On The Hollowing Middle

The Vanishing Common Life (Class Series, Essay 2)

“The middle class was not just an income bracket; it was the American identity itself.”

For much of the twentieth century, America was its middle class. A factory worker in Cleveland, a teacher in Denver, and a salesman in Des Moines all claimed the same name. They drove the same cars, watched the same three networks, and leafed through the same Sears catalog. The middle was not merely an economic band, it was a shared culture, the ballast of the republic.

That ballast is gone. In 1971, 61% of Americans lived in middle-income households. By 2023, just 51%. In two generations, the broad center became a fragile plurality. The “average American” has thinned into an abstraction. Below lies a precarious working class; above, an affluent stratum that now commands half of all household income.

The collapse is not just economic but civilizational. When markets no longer orient toward the middle, neither do culture nor politics. Airlines no longer promise one friendly sky, they spatialize class in aluminum tubes. Retail splits between Dollar General and Whole Foods. The mass market dissolves into budget survivalism and boutique luxury. We still share a country, but not a common life.

The Middle as Republic

The stakes of this collapse are not merely financial. They are political. Aristotle warned in Politics that a republic cannot endure without a strong middle. Too great a gap between rich and poor breeds faction: oligarchy above, revolt below. Only a broad and stable middle class, he argued, tempers extremes and sustains civic life.

“The best political community,” Aristotle wrote, “is formed by citizens of the middle class, and those states are likely to be well-administered in which the middle class is large.”

Alexis de Tocqueville, writing two millennia later, saw America’s middle not as wealth alone but as habit. Jury duty, town halls, public schools, and voluntary associations blurred class lines and cultivated a democratic ethos. “The more equal the conditions of men become,” he wrote in Democracy in America, “the stronger the desire of equality becomes.” America’s strength lay not in erasing differences, but in embedding elites and commoners alike in common institutions.

The middle class was never perfect, never fully inclusive. But it was real enough to act as cultural cement. It bound citizens into one nation, moderated the extremes of wealth and poverty, and gave the republic its stability. To weaken the middle is to weaken the republic itself.

Numbers With Teeth

The statistics tell the story of erosion.

• 1970: the middle class earned 62% of U.S. income.

• 2022: it earned just 42%.

In the same period, the upper tier’s share doubled. The middle has not merely shrunk, it has been hollowed out.

A Pew study found that between 1971 and 2021, the percentage of Americans in middle-income households dropped from 61% to 50%, while the upper tier grew from 14% to 21% and the lower from 25% to 29%. Incomes stratified into poles. What was once a broad bulwark has become a narrow ledge.

From Fordism to Algorithmic Feudalism

The American middle was built in the twentieth century on an industrial logic: mass production feeding mass consumption. Henry Ford paid workers enough to buy the cars they built. This was not benevolence but strategy. The broad market sustained the broad middle.

Today the logic is inverted. Platforms and algorithms no longer aim at a unified consumer mass but at hyper-segmentation. They sort, separate, and stratify. The affluent are nudged into walled gardens of curated abundance; the rest are funneled into cycles of scarcity.

The internet promised democratization. Instead, it has become a class amplifier. Retail splits between Amazon basics and luxury e-commerce. Streaming fractures into boutique subscriptions. Travel stratifies into first-class pods versus budget cattle cars. Even culture itself, once united by the “three networks”, splinters into algorithmically curated feeds, each class-specific, each reinforcing its own tastes and resentments.

Marcuse warned of a “one-dimensional man.” What we face now is worse: infinite dimensions, each curated by algorithms, each tethered to class. There is no longer even the illusion of a common horizon.

Lived Consequences

Statistics are abstractions until they map onto lived life. Consider two families.

One lives in the affluent upper middle. Their children play piano in studio lessons, their vacations are Delta One flights to Cabo, their health care is managed through private specialists. They are buffered by education, assets, and access.

The other lives in the precarious lower middle. Their children scroll YouTube loaded with ads while parents patch extra shifts. Vacations, if they come, are once-a-decade trips on Spirit Airlines to Orlando. Health care is rationed. Grocery bills are stress, not routine.

These are not simply differences of taste, but differences of world. They define whether one’s children inherit opportunity or deficit, refinement or resentment. And they no longer converge in a shared middle.

Collapse of the Common Life

The American middle class was once both an economic and a cultural center. It was expressed in shared institutions: public schools, department stores, baseball games, network television. People consumed the same media, bought the same products, and trusted the same public systems.

That common life has fractured. Retail is bifurcated into cheap processed slop for the poor and expensive organic pickings for the affluent. Airlines spatialize class into zones, where some recline flat while others cram into ever-narrower seats. Streaming algorithms stratify culture into class-specific niches. Public schools in wealthy districts resemble private academies; those in poor districts resemble containment.

The “average American” has disappeared as a cultural reality. We share a passport, but not a common world.

Political Fallout

The political consequences are predictable. Without a broad middle, compromise disappears. The middle class once stabilized democracy, forcing elites to temper ambition and radicals to moderate demands. As it thins, politics polarizes: populist anger below, technocratic liberalism above.

Public goods wither as the affluent exit. Private schools, private security, private healthcare drain commitment to the public realm. What once bound rich and poor in shared institutions is abandoned. Trust evaporates.

Aristotle’s warning repeats itself: a republic without a strong middle descends into faction. Tocqueville’s praise of America’s “habits of equality” becomes a relic.

Historical Parallels

Rome.

In the Roman Republic, the plebeian middle, small farmers, soldiers, craftsmen, anchored civic life. As conquest enriched elites and impoverished the smallholders, the middle hollowed out. Rome slid into oligarchy and populism, then into imperial dictatorship.

Victorian Britain.

Britain’s stability in the 19th century rested on the industrial middle classes, the “respectable” stratum between aristocrats and paupers. By the early 20th century, that stratum weakened under the weight of industrial decline and global war. The empire’s cultural self-confidence collapsed before its empire itself.

America.

The United States, like Rome and Britain, built stability on the ballast of its middle. Like them, it now sees the same hollowing. Without a common middle, the republic risks becoming two nations in one, wealthy oligarchs above, precarious masses below, and nothing in between to bind them.

Personal Witness

I grew up in the thin margins of the lower class. Mortgage and groceries were the only calculus. Vacations, new cars, college, distant luxuries. Now I live in the upper middle, buffered by education, assets, and access. I board first-class flights, but remember years of long car rides.

That double vision sharpens the stakes. My children will never know the old “one mall for all” America. They will inherit a world stratified at every turn, where class is invisible to them yet omnipresent to those without it. The very possibility of a common life, the kind that lets citizens imagine themselves part of one people, is dissolving.

Spengler’s Warning

Oswald Spengler described civilizations as organisms: they bloom in cultural unity, then fracture into civilizational decadence. The West, he argued, was already passing into its “civilizational” phase, where economic might masks cultural exhaustion.

The hollowing of the American middle illustrates Spengler’s point. A nation rich in GDP but poor in cohesion is already in decline. When elites consume luxury imports and the masses binge algorithmic distraction, the cultural unity that once sustained expansion is gone.

The middle was never merely economic. It was civilizational. Its collapse signals not just inequality of income but inequality of citizenship.

The Lost Center

The middle class was never inclusive of all. Yet it was broad enough to create a cultural center, a world where working families and professionals shared overlapping lives. That overlapping space is gone.

The republic cannot survive as two nations in one. It cannot endure if its people live in algorithmically separated worlds, with no rituals, markets, or institutions in common. The task ahead is not merely to “restore middle-class incomes” but to restore the middle as a cultural identity: a common life strong enough to bind rich and poor into one nation again. Without ballast, the ship drifts. Without a center, the republic fractures.

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The Task Ahead

Restoring the middle is not nostalgia for the 1950s. It is recognition that no democracy can endure without a center. The path forward requires more than GDP growth or wage subsidies. It requires:

• Rebuilding shared institutions: schools, public services, cultural spaces that both rich and poor use together.

• Reviving civic rituals: jury duty, town halls, civic service that blur class lines.

• Re-centering culture: a new common life, not algorithmic silos.

The middle was never perfect, but it was ballast. Without it, the republic risks becoming a hollow shell: wealthy at the top, angry at the bottom, fragile in the middle.

Toward the Next Inquiry

This essay has traced the collapse of the economic and social middle. But this is only half the story. The next collapse is cultural. Just as the economic middle has thinned, so too has the cultural middle, the “middlebrow” aspiration that once connected mass culture to high culture.

That is the subject of the next essay: The Great Chain of Taste: Highbrow, Middlebrow, Lowbrow, and the Philistine.