Rage of the Falling Elite - Rob Henderson's Newsletter
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Rage of the Falling Elite<br>How downward mobility fuels radical politics
Rob Henderson<br>Sep 21, 2025
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Share<br>Give a gift subscription<br>In America, we love a rags-to-riches tale. Think of Andrew Carnegie, the Scottish immigrant who rose from bobbin boy to steel magnate; Oprah Winfrey, who grew up poor in rural Mississippi; even Elon Musk, the awkward South African transplant who transformed himself into the richest man alive.<br>These stories are endlessly recycled because they affirm a central American creed: that each generation can surpass the one before.<br>Today, however, that creed is starting to creak. In 2025, the most combustible force in American society isn’t upward mobility, but its opposite.<br>It’s easy to laugh at the caricature of the wealthy progressive—taking a knee in Brooklyn for Black Lives Matter, occupying a quad at Harvard for Palestine, or waving a placard outside the headquarters of a Fortune 500 company in the name of climate. Yet the radicalization of seemingly well-off people is one of the defining political developments of the past decade.<br>Consider how the upper middle classes lionized Luigi Mangione , who is accused of killing the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. Or how they propelled the socialist Zohran Mamdani toward becoming the next mayor of New York.<br>The children of affluence appear to be mobilizing—and boy, do they want you to know about it.<br>But what is really happening here? Why are people who appear to have “made it” rallying to causes at odds with their own standing?<br>The answer lies in a less romantic story than Carnegie’s or Oprah’s. It is the story of downward mobility.
For generations, Americans assumed that their children would live better than they did. Today, that assumption no longer holds. In fact, the higher your parents’ income, the less likely you are to match it.<br>According to The Pew Charitable Trusts , fewer than four in 10 children born into the richest fifth of households stay there; more than one in 10 fall all the way to the bottom fifth. Similarly, a 2014 study in The Quarterly Journal of Economics found that while 36.5 percent of children born to parents in the top income quintile remain there as adults, 10.9 percent fall to the bottom quintile.<br>Sociologist Musa al-Gharbi, in his 2024 book, We Have Never Been Woke , argues that this downward mobility of children born into wealth is the psychological engine of contemporary politics. This may look like a trivial problem—the petty disappointments of a small slice of America—but the unhappiness of this group, raised to expect the world and denied it, has outsize consequences.<br>To be clear, this cohort has never faced genuine poverty. Still, they have experienced the sting of loss: They came of age after the Great Recession, watched job security fade as the digital economy made their skills obsolete, and learned that highly coveted jobs in academia, media, and politics were far fewer than promised. These disappointments, al-Gharbi writes, helped power the Great Awokening. Many disillusioned strivers aimed their anger at the system they believed had failed them, and at the lucky few who did manage to retain or enhance their class position.
Unlike the working classes they so often claim to represent, these downwardly mobile elites remain armed with the tools of their upbringing: degrees, contacts, cultural fluency. They may no longer have the bank accounts their parents did, but they retain platforms in media, academia, and politics through which to broadcast their grievances. Given these advantages—or perhaps the right word is privileges—it should come as no surprise that their concerns, which seem to the average American profoundly niche, have dominated the cultural conversation.<br>Some of this downward mobility is voluntary. Al-Gharbi notes that many young, college-educated people would prefer “to be a freelance writer or a part-time contingent faculty member rather than work as a manager at a Cheesecake Factory.” The dream is artistic freedom and flexible work. The reality is disillusionment when prosperity does not follow.<br>Such disappointment isn’t totally new. George Orwell’s Keep the Aspidistra Flying follows a Cambridge-educated poet who abandons his advertising career, squanders his inheritance, and slides into genteel poverty. HBO’s Girls replayed the same theme for a new generation: Brooklynites with cultural capital but precarious incomes, simultaneously privileged and resentful. The details change, but the shape of the story remains the same—raised in affluence, buoyed by expectation, they discover too late that their choices and the system cannot sustain them.<br>What is different today, however, is how the disillusion now manifests itself. When reality disappoints those raised in privilege, the gap between expectation and outcome produces rage. Behavioral economics has long...