In the United States, the phrase “white culture” is often used as though it refers to a coherent, shared inheritance. In practice, it rarely does. What it usually describes is not a culture in the anthropological sense, language, ritual, shared myth, or collective memory, but a default identity shaped by proximity to power.
As the middle class erodes, this illusion is breaking down. Painful, yes, but also clarifying. The disappearance of the “middle” is revealing a truth that has always been present but carefully obscured: the primary division in our society has never been racial. It has been structural.
“White Culture” as a Political Wrapper
Historically, “whiteness” in America was not a stable or inclusive category. Irish, Italian, Slavic, Jewish, and other European groups were once excluded from it. They became “white” over time, not through cultural convergence, but because it became politically and economically useful to expand the category.
Whiteness functioned as a wrapper, a way to group diverse populations under a shared label that implied alignment with power, even when real power remained elsewhere. It flattened differences in language, tradition, religion, and class into a single identity defined mainly by what it was not.
This is why “white culture” often feels hollow. It was never meant to preserve meaning; it was meant to manage hierarchy.
The Middle Class Was a Condition, Not an Inheritance
For much of the 20th century, the American middle class felt stable and enduring. Home ownership, predictable work, and modest upward mobility became associated with normal life. Over time, these conditions were mistaken for cultural traits, signs of responsibility, virtue, or merit.
In reality, they were policy outcomes:
- Postwar industrial growth
- Strong labor protections
- Affordable education
- Accessible housing
- Infrastructure investment
When those conditions changed, the “culture” attributed to them dissolved. This did not represent a moral failure or cultural decay. It revealed that the middle class was never a permanent identity; it was a temporary equilibrium.
As that equilibrium collapses, the fiction that ordinary people were aligned with elites collapses with it.
The Real Divide Has Always Been Extractive
Across history, the consistent line of separation is not between races, nations, or identities, but between those who extract and those who produce.
The titles change:
- Warlords
- Kings
- Governors
- Presidents
- Corporate executives
- Financial elites
The pattern does not.
Extraction follows a familiar sequence:
- First, money
- Then labor and time
- Then land and food
- Finally, agency and dignity
This dynamic is not unique to any ethnicity or era. It appears wherever systems reward accumulation without stewardship and expansion without accountability.
Ordinary people experience the consequences in similar ways: precarity, debt, erosion of community, and declining trust in institutions. This is a global problem.
Acquisition as a Systemic Addiction
It is tempting to frame this problem in moral or personal terms, but that obscures its true nature. The issue is not that certain individuals are uniquely greedy. It is that entire systems are structured to reward acquisition without limit.
In such systems:
- Growth is treated as virtue
- Accumulation substitutes for purpose
- Expansion becomes an end in itself
This produces a form of institutional addiction. No amount is ever enough, because stopping is interpreted as failure. The system must keep taking, not because it serves human needs, but because it is designed to do so.
When people confuse this behavior with “culture,” they misidentify the source of harm.
Why the Disappearing Middle Is Clarifying
The erosion of the middle class is devastating for those living through it. But it also removes a powerful illusion: the idea that most people were only one step away from the ruling class.
As the buffer dissolves, several truths become harder to ignore:
- Most people were never insiders
- Stability was conditional, not guaranteed
- Shared vulnerability cuts across identity lines
This clarity is uncomfortable, but it creates the possibility of real alignment, not based on imagined status, but on lived conditions.
When the fiction of proximity to power collapses, solidarity becomes thinkable again.
Rebuilding Culture From the Ground Up
If “white culture” as a proxy for stability and status is dissolving, what replaces it?
Culture does not originate from institutions or elites. It emerges from:
- Mutual aid
- Skill-sharing
- Local knowledge
- Story, humor, and memory
- Care across generations
These forms of culture persist even when systems fail. In many cases, they survive in spite of extractive power, not because of it.
Rebuilding meaningful culture requires abandoning the idea that worth comes from alignment with authority or accumulation. It requires recognizing that most people, regardless of background, are navigating the same structural pressures.
A Necessary Reckoning
The disappearance of the middle class is not a cultural collapse. It is a reckoning. It exposes how categories like “white culture” functioned less as heritage and more as insulation.
What remains is not emptiness, but opportunity:
- To see the real structure of power
- To reject false divisions
- To rebuild meaning where it has always lived—among people, not above them
The sooner we stop mistaking hierarchy for culture, the sooner we can begin creating something real in its place.
The Wayfinder's Spiral 