'Goodbye, Middle Class. It's Been Fun'
And: More GOP Groyperism; Eastern Europe On Islam; Mamdani; Mearsheimer; Vogons
An American friend went shopping at Target with her kid for school supplies yesterday. She sent me this pic, with the comment, “Goodbye middle class. It’s been fun”. My jaw dropped: $26 for a packet of colored markers?! What the hell?! I keep saying here that every time I go back from Hungary to the US to visit, I’m shocked by the cost of living. But something about this just dropped my jaw. Colored markers!
Aaron Renn is always worth reading, but his latest Substack, a compilation of articles about how unaffordable life is becoming for most Americans, is a doozy. I sent it to my friend, who replied simply, “This. 1000x this.”
In the piece, Renn quotes a Wall Street Journal piece (likely paywalled, but I subscribe, so I can share bits with you) detailing the penny-pinching strategies middle-class Americans are now undertaking. Excerpt:
Saddled with ever-ballooning grocery bills, Julie Simpson decided to take matters into her own hands.
She started to dilute.
Simpson, a software marketer in Mississippi, added water to her Dawn dish liquid and her Clorox floor cleaner. She stopped buying aerosol glass cleaner and replaced it with a bottle of Windex so that she could add water to make the solution last longer. She even thought about diluting her treasured Sensodyne toothpaste, but drew the line there. She squeezes out every last bit instead.
Americans are increasingly experimenting with frugality. In addition to stretching household staples, some are shopping at less expensive grocers and buying pantry products on Facebook Marketplace. One consumer sought to save on beef by buying half a cow.
Consumer companies are getting hit by the frugality. As families like Simpson’s get more creative in pinching their pennies, the companies are seeing dimmer sales compared with the steady growth they have enjoyed in recent years.
Renn comments:
While they may not realize it yet, many people in this category [middle class] are now being proletarianized. The two tier economy is putting the squeeze in people who may have once felt themselves safely above the median income, but who are now being subjected to downward lifestyle mobility.
There are plenty of articles in Renn’s compilation. As somebody who comes from a college football-mad SEC state, this one from the NYT hit hard:
Three hours before kickoff, Ann Whitehead’s Subaru Outback pulls into Lot 13 to continue a longstanding family tradition: attending Florida State football games.
What started in 1960 with Whitehead in the student section has grown into a three-generation congregation in the west stands at Doak Campbell Stadium. Through scorching heat and pounding rain, the Whiteheads had a 28th-row seat for the glory days of Bobby Bowden and the up-and-down tenure of Mike Norvell.
“We love to go,” said Whitehead’s daughter, Alyson Stone. “It’s just, I don’t know how much longer we’ll be able to.”
The costs have swelled out of control around sports, an industry of inherent leisure spending. What was once an affordable autumn excursion for a family of four has become a series of $1,000 (or more) weekends.
The situation isn’t unique to the Whiteheads or Florida State. Florida Gators fan Rob Dotson, a former local alumni association president, got fed up with Gainesville hotels boosting prices while requiring two-night minimum stays; he called giving up his season tickets after 38 years the second-hardest thing he has ever done (after proposing to his wife).
When South Florida started its program in 1997, parking was $5. For this year’s opener against Boise State, it was $32.25. A bottle of water costs $7.50. Suzanne Ward has been to every non-COVID-19 game in Bulls history and has already downgraded from eight tickets per game to four as monthly costs started feeling like another car payment. She worries about what will happen to prices when USF downsizes from the Buccaneers’ Raymond James Stadium to a new 35,000-seat on-campus stadium in 2027.
“I don’t want to get to the point where I have to say, ‘Y’all have priced me out, I’m no longer a fan,’” Ward said.
Similarly, Aaron links to this video talking about how the cost of going to NFL games has broken the capacity of some the the league’s most loyal fans, Buffalo Bills supporters, to come out to support the team.
There’s more — read Renn’s piece to see the evidence of the proletarization of the US middle class. He points out that all this is having and will continue to have big effects on American politics.
This is all part of the Weimarization of America. No, these harder economic times are not strongly comparable to the hyperinflation of the early Weimar era, which destroyed family savings all across Germany. But the comparison is not as far off as you might think. When a people experiences itself seriously losing ground economically, over a sustained period, it causes instability. I’ve written here many times about the non-economic aspects of American life that mirror the experience of Weimar Germany, in particular the collapse of trust in authorities, and the common condition of social atomization. Just last night I was reading in a cultural history of Weimar how that by the end of the 1920s, political polarization was affecting everyday life:
There were opportunities for political feuds everywhere, but there was little dialogue. People found themselves hiving off from each other in social situations, over politics, and even normal politics, as the horse-trading between parties in a democratic system, was becoming paralyzed:
The fragile balance of power in the Reichstag held as long as things were looking economically rosy. But the mood was growing more irritable, the tone more vitriolic, and attempts to find common ground were abandoned. For far too many players in the Republic, the following applied: ‘Principles were upheld and compromise scorned.’
As you well know, I hate the Groyperization of conservative politics in the US. I am also alarmed by the Mamdanization that’s on the way on the Left. But it’s coming in part from miserable economic times. James Billot, writing in UnHerd, says that “Mamdani-Trump voters are America’s future.” He visits a Latin-dominated part of Queens that went hard for Trump in 2024, and also hard for Mamdani this year:
In 2024, Trump won six election districts here (up from zero), and made double-digit percentage point gains in dozens of others nearby. It was the best performance of any Republican nominee in Gotham since 1988, fuelled by anger over rising grocery prices, the cost of living, and declining public safety. But within a year, voters turned away from the 79-year-old, two-term president and voted for the 34-year-old newcomer Mamdani instead.
“Trump brought too much chaos, man,” says Ramon*, whom I met outside the Guatemalteca Deli on Roosevelt Avenue. “My bills are still high and my wife can’t afford no groceries.” A part-time car mechanic by day and cleaner at the new JP Morgan office by night, Ramon says that he voted for Trump in 2024 because he thought he’d bring down the price of gas and groceries, but “that ain’t happened”. “I don’t know if Mamdani’s going to make things better or worse,” he said, “but we need something different from this.”
Again: Weimarization, as the political center weakens and loses ground to the extremes.
Kale Zelden’s Dickens Classes
Hey, here’s a great opportunity to learn from a gifted teacher, my pal Kale Zelden. Starting on November 25, he’s going to be doing four weekly live online classes exploring the meaning of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Click here for more information and to sign up.
Today’s newsletter continues past the paywall, including Mamdani’s Islamogauchisme, Mearsheimer’s I Told You So, And Vogon Poets in Love And Hate!
