The Rage of the Educated Underclass

I want to start this with a story of where I came from, a rural county just outside a medium-sized city in Virginia. Now, even when I was a kid, it was a pretty poor place. I knew that much even before I developed a lot of political and social awareness. Certainly I knew it before I went to college not far from the Washington, DC exurbs, where I got to mingle with college kids who came from high schools where there were actually more than two A.P. courses.

But as I got older, I could tell it was getting worse. Admittedly, I never researched the employment numbers or kept up with news about the local industries. It was just all the little clues I saw whenever I visited family for a weekend or over the holidays. All the places I hung out at when I was a teenager went out of business and they didn’t seem to get completely replaced. A store clerk made a joke in passing about how nobody he knew could get a full-time job anymore. My parents told me that the race for county sheriff was all about how to deal with the meth problem. A new housing development trumpeted in the local news in the city’s downtown area turned out to be mostly lofts and luxury apartments. Around the same time, an apartment building whose residents were low-income or were dependent on Social Security was shut down and turned into a high-end hotel. I should admit it’s not all doom and gloom; the area has recently become home to a fantastic theater company run by an openly gay couple, something that would have been absolutely unthinkable when I was 17. And I know the glow of nostalgia is a powerful but subtle thing, but whenever I go home, I just get the feeling things have just deteriorated from what they used to be.

Of course, if you listen to many mainstream media outlets or certain clans of politicos on social media, everything is actually going great, all in all. Unemployment is down, the younger generations are doing better (just still not nearly as well as the boomers), and income inequality is just a matter of people having “bad vibes.” Never mind all the other stories about rent and housing costs, elderly people having to work fast food or at Wal-Mart, middle school-aged kids being hailed by the local news for starting a business in order to pay for chemotherapy, or teachers and nurses having to live in their cars. “Gaslighting” is an overused and misused term nowadays, but it’s hard not to feel that way when you share with your friends and relatives the same refrain about struggle and frustration and just all-around hopelessness while the news claims we actually live in a time of prosperity. It’s not just we’re not fulfilling our dreams of becoming at least relatively rich or well-known in our chosen field; it’s that even just having a full-time job with benefits that we find reasonably fulfilling might as well be as unobtainable as becoming a millionaire or a famous novelist or filmmaker.

I wrote candidly—perhaps too candidly—about getting a PhD only to barely get by, much less earn a tangible foothold in academia, and the psychological pain it caused. I got my fair share of heckling responses of the usual “Learn to code” variety. However, I was also pleasantly surprised at how many people spoke out sympathizing with my basic experience: following the rules and getting accolades in their chosen career yet never seeming to get anywhere in terms of just basic stability and comfort.

I can’t help but wonder how much similar experiences to mine could explain our politics, from the alt-right to “Bernie bros.” Admittedly, as someone who proudly called himself a Bernie bro once during Bernie Sanders’ last run for the presidency, on this topic I am looking from the inside out. But I don’t think many people would disagree that, with exceptions of course, the Bernie bros tended to have similar biographies. So many people I commiserated with online over the rise and fall of Bernie Sanders’ campaigns had Masters’ degrees but worked as temps or in retail. A few had published successful books or were writers who had been published in national publications but had to make most of their money on Patreon hustles, as adjuncts, or were writing for those websites that just churn out clickbait rephrasing articles and press releases. A sizeable number were grad students not because they had any hope of becoming tenured professors, but just because they wanted the opportunity to actually do what they liked for as long as possible. And my compatriots were up against (again, a gross generalization, but a valid one nonetheless, I would argue) more left-of-center people who had Ivy League degrees, worked steady and lucrative jobs in national journalism, could afford their own house even while writing only for Substack, and never knew unemployment except perhaps that one time they spent a summer backpacking in Europe or the time they helped launch a business or media venture. On the other side of the ideological spectrum, the basic themes of the story were quite similar, even if the characters, the motives, and their chosen foes were impossibly different. The path to President Donald Trump was as much a saga of burnt-out and disillusioned one-time high achievers turned Internet reply guys and trolls as it was of angry car dealership magnates. So, more and more, I’m convinced that future historians cannot fully understand our era unless they keep in view a large and growing educated underclass, one whose anger and bitterness reached up from the abyss and shook, at least for several brief periods, the cozy enclave of our disbelieving and uncomprehending ruling class.

Most people know at least one person in their lives who is a member of this underclass, the forsaken literati. These are the ones who, had they been born just 30 or perhaps 20 years before, might have been able to make for themselves a middling but comfortable career as a writer for a regional newspaper, in a local business' marketing department, or as a full-time lecturer at a small, obscure university or community college. But now the newspapers are running on skeleton staffs, the entry-level marketing jobs are being given only to part-time freelancers (and ones with three years of experience, at that), and even people who went to grad school at Dartmouth or Notre Dame are competing for rare academic posts even at mid- and low-tier colleges. So, instead, the members of the underclass work a series of side gigs and bounce unsteadily between different jobs completely detached from where their talents and interests actually lie, if they’re employed at all or not relying completely on the nightmare of the gig and freelance economies.

K-12 teaching might have offered many of these people a refuge, but those days are long gone. What should be one of our society’s noblest professions has been turned into a dark horror-comedy that’s like a collaboration between Todd Solondz and the creators of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Teachers are besieged from any and all possible angles: catastrophically low pay, the need for second jobs and side gigs in order to barely be able to pay rent or a mortgage, a system that’s long replaced a well-rounded education with endless testing, random shootings looming more closely over the school day than perhaps even nuclear war ever did for the boomers, and the demand for teachers to shoulder the burden from a failing safety net for the sake of their students. Most recently, there’s the grotesque and nonsensical political wars fought by perpetually furious crusaders who seem to genuinely believe a fourth-grader learning about their male teacher’s boyfriend or seeing a school counselor with hair dyed orange will turn that child overnight into a pansexual genderqueer. Frankly it's a surprise that there are still so many people willing to become teachers as there are.

It's a cliched assertion from articles like this that millennials grew up being assured that one of the glories of triumphant late stage/post-Cold War capitalism was that, as long as you worked hard and got a degree, you could at least find a job doing what you’d like, or at least found tolerable. Now, not just hardline conservatives but squishier liberals might call you entitled for believing you should be able to afford rent on your salary, doing work where the drawbacks don't include frequent suicidal ideation. More than once I’ve seen people on social media smugly tell people complaining about the cost of housing that they should just suck it up and move out of the city; never mind that the cities are where the jobs and the opportunities are, or that the housing crisis has hit the exurbs and many rural areas as well. Still, I know so many of us are haunted by that voice in the back of our heads. Call it the ghost of the Puritan work ethic, but it constantly reminds us that, yes, we are to blame, and the fact that no one has responded to our 20-40 job applications a week is our fault. Doubt, guilt, and second-guessing our own decisions from years if not decades ago can easily feed into our rage, a rage that pushes us to do things ranging from harassing a well-paid political pundit on Twitter to turning toward unhinged gurus like Jordan Peterson.

The rage of the educated underclass isn’t just turned outside, but it festers within their thoughts and their self-perception, like a psychic cancer. The underclass has to live with the knowledge they are sinners according to the gospel of one of the great American religions, the Church of the Meritocracy. The only way to claim redemption is either embrace the toxic politics of capitalist bootstraps and blame anyone and everything but the people who actually keep our current systems in place, or perhaps you just make sure you hate and blame yourself for any bad or hasty decisions those born more fortunate than you always have the luxury of making.  I’ve learned from experience that no matter how much you nod along to podcasts about the rot running down the veins of our society and economy, no matter how much you learn the statistics about the economics of income inequality and underemployment, part of you will still feel like you failed a test, albeit a test no one told you about or prepared you for.

I’m not hopeful the state of the underclass or our prospects overall will change anytime soon. Even just a small, little reform that would benefit struggling and well-off people alike such as normalizing the idea that work performed completely on a computer should usually be done at home is being viciously fought by millionaires and a lapdog media. And let’s not talk about bigger moves like tying the minimum wage to cost of living, a guaranteed basic income, or universal health care.  "AI" will never replace writers and artists, as much as our would-be tech overlords wish otherwise, but it’s already being used as an excuse to give creatives even less work, credit, and respect. And this is at a time when the creative middle class, especially those in places like New York and Los Angeles, has been completely eviscerated. Even what should be a given, that society should as much as possible provide work that allows people the chance to make a living using their own natural talents, is seen as radical or as a selfish demand for privilege.

Although I have seen writers, especially on the left, at least hint toward the existence of the educated underclass, I am currently not aware of any works that delve into the subject. I would love to read it, and I would rather not be the one to do it. What I can say now is that the educated underclass exists. It is growing while the range of opportunities for even just a comfortable life are narrowing. Our leaders should start to acknowledge its existence and go from there. Speaking as a historian, even one who has never been offered a place in a university department, it generally doesn’t end well when the young and educated feel alienated and deprived of a future by their own society.