The Secret Conservatism of Upper-Middle-Class Parents
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The Secret Conservatism of Upper-Middle-Class Parents
Rob Henderson<br>Aug 02, 2026
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A version of this article was originally published in the Washington Post under the title “The latest data on baby names reveals a progressive paradox.”
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Share<br>Give a gift subscription<br>The most progressive parents in the United States are giving their children the most traditional names.<br>The latest baby name data from Washington, D.C., reads like a roll call of 19th-century senators and their wives. Lucy, Eleanor and Caroline for girls. Charles, John and George for boys. These are not the names you might expect from one of the most progressive cities in the country.<br>The same pattern exists in New York, where some of the most popular baby names include Charlotte, Emma, Henry and Theodore, according to newly released state name data.<br>Upper-middle-class professionals often talk a big game about openness, inclusion and social experimentation. They tend to say that people should be free to invent themselves. When psychologists Michele Gelfand and Jesse Harrington asked survey respondents in 2018 to list words that came to mind when they heard the word “rules,” upper-class respondents were more likely than others to write down negative words such as “bad,” “frustrating” and “constricting.”<br>They are wary of old rules and outdated hierarchies. Baby name experts told NBC News that ridiculing an unusual name can reveal “uncomfortable classism.” The unease suggests that even those who preach against the judgment know it is real.<br>So affluent parents opt for baby names such as Amelia, Isabella, James and Sebastian. They know that despite their professed openness, “safe” names tend to confer benefits in the real world.<br>Indeed, research has found that people with unusual or hard-to-pronounce names can face penalties. An analysis of 500 attorneys revealed that the harder an attorney’s name was to pronounce, the lower he or she was likely to be in the firm’s hierarchy.<br>People with options choose the safest ones for their own children, while praising risk and novelty for everyone else. They talk the ’60s and walk the ’50s.<br>I coined a term for this pattern: “luxury beliefs.” These are ideas that confer status on the affluent while imposing costs on people further down the socioeconomic ladder. Expressing a luxury belief raises your status. The costs fall on other people. And the people who espouse the belief are protected from those costs.<br>Most people who hold luxury beliefs are sincere. But there are also people who express these views for cynical reasons — to protect their reputations or advance their careers. They don’t necessarily believe what they are saying. But they know that saying it pays off. Just as some people buy expensive objects they don’t really like to impress their social circles, they may also espouse luxury beliefs.<br>Names fit the pattern. An educated professional in a blue city may say that all names are equally valid. Or she might go one step further and say that unconventional names should be celebrated. She might even go so far as to suggest that giving your child a traditional name is a sign of unoriginality or narrow-mindedness. Still, when the birth certificate arrives, she writes down Lucy.<br>J. Eric Oliver, a political scientist, has studied naming patterns and found that educated mothers tend to favor common, conventional names.<br>Unsurprisingly, educated liberal parents were more likely than educated conservative parents to choose unusual names.<br>However, such names were different from those favored by parents lower on the socioeconomic ladder. Less-educated mothers were more likely to invent new names or use unconventional spellings for familiar ones.<br>When affluent liberal parents choose unusual names, though, they tend to favor obscure cultural or literary references. Think of names like Esmé, Emerson or Archimedes. Oliver has argued that this is a way to demonstrate a “sense of cultural superiority.”<br>Similarly, economist Steven Levitt has said that “the primary purpose, when a parent gives a name, is to impress their friends that they are whatever kind of person that they want to be.”<br>Names move through the American class system in a downward migration pattern, akin to fashion. Popular names often begin among educated and affluent parents, then drift down the income ladder. Once they become common among less educated families, affluent parents abandon them.<br>This is consistent with other findings indicating that elites shape the social atmosphere in which others make choices. Studies have found that newspaper op-eds can change the minds of the general public and that messages from political elites can measurably shift public opinion. In other words, elites’ openly espoused views affect what other people see as normal, desirable or respectable.<br>This doesn’t mean elite parents sit around...