Zohran Mamdani Doesn't Know What Working Class Means

The luxury belief class continues to redefine terms to the point of meaninglessness

In a recent New York Times interview, Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s socialist mayor, struggled to define “working class.”

At one point he was asked point-blank, “How do you define the working class?”

Mamdani replied, “I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being a part of the working class.”

After some pushback from the interviewer, Mamdani said he would draw the line at “about a million dollars a year.” I have no idea how he can say that without any embarrassment, but that’s why he’s a politician and I’m not. Say what you will about him, but the man knows his base. These are the people who claim to be the champions of women yet—and please forgive what has now become a hackneyed line—can’t define what a woman is, and they claim to be the champions of the working class, yet can’t define what the working class is. Or they redefine both terms to be so expansive that they could potentially encompass just about everyone.

This is where the luxury belief class has steered us.

Anyone who isn’t a millionaire gets to be working class now. It sounds absurd but that’s where we’re at now. Remember during the primaries in 2015, Bernie Sanders said that “the millionaires and the billionaires” need to pay their fair share? At some point over the past decade, he dropped “millionaires” because he became one. Now you see the millionaires condemning only the billionaires. Mark my words, at some point in the not-too-distant future, you will see the billionaires disparaging the trillionaires. Maybe inflation will hasten that phenomenon.

Anyway, in that Mamdani interview, the focus on defining class by money is revealing.

People often conflate social class with economic class. This allows us to talk about the former while pretending we are talking about the latter.

It is easier to discuss income than educational pedigree, accent, hairstyle, clothing, taste, or zip code.

But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does.

Research has found that parental educational attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. This is because, compared with parental income, parental education is a more powerful predictor of a child’s future lifestyle, tastes, and opinions. If your parents went to college but you didn’t, you’re still middle-class or higher. Not working class.

Education shapes habits, networks, and outlook long after the degree is earned. Higher education bestows cultural capital: patterns of speech, tastes, opinions, and expectations about life. Income may rise and fall over a lifetime. The worldview formed in selective institutions usually endures. By that standard, college graduates, regardless of earnings, are not working class.

Education also shapes political views more strongly than income does.

In 2021, Ezra Klein pointed out that “We tend to think of class as driven by income” but that “A high school dropout who owns a successful pest extermination company in the Houston exurbs might have an income that looks a lot like a software engineer’s at Google, while an adjunct professor’s will look more like an apprentice plumber’s. But in terms of class experience — who they know, what they believe, where they’ve lived, what they watch, who they marry and how they vote, act and protest — the software engineer is more like the adjunct professor.”

Plainly, a PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other PhDs, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree.

It is important to note that working class is not the same thing as poor. And upper class is not the same thing as rich. A working-class person can become wealthy without moving into a higher social class. Money alone is not enough. If a manual laborer wins the lottery, he is rich. But still working class.

The focus on economic class (rather than social class) promotes the belief that we could have an egalitarian society if everyone simply had enough money.

This focus is especially convenient for the upper and upper middle classes. It allows them to express concern about inequality without implicating themselves. They can condemn the problems faced by the poor, such as limited access to education, a lack of money for professional clothing, or unreliable transportation, without confronting the less obvious realities of class signaling.

The assumption is that if you could afford the right things, you could pass as upper class. But the main obstacle is cultural rather than financial. You can come into money, but if you do not know how to use it in the “right” ways, or understand the signals, customs, and shibboleths, you’ll still be shut out.

No one spells out the rules for you.

Relatedly, on the point about rules, the organizational psychologist Michele Gelfand has found that “The upper class has a negative connotation about rules. The working class holds a more favorable view. They work in more dangerous jobs where rules help keep people safe. They live in more dangerous neighborhoods where rules can keep kids out of trouble.”

Most poor and working-class people value rules, partly because they are exposed to so much disorder and misbehavior from the people around them. Naturally, the luxury belief class sides not with the poor people who prefer rules and order, but the poor people who engage in disorder. And will then pay a lot of money to distance themselves from the resulting squalor.

The best way to learn class rules is through exposure. Most people, though, do not get many chances to live, work, and socialize with those outside their own social class. And when they do, the discomfort of crossing that cultural divide often sends them back to familiar territory. This is one overlooked reason why people who are capable of upward mobility don’t always pursue it. It’s uncomfortable.

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What makes someone working class is not income. Of course, social categories can be difficult to define. Still, there are identifiable regularities.

One thing that distinguishes the working class is the kind of work they do and how much oversight is involved.

A working-class job is often (not always) closely supervised. A frontline supervisor or foreman is in close proximity to the worker and judges his work as he does it. When I washed dishes for minimum wage, the manager or assistant manager was always walking through the kitchen and dish room keeping an eye on everyone in the back of the restaurant.

Another feature is danger. Many working-class jobs expose people to some degree of physical risk. This is one reason why a cab driver or a roofer counts as working class while a schoolteacher who might earn less than either counts as middle class.

In my book Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class I recall the story of one of my high school history teachers who’d worked as a manual laborer at a lumber mill before attending college relatively late in his life. He explained to me and the other students that teaching didn’t really feel like “work” to him because he was sipping coffee in an air-conditioned building.

Not all working class jobs carry the risk of physical injury. Some just make your feet tired from standing all day. But if you spend most of your work day sitting and there is zero risk of any injury, you’re almost certainly not working class. (No, your ergonomic standing/walking desk doesn’t count as “being on your feet all day;” owning one means you’re probably upper middle class).

The high working class is made up of craftspeople. Carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and so on.

The middle layer is made up of operators: train conductors, forklift operators, sewer and water plant operators, short-order cooks, cab drivers, bus drivers, Uber drivers. One thing I’ve noticed is that white Uber drivers sometimes tell me that their driving job is a temporary stopgap and they have some other career ambition they’re working on, whereas nonwhite drivers seem to feel no status anxiety about their job.

The low layer of the working class is unskilled labor. Just about anyone could be trained in a day to do one of these jobs, which means there’s a lot more uncertainty about employment stability. Day laborers, farmhands, hotel maids, car wash workers, the guy who delivers your DoorDash, dishwashers, stock clerks.

The sociologist Lauren A. Rivera has written that, “Whether it involves the weathered hands of a manual laborer or the straightened and whitened teeth of those who can afford them, social class manifests in people’s bodies.”

Clothing style is a giveaway. My sports journalist friend Ethan Strauss says that at NBA games (and presumably other sports as well), the more expensive the seat, the less likely you are to see the person sitting in it wearing NBA apparel. Wearing the jersey of your favorite player or whatever is gauche I guess.

This is consistent with the general pattern that working-class people are more likely to wear clothes with words on them. T-shirts, caps, and jackets with brand names or slogans. A t-shirt with GOODYEAR on the front and that kind of thing. Trump knew what he was doing with those red MAGA caps. The cap upset his critics for obvious political reasons, but there is also an undercurrent of class prejudice at the loud red hat with the ALL-CAP words.

You’ll see hipsters or post-hipsters or whatever wearing loud logos but it’s usually irony and/or working class-larping. The Brooklyn or Silver Lake guy in a NASCAR T-shirt he bought at a thrift store. Carhartt jackets or Dickies workpants on people who have never framed a wall.

On this point, formal dress codes are useful because they make expectations clear. When everyone knows what they’re supposed to wear, it levels the playing field.

But when you say, “Wear whatever you want,” people don’t stop making judgments. If anything, they make more of them based on the choices you make.

A few years ago The Atlantic published an interview with a couple of sociologists describing the subtleties of class and clothing in the context of the workplace:

Pinsker: You also talk a lot about the unwritten codes of behavior that can shape who advances and who doesn’t at certain workplaces. What’s an example of how that played out?

Laurison: Probably the best example of this is the television-production firm we studied. The name that we gave to the culture there was “studied informality”—nobody wore suits and ties, nobody even wore standard business casual. People were wearing sneakers and all kinds of casual, fashionable clothes. There was a sort of “right” way to do it and a “wrong” way to do it: A number of people talked about this one man—who was black and from a working-class background—who just stood out. He worked there for a while and eventually left. He wore tracksuits, and the ways he chose to be casual and fashionable were not the ways that everybody else did.

There were all kinds of things, like who puts their feet up on the table and when they do it, when they swear—things that don’t seem like what you might expect from a place full of high-prestige, powerful television producers. But that was in some ways, I think, more off-putting and harder to navigate for some of our working-class respondents than hearing “just wear a suit and tie every day” might have been. The rules weren’t obvious, but everybody else seemed to know them.

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Paul Fussell in his 1983 book Class described how romantic couples arrange themselves in cars:

Working class: Men sit in front, women in back

Middle class: One couple in front, one in back

Upper middle class: Spouses trade places, men and women from differing couples sit together. Perhaps—my view, not Fussell’s—to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are superior beings, unbothered by trivial romantic jealousies. How basic.

Working class people are comparatively unconcerned with being called “basic,” whereas many upper middle class people lay awake at night terrified that someone might bestow that label upon them. They crave distinction from the commoners.

Anyway, the working class is defined not by income but by a lack of a college degree (especially if one’s parents are not college graduates), an absence of control over how their work days are spent, physical strain or proximity to physical danger in their jobs, and how they dress and carry themselves.

But we can expect that Mamdani and his base will continue to focus on income for the obvious reason that few of them are actually working class, but many of them feel financially strapped. Some of this of course is self-inflicted. As sociologist Musa al-Gharbi has written, describing people in high-prestige/low-pay jobs, “they would prefer to be a freelance writer rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory.”

Look, Mamdani is free to define “working class” however he wants. He can draw the line at a million dollars if he likes. Regardless of where his line is, the roofer, the hotel maid, and the dishwasher know that he and his base are on the other side of it.