Politics & Power Quote by Judith Martin

Leave it to Judith Martin, Miss Manners herself, to skewer American class anxiety with the kind of polite smile that lands like a slap. By naming only variants of the middle class, she turns the national myth of a broad, egalitarian “we” into a deadpan taxonomy of denial. The joke isn’t that class doesn’t exist; it’s that we have trained ourselves to describe it in a way that keeps everyone respectable and no one responsible.

The line works because it captures a uniquely American etiquette around money: you can be comfortable, striving, or “just getting by,” but you’re still allowed the dignity of calling it middle. “Lower middle” is the linguistic trapdoor that lets poverty be acknowledged without ever being fully named. “Upper middle” performs a similar service for the affluent, laundering privilege into hard work and good taste. Martin’s genius is seeing class not as an economic chart but as a social performance - the same terrain her etiquette writing patrols: what we say to avoid saying what we mean.

Context matters: Martin built a career reading the hidden power dynamics in everyday rituals, and this line is basically an RSVP to the American dream. It reveals a culture that treats class as vulgar to discuss directly, then smuggles it back in through the side door of aspiration. The subtext is blunt: we’ve replaced honest categories with comfortable euphemisms, and the comfort is the point.