Since the mid-20th century Americans have distinguished the “upper middle class” from the “lower middle class.” We can think of these as two lifestyle packages, combining certain jobs, certain homes and neighborhoods, and certain family structures.

The upper-middle-class lifestyle package has three elements: a well-paying job that requires a college diploma, preferably in a large, high-status institution, along with a trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood that functions both as a display room for fancy furniture and a speculative asset. Another part of the upper-middle-class package has been the ability of affluent professionals to delegate care for children and elderly relatives to servants or paid employees of institutions (public, private, or nonprofit).  

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Contrast this with the lower-middle-class lifestyle package: a decently-paid job that requires only a high school diploma or some additional training and sometimes a bachelor’s degree; a house that is productive; and reliance for care-giving chiefly on family members, supplemented sometimes by neighbors or friends. The productive household might generate some income by being the site of a small business or, with the help of appliances, allow residents to substitute unpaid DIY labor for market transactions, by building, fixing and refitting at home. 

The mass middle class that was created in the United States after World War II was a mass lower middle class, not a mass upper middle class. There were various paths of entry into the mass lower middle class, whose members included unionized workers, prosperous skilled artisans, minor functionaries, small business owners and even well-off family farmers.

Neither a college education nor a professional career was required for entrance into the mass lower middle class, between 1945 and the 1980s. In 1960, only 7.7% of Americans had bachelor’s or higher degrees; by 1980, around the time I graduated with a BA, the number was still only 16.2%.  

Between World War II and the last quarter of the 20th century, most Americans graduated from high school and went to work and got married and had children. Being part of the middle class was defined not by educational or job status, but by a certain material standard of living, like having a family home, at least one car, and a television that received the three commercial network channels (created in 1970, PBS was limited to big cities and college towns).  

Beginning in the Reagan and Clinton years, however, the American Dream was redefined to mean achieving the lifestyle of the small upper middle class — not the super rich, but the most affluent lawyers, doctors, bank executives, corporate executives, and tenured professors. We were supposed to believe that their affluence was the result of their superior skill and merit-accruing academic labor, as measured by tests and rewarded with graduate and professional degrees. And it was true that brain power counted for something. But just as important was the success of the legal, medical, and academic professions a century ago in the 1900s in creating professional associations like the American Bar Association (ABA) and American Medical Association (AMA), which captured occupational licensing in their fields and created cartels that protect their members from fee-lowering competition. 

We were also supposed to believe that upward mobility was achievable en masse, through a college diploma. By the 1990s, politicians, corporate executives, nonprofit reformers, and self-interested academic bureaucrats united behind this message. And Americans listened. The number with a BA or higher has exploded from 16.2%  in 1980 to 38.7% in 2024. In some European countries the college-graduate share of the population is even higher.

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But the higher-ed industry was “talking its book,” i.e. painting a biased and overly rosy picture, when it sought to expand the number of applicants. And business leaders were pretending that stagnant wages were the result of inadequate education and insufficient skills on the part of workers, rather than the offshoring of industry, the flooding of the labor market with cheap immigrant labor, and the near-annihilation of private-sector labor unions. For their part, politicians of all persuasions found that encouraging more Americans to go to college cost little and avoided controversy.

The result of this massive and ill-advised expansion of higher education in the last half century has not been upward mobility, but too many college graduates chasing too few well-paid professional jobs. In 2025, only 19.3% of job postings in the US required a bachelor’s degree or higher, at a time when those qualifications are possessed by around 40% of the population. According to the St. Louis Fed, a year after graduation, 52% of Americans with college degrees are employed in occupations which do not require their degrees; the number after 10 years is 45%. For around half or more of college graduates, then, investing in a college diploma has been a bad decision.  

What about the second part of the upper-middle-class lifestyle package — the big trophy house in a prestigious neighborhood? There are plenty of modest houses in unfashionable neighborhoods, cities, and regions. But the Starbucks barista with a useless degree in communications or marketing wants to live in a hip neighborhood in New York or San Francisco or Austin, not in a tract-home neighborhood in Cleveland, Ohio.

The final element of the upper-middle-class lifestyle package is outsourcing the caretaking and domestic roles to unrelated paid caregivers. The rich have always been able to afford to hand off their children and elderly to be looked after by servants or other paid non-relatives, and to delegate household chores to other servants and service workers. Today, however, there’s a “care crisis” in the form of college-educated professionals who belong to two-earner couples, who can’t afford private child care and private schooling. The rich can afford to be generous to Mary Poppins or Jeeves. But the struggling two-earner professional couple typically relies on poorly-paid, largely immigrant female labor to look after the children and keep the house or condo clean.

The point is this: half or more of the college-educated professionals in the US belong to a pseudo-upper middle class, a knock-off version of the actual professional-managerial elite.  These wannabes and also-rans have worthless diplomas and jobs which, however honorable in themselves, do not allow them to purchase the homes and lifestyles of which they dream. They have champagne tastes on beer budgets.

This ersatz upper middle class has been overbuilt from the late 20th century until the present. It was unsustainable and bound to collapse. By automating a lot of “knowledge jobs,” AI may accelerate the inevitable contraction. But the decline was bound to come at some point even without AI.

If the half-century experiment in creating a mass upper middle class of college-educated professionals has failed in the US and similar democracies, what is the condition of the mass lower middle class? Current data prove that lower-middle-class neighborhoods and lifestyles, far from being gone with the wind, continue to be as distinct from the professional class as they are numerically significant. 

Working-class people of all races are still more likely to be family caregivers or to rely on family caregivers than to rely on paid nannies or institutions. They are likely to live in multigenerational families, a trend that is growing. They have side-hustles and run home-business — in fact half of small businesses are run from a home or began there. And working-class and low-income people are more likely to engage in home improvement projects than the affluent, who hire specialized workers instead. According to a survey last October, more than half of American parents said they would make Halloween costumes for their children from scratch, while four in ten — presumably more upscale — said they would buy them.

For members of today’s bloated and unsustainable college-educated professional class who identify their own real or desired lifestyles with success, all of these traits of what I am calling the lower middle class represent the failure of American society. How terrible, that some children receive low-quality day-care from grandparents or aunts or uncles, instead of from an immigrant nanny or corporate daycare workers or public school teachers. How tragic, to think that some middle-aged people must let elderly parents live with them because they can’t afford to warehouse them until they need round-the-clock nursing care in an expensive, high-quality retirement community. It’s a national disgrace that some high-school graduates still run some small businesses out of their homes, when they might have been salaried college-educated professionals with their own cubicles in office buildings somewhere. Imagine, there are still Americans so deprived that they make the costumes that their children wear at Halloween, instead of buying them in stores. 

But the lower middle class may have the last laugh. AI may well wipe out whole chunks of the upper middle class. But innovative technologies may not only spare many people in the lower middle class, they might also empower some.  

Computers soon may be able to write wills and diagnose patients and grade papers, causing a mass extinction event for lawyers and doctors and professors. But it will be some time before physical robots are able to replace the “essential workers” who were lauded during the COVID pandemic — nurses, caregivers, first responders, police officers, public and private utility engineers and mechanics.

If you are an executive vice-president of a firm whose work consists largely of convening meetings and sending emails, you may soon find yourself the victim of technological unemployment. But if you run a cookie-baking business from your home, you can already do much of your accounting and tax work with software, while reaching a large client base online. Advances in AI will only accelerate these possibilities.  

If you are a middle manager in a large corporation, your job may vanish when many of those you supervise are replaced by computer programs. But if you like to tinker in your garage, instead of doing woodwork with old-fashioned tools you may be able to use 3-D printing and other advanced technologies to make toys, models, artwork, dishes and cutlery, household furniture, musical instruments, and even functional drones.

If you are a banker who evaluates loan applications, you may be replaced by bots that do the same job in less time and without human error. But if you want to rent out a spare bedroom, or rent an unneeded space in your two-car garage, you can do so with the help of Airbnb or other online services.

If you are an academic who specializes in researching archives, your occupation may not be long for this world. But if you want to home-school your children, technology will permit them to take virtual classes, listen to virtual lectures, and have access to first-rate libraries, while learning social skills by playing with neighborhood kids.

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If your job as an insurance company apparatchik is to boost company profits by denying coverage to your company’s paying clients, software can cheat sick people just as well. Meanwhile, telemedicine for doctors’ appointments, home visits by nurses, and home-based monitors connected to hospital or medical practice computers might allow your ailing, elderly parent to live with you in your home, instead of being committed to impersonal institutional care.

The obstacles to many of these classic lower-middle-class activities are not technological but legal. Many technology-enabled opportunities can be realized only by loosening or repealing restrictive local government and zoning regulations that bar businesses from being run out of homes, ban accessory dwelling units (ADUs) or “granny flats,” and prevent homeowners from renting rooms to non-relatives.  

Today’s YIMBY (Yes in My Back Yard) movement mostly represents the interests of greedy real-estate developers who want to plop down apartments in desirable single-family neighborhoods, and of social-climbing, childless singles willing to be packed like sardines in hip neighborhoods if they can enjoy a cool urban consumer experience in their 20s. What is needed is not replacing single-family neighborhoods with blocks of apartment buildings, but rather eliminating restrictions which prevent sterile, snooty upper-middle-class neighborhoods from being converted into dynamic lower-middle-class neighborhoods, with home businesses and garage craftshops and maybe the occasional chicken in the backyard.

Needless to say, property owners in upper-middle-class neighborhoods would fight these reforms.  But there are not enough affluent young professionals in the next generation who can afford the upper-middle-class lifestyle, and there would not be even if the progress of AI turns out to be exaggerated. It is conceivable, of course, that sufficiently advanced technology might lead to truly widespread unemployment or lower wages in most occupations and income levels. But the idea that there is a binary choice between a well-paid job and a universal dole reflects the bias of the professional class.  

In a lower middle class or working household, there may be multiple streams of income. There are full-time jobs for some members of the family, side hustles, and rental income, to say nothing of DIY projects that save money, compared to purchases of finished goods or labor. Meanwhile, government may also subsidize a multigenerational household in the form of child allowances and Social Security, as well as means-tested in-kind benefits like food stamps if necessary. In the event of a true robotic jobs apocalypse, it would be easier to incrementally increase these existing government cash and in-kind subsidies to households, in addition to their other income streams, than to provide everyone with a cash stipend or “universal capitalist” investments in stocks and bonds like Tony Blair’s failed “baby bonds” and the doomed-to-fail “Trump Accounts.” 

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In hindsight, the US and similar industrial democracies took a wrong turn after the 1970s when “middle class” was redefined to mean “upper middle class” rather than “lower middle class.” There is no reason why the post-1945 lower middle class, rather than the college-educated professional class, could not have continued to define the middle class to this day. The silicon chip did not force Western democracies to shower expensive college diplomas on great numbers of citizens who got jobs that do not require them. The internet did not compel people to aspire to move from lively, eclectic lower-middle-class neighborhoods to sterile upscale bedroom communities policed by authoritarian homeowners’ associations. Satellite telephony did not persuade people to equate social status with sitting in an office cubicle emailing memos instead of running a business from the garage or doing DIY projects at home. The idea that from the age of 18 until death in old age, the members of a multigenerational family should all have separate homes was not suggested by a computer program. Far from being determined by technology or economic trends, the failed experiment in ballooning the upper middle class in the last half century was the result of changing fashions, misguided reforms, and the self-aggrandizement of professionals as a group.

Having spent portions of my life in both the lower middle class and the upper middle class, I find the lower-middle-class environment more … well, more human. Born in 1962, I spent the first year of my life in a classic lower-middle-class, blue-collar neighborhood on the east side of Austin, Texas, which has now been gentrified beyond recognition. As an infant I lived with my parents in a studio apartment atop the detached garage behind the small house of my widowed paternal grandmother, a bank teller who made additional income by renting one of the two bedrooms in her home to female University of Texas students. My college-educated parents later moved the family to suburban houses, first in South Austin and then in West Austin. But our family spent a lot of time with my grandmother in East Austin and I lived with her as an undergraduate at UT-Austin.

My grandmother’s lower-middle-class neighborhood was like a tropical savanna teeming with wildlife, compared to the Arctic sterility of a professional-class suburb. One of my grandmother’s neighbors, a high school teacher, spent hours with the woodworking equipment in his garage. Another neighbor was a black lay preacher who supported his prison ministry by mowing lawns. A few doors down was a ladies’ “beauty parlor,” possibly unlicensed, that was operated by yet another neighbor out of her small home. Around the corner was a small grocery store owned by a relative, and one block away was a service station owned by a family friend, where I spent pleasant hours as a child watching garage mechanics repair cars, as my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born, had done. Two blocks away was the black-owned and staffed barbershop where my father in the 1960s took me on occasion to get my Bart Simpson-like buzz cut.

If there was a homeowners association with restrictive rules in my grandmother’s lower-middle-class neighborhood, it was moribund in the 1960s and 1970s. People ran nursery schools out of their homes and rented rooms and put up cars on concrete blocks in the front yard and kept hens and crowing roosters decades before hipsters embraced backyard poultry. In an elite Austin suburb, if you ran a business out of your home or rented a spare bedroom, your neighbors, obsessed with possible declines in the value of their trophy houses as a result of the “wrong sort” coming in and out of the neighborhood, might sue you.

I for one will not lament the shrinking of the oversized upper middle class in relation to the lower middle class. When vacant downtown office towers are detonated and depopulated, university campuses are rented or sold off, and pretentious McMansions rot in the rain for want of buyers, humble lower-middle-class neighborhoods and their denizens will survive — and perhaps even flourish, with the help of advanced technology.  

So it is that Pete Buttigieg — mayor of South Bend, Indiana, turned surprisingly competitive, first openly gay presidential candidate, turned transportation secretary — finds himself a popular answer to Washington’s favourite guessing game.

But is Buttigieg 2024 really the answer?

If you squint, you can just about see the outlines of a case for President Pete. Viewed from his most flattering angle, Buttigieg might look like the perfect candidate to save the hopelessly out-of-touch Democrats. Hailing from a rust-belt city in a red state, he can construct a better claim to broad appeal than Harris, for example, who has never won an election outside California. His 2020 presidential pitch was more sympathetic to Trump voters than his rivals’; to liberal astonishment, he is even capable of appearing on Fox News. Indeed, Buttigieg’s appeal to “heartland values” has caused some on the Left to accuse him of deploying racially coded language.

But far from providing an answer to the Democrats’ succession quandary, the chatter surrounding Buttigieg only reveals the seriousness of the party’s talent crisis: the Democrats’ line up of top-tier politicians looks hopelessly thin. Yet this personnel problem — and the promotion of Buttigieg as the solution — points to a more profound shortcoming: the Democratic Party’s increasing inability to appeal to blue-collar voters.

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First, let’s be clear about the problem. Educational polarisation — the process by which Democrats have been losing non-college-educated voters and gaining college-educated ones — is starting to look like a very bad electoral trade for Democrats. For years, the party has been haemorrhaging support among working-class whites. According to Pew, white voters without a college degree accounted for a quarter of Joe Biden’s support in 2020. In 1992, nearly 60% of Bill Clinton’s supporters were whites without a college degree.

A coalition of college-educated whites and non-white working class voters was supposed to more than make up for those losses. As the political scientist Ruy Teixeira has noted, this was always a questionable bargain for Democrats, with losses among white working-class voters outpacing the racial diversification of the electorate that the party has been banking on. But it now threatens to be a truly disastrous deal.

Why? Because the long-promised rainbow coalition is proving elusive. And the firewall of non-white non-college-educated voters that Democrats have relied on is crumbling. Since 2012, the Democrats have lost 18 points off their margin among non-white working-class voters. A recent Wall Street Journal poll put the parties on level pegging among latino voters. This all adds up to a significant blue-collar problem for Democrats. And if they fail to solve it, they face electoral disaster.

In this context, Buttigieg, the son of an English professor and a linguist, is a strange candidate to be the man who can reconnect his party to their traditional voting bloc. A bookish meritocrat who calls South Bend home because that is where his father had tenure at Notre Dame, Buttigieg is best understood as an elite credentialist who did all the things an ambitious early millennial was supposed to do: Harvard, a Rhodes scholarship, a stint working on John Kerry’s presidential campaign, a lucrative job as a consultant at McKinsey. All of this before 29, at which point he was elected mayor of his hometown.

While Buttigieg certainly eschews the Squad-style radicalism that is electoral kryptonite outside the bluest neighborhoods, the self-styled moderate is nonetheless an enthusiastic apostle of woke capitalism. He may not be the activist on the street who wants to defund the police. But he’s the suit in the boardroom insisting that everyone sign up for their DEI training.

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For all his stated empathy for the Trump voter, Buttigieg oozes technocracy. In truth, he is made by and for the elite. As should be obvious by now, the idea that, armed with the right policy programmes, politicians can respond to the populist challenge by addressing “economic anxiety” misreads the moment. His is a trade-off free politics, all managerialism, no clear communication of the simple but essential message: I am on your side.

No wonder his brief moment as a contender in the Democratic primary was built on support among college-educated whites. He struggled with non-white voters, but also white, non-college-educated voters. In other words, he is uniquely ill-equipped to solve the Democrats’ two biggest demographic headaches.

To underscore just how bad an option Buttigieg would be, we need only contrast his Rhodes scholar slickness with a rising star in another midwestern state. Lucas Kunce isn’t a big beast; the 39-year-old former marine is running for the Democratic nomination in a US Senate race in Missouri, a red state. But he’s a curious species. He describes himself, first and foremost, as a populist.

Watch a recent TV ad for Kunce. It is strikingly different in tone to most Democratic politicians’ pitches, with the sort of soundtrack that makes you think you’re being sold a truck. He attacks Missouri Republicans for “stripping Missouri for parts, selling land to China and bowing down to Chinese state TV”; he promises to be a “warrior who will fight” for Missourians.

Or compare Buttigieg to Eric Adams, the Mayor-Elect of New York. The black working-class former cop won the keys to Gracie Mansion with an uncompromising pledge to crack down on law and order and resuscitate the New York economy after Covid. Adams is an ebullient, party-animal vegan. But in his own oddball way, he is authentic.

He stormed to victory in a crowded Democratic primary with huge margins among New York’s minority middle and working-class voters. On the pandemic, he sides with those for whom remote work isn’t an option, rather than a neurotic laptop class sheltering in place two years after the first lockdowns. And, unlike Buttigieg, Adams is unencumbered by the progressive speech manners — “faculty lounge bullshit,” as James Carville calls it — that have come to dominate the Democratic elite.

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In their own ways, Kunce and Adams communicate something very simple: I am with you. On election night, Adams told New Yorkers: “I am you. The life I lived is the life many are living right now. We are the same.” Buttigieg cannot tell blue-collar Americans that — an unavoidable fact which will ultimately be his undoing.

The Democrats’ biggest problem isn’t a flyover-state problem, or a white-voter problem. It’s a class problem. Ordinary Americans look at the party in power and see politicians who talk a language they don’t recognise. If Democrats think Buttigieg is the answer, they don’t even understand the question.

But unlike the social democracy movements that followed World War Two, the New Socialism focusses not on material aspirations but on climate change, gender, and race. While the old socialism sought to represent the ordinary labourer, many on the Left today seem to have little more than contempt for old working-class base and its often less than genteel views on issues such as Critical Race Theory.

Yet perhaps the most critical difference between traditional socialism and its new form relates to growth. The New Socialism’s emphasis on climate change necessarily removes economic growth as a priority. Quite the opposite, in fact: the Green agenda looks instead towards a shrinking economy and lowered living standards, seeking to elevate favoured groups within a stagnant economy rather than generating opportunities for the general population.

As a result, this new variant of socialism seems more feudal than Marxist. As Edwin Aponte, editor of the socialist blog The Bellows, has observed, Marx opposed utopian socialists, with their dreams of a return to the cohesive social order of feudal times — instead, he favoured using technology and economic growth to lift them up.

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Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez may not realise that the much-admired European socialist system was built on the back of a private sector. But the truth is that virtually all the successful welfare states — Germany, Netherlands, Scandinavia — rose on competitive economies: Swedish steel, Dutch chemicals, German machine tools and cars were critical to funding socialist programs in capitalist countries. But as this model slowly crumbles, as Europe loses its competitive edge to China and elsewhere, this lesson appears to have been forgotten. And in its place has risen a New Socialism that serves Wall Street, the City and the tech oligarchy.

The usual response from environmental activists is that the rapid transition to “zero carbon” will create oodles of new, well-paid jobs. In reality, however, these jobs generally pay less, offer fewer hours and are rarely unionised. The reality facing the middle class is an acceleration of our class divides and lower living standards. It’s long been de rigueur on the Green Left to cut back on homeownership, limit use of private cars or even fly on vacation. In other words, those who will suffer most are the very people whom socialism is supposed to save. Already energy poverty is on the rise in those places — from California to the EU — where punitive fuel costs have been increased.

Elsewhere, supply chain problems and inflation are now dismissed as “high-class problems”, even if it also means high prices for essentials such as milk, gas and rent. The Atlantic, a premier voice of the gentry Left, grumbles that “America’s central organizing principle is thoughtless consumption”, echoing the kind of homily handed out by Medieval clerics to disgruntled serfs.

Yet nowhere is the hierarchical nature of feudalistic socialism clearer than in the property markets. Social democrats may have once celebrated people owning homes or cars, but new green-tinged policies would lead to those becoming an option only for the rich, while opening a vast market for financial firms to buy single family homes and turn them into rentals. Just look at California, where Green progressives wield almost unlimited power, and which is now home to rising inequality, the nation’s highest poverty rate and the second lowest percentage of homeowners.

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Of course, this mindset is not confined to the Left. In the UK, for example, Boris Johnson’s Conservatives have proposed climate-based rules that would force homeowners — their political base — to retrofit their homes for thousands of pounds, while forcing them to abandon affordable gas heaters for less effective electric ones. This reflects what one socialist neatly labels “eco-Thatcherism in Britain“.

But there can be little doubt that the biggest change is taking place on the Left. Historically, the British and Australian Labour Parties, the French Socialist Party, America’s Democrats and Canada’s Liberals evolved from a strong working-class base. But in recent years, for both economic and cultural reasons, these parties have become dominated by professionals, academics and government workers increasingly bent on introducing paternalistic, puritan policies.

Ultimately, many of the old Left-wing parties may end up losing out to the ascendant Greens, who could be the real winners of the rise of New Socialism. It is not inconceivable that they could take power across Europe — particularly in Germany where the country’s traditional industrial base has shrunk. In the US, although there’s not much chance of the Greens challenging the ruling political duopoly, there are clear signs that the Democrats could find themselves torn between the need to represent both progressives and the party’s blue-collar base.

Yet it didn’t have to be this way. The Left’s Green policies might be big on virtue, but moves to eliminate energy and industrial jobs make no sense if we are going to depend on fossil fuels for at least the next few decades. It seems futile to be shutting down domestic pipelines, curbing energy production and raising electricity prices while begging the Saudis or the detestable Putin regime to drill more.

A more traditional socialist would promote domestic production, particularly natural gas, while also trying to shift production away from coal-dependent China, the world’s primary emitter. China’s Xi continues to build new coal plants and arrange for long-term oil supplies from the Middle East. Unlike our Left-wing parties, Xi knows the grip on keeping power rests on meeting the aspirations of his subjects, not dampening them.

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To remain relevant, the Left needs to return to the basics. Social democracy, as first developed in places like Sweden, sought to bolster families, and allow for improvements in daily life. Throughout history, economic growth has been critical to making societies wealthier, while making it far easier to distribute salves to the poor, invest in environmental improvements and work to improve conditions for historically disadvantaged minorities. Good jobs and “economic expansion,” notes economic historian Benjamin Friedman, are the best antidote for “rising intolerance and incivility”.

Is there still hope for a more socially beneficial kind of socialism? Certainly, elements of the recently passed bipartisan infrastructure bill could help American industry compete with China. People, more than anything, want roads, bridges and ports fixed. But all this risks being undone if the Democrats continue to press for more extreme measures: more moderate Democrats will lose their seats, and the GOP will gain control of the House.

Many on the Left deny the electoral reality, and claim the party can only win by moving towards more assertive redistribution, anti-racist and draconian climate policies. Meanwhile, the Republicans are redoubling efforts to forge a social democratic agenda, crafting an aggressive programme of tax breaks for working families, upholding educational choice in states such as Virginia, and committing to aggressive re-shoring for industry. Florida’s Senator Marco Rubio has even called for a “divorce” with the financial and corporate elite.

It’s an encouraging sign, even though such moves will be adamantly opposed by the bearers of libertarian orthodoxy who have shaped the party for a generation and have the support of many of the party’s big funders. In the end, then, both the libertarians and feudal socialists could find themselves rejected by the majority of the population. After all, a society bedevilled by rising inequality, racial tensions, a pandemic and complex issues around climate change is as unlikely to accept honeyed words about ‘the market being efficient’ as it would tolerate an increasingly intrusive state that squashes their aspirations in the name of environmental virtue.

Something else is needed: policies that address the competitive economy while preserving upward mobility, economic growth and an environment improved by technological changes. In other words we need a socialism that is rooted in the needs of the working and middle classes — not one that seeks to keep them in their place.