There is no working class in America; there is only a Striver Catechism, recited on schedule by men whose own careers were made on the wealth the catechism is recited to protect. In The Wall Street Journal this week, Andy Kessler — Who’s ‘Working Class’ Anymore?’ — argues that “class” is political spin, that Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders use it to gin up class warfare, that Americans are “temporarily embarrassed capitalists” the way John Steinbeck is reported to have said in 1960, and that the politics of envy should be ignored because hard work, not class, accounts for the Pew-documented rise of the upper-middle class from 10 percent of families in 1979 to 31 percent today. Kessler is paid to recite this. The question is who is paying, and what they want bought.
The damning specific sits at the bottom of the column, in the part Mr. Kessler writes about himself. Bell Labs, where he designed chips. PaineWebber and Morgan Stanley, where he sold them to clients. Velocity Capital, the hedge fund he founded. The Wall Street Journal op-ed page, where he now pronounces the working class a category error. He is, by his own self-description, the upper-middle class he claims is no longer worth naming. The class he embodies — call it the apologist class — is the well-paid opinion-maker paid to deny the category exists. The mechanism is dull and constant: when extraction is the dominant fact of the period, somebody has to rename it upward mobility, and the somebody is the columnist who works eighty hours a week for a byline that doesn’t dilute the wealth.
The catechism is older than Mr. Kessler. Each time redistributive politics gains ground, the editorial pages of the wealthy insist class is envy, the wealthy are strivers, and the upper-middle growth statistics prove the rest. The catechism does not need to be true. It needs to be recited on schedule. The schedule is the midterms.
The serial catalogue is well-documented. In 1984, Reagan’s “Morning in America” advertisements sold the same story with different words. In 1992, Ross Perot divided Americans into “lazy bucks” and “earned bucks” — the catechism with the channel changed. In 2004, the Bush White House marketed the “Ownership Society” to the same clientele. In 2012, Mitt Romney explained to a $50,000-a-plate fundraiser that 47 percent of Americans were government dependents who would never “take responsibility for their lives” — the catechism’s first draft with the byline attached. Through the Sanders, Warren, Ocasio-Cortez and now Mamdani candidacies, the Wall Street Journal editorial page has run the catechism, same form, same page, same employer. The column is not analysis. It is a standing operating procedure.
The op-ed page has done its share of the work. The Wall Street Journal has spent four decades defending the carried interest loophole, the tax provision that lets hedge fund managers pay roughly half the income-tax rate of their secretaries. David Stockman, Reagan’s OMB director, conceded in William Greider’s 1981 Atlantic profile that supply-side was, in his own phrase, “a Trojan horse” to bring down the top marginal rate — and the Journal’s op-ed page spent the next thirty years calling that confession heresy. Larry Kudlow built a two-decade CNBC career defending low capital-gains rates and deficit-financed tax cuts as if they were the same policy. Stephen Moore earned his keep at the Club for Growth and the Heritage Foundation defending the carried interest loophole by name, before co-writing “Trumponomics” to defend the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act — the law whose 20 percent pass-through deduction, sold as small-business relief, sent its largest checks to the top one percent. The 2018 share-buyback boom — hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate repurchases by S&P 500 companies — was defended on the same page as “returning capital to workers,” even though the workers did not receive any of the capital. The estate tax was rebranded the “Death Tax” on the same page. Kimbal Musk, cited in Mr. Kessler’s column, calls the resentment of the wealthy “wealthism” — a coinage that, like every other coinage on this list, exists to make the resenters sound pathological and the wealthy sound scolded. The Burning Man tickets, $775 to $3,000 plus tax, are the price of entry to the “decommodification” utopia that requires the very wealth it pretends to dissolve.
The Pew figure Mr. Kessler wields is a definition trick. Pew defines upper-middle as a family of two earning between $109,000 and $326,000 — a band so wide it fits a schoolteacher and a junior hedge-fund partner into the same box and calls them both upper-middle. The 31 percent is a statistical artifact; the $326,000 number is the principal’s home address.
One notices what is missing. Mr. Kessler cites a Mamdani line about “fair share” parks and libraries, and an Ocasio-Cortez line about “working-class-centered politics,” and a Rahm Emanuel line about socialists repelling working people, and a Charles Hugh Smith ten-class list, and a John Steinbeck 1960 Esquire line about “temporarily embarrassed” capitalists — a forest of other people’s words. Nowhere in the column does Mr. Kessler name his own class interest. He treats Steinbeck’s wisecrack as if it were settled science. He names AOC and Mamdani by tag, three times in eight hundred words. He names Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as “socialist fear-mongers” without ever naming the editorial page he is writing on, the ownership structure of the company that prints it, or the household income of the readership that subscribes. The politician is named; the columnist is anonymous; the class he represents is invisible.
I won’t mention that one of Mr. Kessler’s books is titled Wall Street Meat; titles, however, are confessions disguised as choices. I won’t mention that the man telling you class doesn’t exist is the man whose career is a class — Bell Labs to PaineWebber to Morgan Stanley to a hedge fund to the column where the catechism has been recited on schedule since before he filed his first 13-F. The man telling you class doesn’t exist is the man whose career is a class. Don’t change the subject, dear.
The Striver Catechist ends his column by invoking Elon Musk sleeping under his desk and Kimbal Musk explaining “wealthism” at Burning Man. The Striver Catechist defends a $2,000 week in the desert as evidence that hard work pays, and the two men he names as authorities on the matter are brothers of a man whose net worth has, on Forbes’ own accounting, exceeded three hundred billion dollars. Don’t change the subject, dear.
The gavel. By the metric Mr. Kessler himself adopts in this column — work ethic knows no class; ignore the rhetoric — he is, himself, working class. He works on a deadline. He works at The Wall Street Journal. He works for News Corp shareholders. He is paid by a Murdoch to write that the working class is a useful fiction that socialists use to recruit the envious. The working class of which Mr. Kessler is a member is the working class of op-ed columnists, and its working hours are spent inventing the language in which the other working class — the one that needs parks and libraries and a pied-à-terre tax — disappears. The Striver Catechism is back for the midterms because the midterms are when the contract is renewed. Read Mr. Kessler’s $775 Burning Man ticket; that is the smallest hardest fact, and that is what the catechism costs.