The Middle Class and Striver Class Divide

The fundamental difference between building a life and seeking status advancement

One of the important distinctions to understand in our society is between the middle class and the striver class.

Being middle class is about building a life. It's primarily about the material elements of the American Dream: a house with a backyard for grilling in a nice neighborhood, a car, family vacations, retirement savings, a social life with friends and neighbors and people from church, children who are able to build a life with even better material success.

Being striver class is about the desire to move up in the world. There are material aspects to that, but also the key element of social status. The striver wants to get into the right schools, to move to the right city or neighborhood, to vacation in the right destinations, to have intellectual or artistic ambitions, to run in the right circles, to be recognized and accepted by people at higher social levels.

The difference between middle class and striver class is not money. People with a middle class orientation can make a ton of money and be wealthier than many striver class people - even be rich, typically through some prosaic business or "sweaty startup", or even by becoming a partner in an accounting firm or a successful doctor.

What distinguishes the striver class person is a desire to move up socially, not just economically. This doesn't have to mean trying to join some exclusive country club. It might also mean wanting to become a tenured professor at a good university, or to own an apartment in a fashionable NYC neighborhood, or to get an op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal.

The difference is also not strictly about ambition level. Some people with middle class mindsets really want to get rich. Strivers can have as shallow or low ambitions as any middle class person. The difference is in the kind of ambition.

Both are completely legitimate ways to live. But these groups have very different orientations toward life. I don't think a striver class person would feel at home in a predominantly middle class environment, or vice versa.

Pete Buttigieg and Vivek Ramaswamy are archetypal strivers. It’s no surprise that both of them managed to get on TV during two separate 2003 MSNBC presidential town halls.

Most strivers aren’t trying to become President of the United States, but this gives you a feel. Buttigieg’s résumé: Harvard, Oxford, McKinsey, intelligence officer in the Naval Reserve, mayor, Presidential candidate, cabinet officer. Ramaswamy’s is similar: Harvard, Yale Law, hedge fund, Soros Fellowship, Presidential candidate. Especially notable: the name of the investment fund he started is literally Strive Asset Management.

Of these two groups, I personally would fall into the striver category.

Very successful people with middle class orientations are much more likely to end up as the kinds of local gentry the Atlantic complained about in 2021: large agribusiness style farmers, car dealers, McDonalds franchise owners, road construction contractors.

Some of the intra-evangelical conflict we see has a subtext of this divide. Culture warriors are very middle class. Seeker sensitives are a mix of middle class and strivers, but that model is very shaped by a middle class ethos. Cultural engagers are largely striver class.

People in the striver class are much more bound to the particularities of the current social status hierarchy. Rising socially requires either playing the game or hacking the game by successfully routing around it. Middle class people are much freer in that regard. Hence, striver class evangelicals are much more aligned with secular elite culture and norms than middle class evangelicals to whom those social signals are less salient. That’s not to say that culture warriors and seeker sensitives are not also tribal in some respects, but they are not as controlled by the need to position themselves to rise socially into the upper strata of society.

I think this divide also affects other environments. The city where I live is a mix of middle class and striver class, and some of the conflict we do have is probably a result of these differing orientations. These groups want different things out of life for themselves and their cities.

Not everyone falls into these two classes. Some people are born elites, for example. Others are part of particular subcultures. But the middle class vs. striver class divide is one of the most important distinctions to keep in mind when analyzing society, and also simply understanding the people we interact with in our daily lives.