23 thoughts on class in America.
I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”
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Setting the table.
Throughout our coverage of Brian Thompson’s murder, I’ve been told "you're out of touch" more than I have at any period in my life.
It's always hard for me to know how to weigh critiques like this, but that was especially true last week — I felt like people were criticizing arguments I wasn’t making. Most of these criticisms accused me of not understanding the struggle normal Americans are experiencing, what it's like to live with tenuous finances or insufficient healthcare, and why so many people are angry enough not to care about the cold-blooded murder of a major health insurance CEO.
And, to be honest, the comments have been eating at me. Our brains are hardwired to focus on negative criticisms more than positive feedback; I could read 1,000 emails praising a piece I wrote as profound or steadying or engaging or meaningful, but I'll spend all night thinking about two emails telling me my writing was out of touch. For a few days, these criticisms were infuriating. “I'm not out of touch!” my inner monologue kept chanting.
As the emails and comments kept coming in, I felt more misunderstood than I have in a long time. I sensed the despondency and impatience of so many readers about the current state of health care and our country, but I also felt like they didn’t really know how I viewed the issues I was writing about. At times, I even found I agreed with my critics’ central points — and felt perplexed that we still seemed so far apart and adversarial.
Then something occurred to me: I've never actually written explicitly about class — or class politics, or even my upbringing — in Tangle. Sure, I've analyzed class politics a lot, and I've included a few lines about household economics, poverty, and the working class's role in the electorate. Similarly, I've made some mention of my upbringing, or my experiences going from struggling journalist to entrepreneur. But I've never once written a piece explicitly about how I view my own class, or how I view class in America, or what I think productive class politics actually looks like.
The realization froze me. I was standing in my kitchen and basically came to a complete halt, then ran downstairs to my computer and started outlining this piece.
My hope, going forward, is that I can point back to this edition — as I might refer back to my solutions to the immigration crisis or my views on gun control — and use it as a jumping-off point for future writing that touches on this subject.
My upbringing.
I think it's important to start with how I grew up.
Class is something you can understand and empathize with regardless of your background, but it's also clear to me that personal experience intimately informs this understanding. I have experienced some class-related struggles and not experienced a host of others, and as the lead editorial voice in this newsletter, I want to be as transparent about those experiences as possible. I don't want to pretend to be something I'm not.
So here's a little bit about me:
I was born in Trenton, New Jersey, the third of three boys. My mom wasn't working when I was born, and my dad was a salesman at a burgeoning computer sales company. Our neighborhood was decidedly "working class" and predominantly black. My parents owned the house we lived in, and when I was five years old they sold that house and moved across the river to Bucks County, Pennsylvania — Yardley to be specific, one of the more affluent towns in Bucks and a much whiter area than Trenton.
Bucks County is at the heart of Tangle; it has a great deal of class and political diversity, which shaped a lot of my worldview. My family lived on the "wealthier" side of the tracks. We had a great big beautiful house that my parents were proud of and worked very hard for — with a driveway, backyard and front yard, walking distance from my elementary school. It was the suburbs. Our neighborhood was a glorious smorgasbord of free-running kids, roller hockey, mischief, manhunt, and low-level crime. We had a gang of kids who all spent a lot of time getting in trouble together and making memories that childhood should be full of.
We moved in across the street from a family of three girls and one boy that effectively merged into our family over time to become one; 30 years later, we still have Thanksgiving together, consider each other’s parents as our own, and think of one another as uncles and aunts to our children. Their dad was a former Green Beret who was a major father figure in my childhood before he died when we were in middle school. Money was always tight. I remember that part. When I became an adult, my mom would describe our family during my childhood as "house broke" — well off enough to have bought the house, but struggling to afford to keep up with it. As kids, we did all the stuff a lot of middle-class kids in the suburbs did: We got jobs when we were old enough to work, we got hand-me-downs, we drove crappy old cars that our siblings owned before us, and we did our best to stay out of trouble and get decent grades in school.
My dad worked a number of sales-related jobs throughout my childhood, and like a lot of people in sales he cycled through promotions, layoffs, and change. I remember him variously selling computers, cars at a local dealership, credit card processing, and polymer construction materials. For a brief period of time he also managed Catch A Rising Star, a comedy club in Princeton, New Jersey. When all the kids were old enough to be in school, my mom started working in the Judaic Studies department at Princeton as an assistant to a professor. Princeton — through a generous and supremely middle-class-friendly employee benefits program — helped pay my way through college when I went to Pitt years later, simply because my mom worked there.
In middle school and high school, a lot of my close friends’ families were in visibly worse shape than my own — parents living on disability, unstable single-parent homes, abuse, addiction, moving constantly, siblings in and out of jail. This was part of the class diversity that I grew up in. Just like many of those families, mine was deeply impacted by the 2008 financial crisis. My parents were living on the margins of what was manageable in the middle class and the economic downturn was devastating. We had to sell our house in Yardley, and my parents got divorced. Both moved into their own apartments that they rented; my dad started driving limousines and eventually Uber to make ends meet while my mom continued to work at Princeton until she retired. When I started Tangle, before I had a single employee, my dad volunteered to help me start editing this newsletter one morning after I called him to run through it because I was running behind, then hung around like a well-fed stray cat. He's still one of the (now paid) part-time editors on our team.
My later high school years were a very formative time for me. Two of my brothers — one who is now a general contractor and the other an operations and event planner — had gone off to college. A third brother, whom I consider a brother though my parents never formally adopted him, was still in the house with me. He was my oldest brother's best friend, who my parents took in when I was in middle school (he now owns his own screen-printing business and works as an independent artist in Philadelphia). Two of my parents' friends fell on hard times and also moved into our home. So it was me, my parents, my adopted brother, and two family friends we had taken in during my final years of high school, all during a financial crisis and as I was getting ready to leave for college.
Throughout my adolescence, I always worked. I was a janitor at a veterinarian’s office, a lifeguard, a busboy, and I worked seasonally shoveling driveways, mowing lawns, or babysitting. In the summers, from the age of 13 on, I would go to live with my cousin in West Texas, on the border of Mexico, in a tiny little town of outfitters where most people are self-sufficient and skilled in some trade, living off the bare minimum and getting by happily.
I loved it there, and I still do — now as an adult, it’s my happy place I escape to once or twice a year for weeks or months at a time. It's where I learned to shoot guns, drive motorcycles, and ride horses. It’s where I fell in love with the country and the desert and Texas and open air, and where I learned the value of a full day or week or month or season of manual labor. My cousin ran a cactus nursery and his wife ran horse stables, and I spent a lot of full days digging holes or driving forklifts or slopping through horse pens or moving bales of hay. I tried and failed to learn how to fix cars, and I picked up some broken but effective Spanish.
After high school, I went to college at the University of Pittsburgh, in the heart of one of America's quintessential "working class" cities. I worked at the student newspaper and held down a landscaping job to help pay my way through school, with my parents' help. I also picked up some internships at local newspapers like the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and — like an idiot — sold drugs to make extra cash, which I've written about in Tangle before.
When I graduated from college, with my childhood home gone, and after a brief stint living in Israel, I moved into my mom's apartment and lived with her as I entered the workforce. For about a year I commuted to New York City every day from Bucks County — two hours and change door to door — while being paid $38,000 a year at my first reporting gig. That job was with the very liberal Huffington Post. It was a rather obscene set-up, getting paid $38,000 — an impossible wage to live on in most cities, let alone New York City — to churn out three or four articles a day.
But it was the only writing job I got, and I loved the work. I learned a lot from smart, aggressive reporters there; I also learned a lot about how news organizations with an overt political slant were run. Then I caught a break.
A few articles I wrote about politics went viral, and I ended up going on CNN as a 23-year-old pundit to defend my positions. So, as far as those things go, I got noticed. I left the Huffington Post when Ashton Kutcher, the actor and angel investor, quite randomly came across my work and offered me $60,000 to help him start a news organization focused on "solutions journalism." It was a new, independent media company without any baggage, and one I could put my fingerprints on. I took the position of running the politics vertical, and I moved into a five-bedroom one-bathroom apartment in Harlem with six roommates for $600 a month. It was the only way I could afford the city while also paying off my student loans, which I would do over time. I lived there for the next five years.
When I started Tangle in 2019, I was making $72,000 a year, still at Ashton's media company, and was living with my girlfriend (now wife) in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She was working as a server while pursuing a career in theater. We both had artistic pursuits (I wanted to be a writer; she wanted to be a director) and pledged to love each other through our forthcoming decades of being happily broke together. Then the pandemic, and Tangle, and life and luck and hard work collided. Phoebe decided to try law school. Tangle gained traction, and it went from a side gig to a real business, and now I'm here — back in Pennsylvania, running my own news organization as my wife nears graduation and readies herself for a second career.
On all counts, I consider my upbringing incredibly, unbelievably, unfathomably fortunate, as anyone who had a similar upbringing should consider theirs. I am not exaggerating when I say I thank God for it every day. A lot of people in this country had it better than I did, but plenty more here and across the globe have had it much, much worse. I had a roof over my head my whole life, loving parents, a big family, tough-loving brothers who looked out for me, a good community, good schools, and lots of opportunity.
I write all this to share what I have and have not experienced personally. I've been broke and lived paycheck to paycheck, but I've never gone hungry. I've lived with a parent as an adult in the workforce, like many millions of young American adults, but I've never been homeless. I've worked back-breaking manual labor jobs for days on end, but I’ve never pursued a true blue-collar career and I've never been part of a trade union. I've had crappy landlords with too much power, but I’ve never been evicted. I’ve had surprise medical bills that were financially debilitating, but I’ve never had a disability.
I've also always felt a deep and abiding affection for the people I grew up with — the so-called "working class" or "non-college educated" or whatever insufficient language we have for people who aren't wealthy, ultra-educated, "out-of-touch" snobs. I love a posh event or a fancy dinner as much as anyone, but I feel much much more comfortable drinking shitty beer in a grungy bar talking politics with some Philly locals than I ever have navigating an event like the Democratic National Convention. I recognize that might read like I'm trying to virtue signal myself as "down to earth" here, but I'm just trying to paint an honest picture of who I am and where I came from.
Some of my class beliefs.
Since I've never really written about class or class politics explicitly, I figured the easiest thing to do here — after describing my background — would be to list a few of my beliefs about class.
Remember: These are my personal beliefs — not those of Tangle, my staff, or the many writers whose work we share every day who disagree with me. But they might be relevant to future “My take” sections or personal essays from me that you read in Tangle.