhausted ‘20s establishment party line, the right has found that—paradoxically—reaching for midcentury respectability freaks their elders out and fills a gaping hole in American culture.
Paul Fussell died in 2012, right as the American saeculum tipped into crisis. He didn’t see the insights of his funny little book get inverted. No matter—the core structure holds just fine.