The white upper middle class is deranging American politics. We should have seen it coming.
In 2010, America’s last famous novelist, Jonathan Franzen, launched on the reading public Freedom, his tale of a striving family headed by Walter and Patty Berglund. They were gentrifiers in St. Paul, Minn. The paterfamilias was a lawyer at the conglomerate 3M but no corporate cutthroat. He biked to work and was in the outreach-and-philanthropy department. The Berglunds were “the super-guilty sort of liberals who needed to forgive everybody so their own good fortune could be forgiven; who lacked the courage of their privilege.”
