The New Class Warfare And An Unexpected Warrior -- From The Right-Wing National Review
Nick Gillespie has a terrific column at the Daily Beast about the derision for the upper middle class -- not all of which is coming from the left:

You may be joining me in the reeducation camps if you have bothered preparing for your kids' college via so-called 529 plans, which allow for tax-exempt gains on higher education savings. Or if you're one of those "upper middle class" types who earn "well into the six-figure range yet don't feel rich, either because of their student loan debt or the enormous cost of the amenities they consider nonnegotiable: living in well-above-average school districts for those with children or living in 'cool' neighborhoods for those without."

Shit. Here I was, thinking that I was in some small way an embodiment of the American Dream. I'm the grandson of immigrants from the poorest parts of Ireland and Italy.

...From such relatively humble, lower-middle-class roots--I even helped my folks cover their utility bills from time to time and paid for my last year of high school out of my own pocket--I worked and borrowed my way through state college and grad school, am helping to raise two kids, and am earning more dough than I ever thought possible (I take comfort in Babe Ruth's assertion that "no man who works for another man is overpaid").

...This new class warfare isn't being waged by a second-generation Weather Underground terrorist or a red-diaper baby at The Nation but by the executive editor of the storied right-wing magazine National Review, Reihan Salam. Writing at Slate, Salam lays into vaguely defined upper middle class people whom he says are polite, largely liberal and Democratic in their voting habits, obsessed with status, and who are "the chief culprits behind the gentrification wave that is driving many poor families out of close-in neighborhoods in Brooklyn, my hometown."

All we care about, he avers, is Whole Foods and Pilates studios and gourmet yogurt and getting our kids into great schools (such as New York's elite public magnet Stuyvesant, or Cornell, or Harvard, all of which Salam attended). In best Nick Carraway fashion, Salam travels with this "tribe" but is not of them: "I can't say I liked these people as a group," he writes, yet "I felt it that it was inevitable that I would live among them."

Yeah, why don't upper-middle-class people send their kids to crap schools and drink shitty coffee and mass-produced beer? Really, just who do we think we are?

...As a first-generation--and quite possibly last-generation--member of the upper-middle-class, let me suggest that guilt isn't going to work, at least not on people like me. I know that I am in no way poor or even just treading water. I don't feel rich really, but I definitely don't feel guilty. Why should I, or anyone else who has prospered through a mix of hard work and luck? I'm confident that my success, such as it is, didn't come at anybody else's expense and I know I've never tried to shut the door behind me. The idea that I should feel bad for finally getting to the place that my grandparents and parents dreamed of for me and my kids is repellent and grossly misplaced.

As my Reason colleague Peter Suderman noted, the real message of "Obama's 529 College Tax Plan Debacle" is that it shows the current welfare state is unsustainable (Salam mentions Suderman's piece in passing but doesn't engage it). As a society, we want too many things but don't want to pay for them.

My suburban-Detroit dad just retired at 88. He worked really hard five days a week selling and renting commercial real estate in Detroit. On the weekends, he'd mow the lawn. Himself. He still mows the lawn himself. At 88. And he sent his three girls to University of Michigan and took us on modest vacations (mostly in the station wagon, for a week in the summer to Camp Michigania -- University of Michigan family camp and to parts of Canada we could drive to).

My dad is a first-generation American, and on my mom's side, my grandpa (her dad) actually was a first-generation American. His dad came over as a peasant from Russia (in the wake of the pogroms) and collected and sold trash for a living -- that is, found metal scrap on the streets of Detroit, sold it for pennies, and sent my grandpa to college (Wayne State University), where he became a doctor.

This is the American dream and it's fucking great.