Middle-class is tricky as a concept, because it is defined, more or less, as "not". Middle class is not upper, nor lower class. Those two have definitions, it does not. It is simply the remainder, defined as what's left, between the top of the lower class, and the bottom of the upper class.

A lower class person doesn't own their own home. A truism since the feudal era: Barons owned the land, and you effectively rented it, worked on it for taxes and payments. Now, an upper class person is that Baron. They own lots of land, or are suzerain to a particularly valuable plot like a river gate fortress.

The middle class, then... Own something tiny. One bit of land, not many. And not particularly valuable.

Just an example scenario.

Middle Class has always been a nebulous question, because they simply occupy the space between upper lower class, and lower upper class. To someone of lower-lower class, owning ANY house is upper class. The kulaks can vouch for that one! To someone of upper class, they'd pity the person who owns, but also lives in, a singular teensy semi-detached in the middle of nowhere with less square footage than their cottage. Clearly lower-class.

The conceptual space of "owning enough to be not only safe, but comfortable... But simultaneously not owning enough to be opulent or fully secure" certainly still exists. The middle class certainly still exists. But there's an active effort to remove it. The gap between the "haves" and the "have-nots" has increased exponentially of late, and that exponential growth means the gap just keeps getting bigger. I'm no commie, I don't think such a gap is fundamentally unlawful, but it would be better, in my opinion, if both sides were growing just one at a slower rate, rather than one stagnating or even contracting, while the other grows exponentially.

Not a Boomer. But you aren't going back far enough. The concept of a middle class was a delineation between upper and lower classes in the age of serfdom. Free men, not serfs, but not titled nobles either.

It's a much older concept than just what it came to mean in the twentieth century.

Yes, there was a middle class and it started its ascendancy after WWII as a new consumer economy base. Its decline started in the late seventies/early eighties to its current state.

Before all the insanity, I would have argued that Middle class was expanding. I knew tons of people who lived in poor neighborhoods and had nice modern stuff. They could afford it as well. They bought modest homes, filled them, and lived happy lives. The riots went after those homes and neighborhoods.

A middle class existed very much so. Middle class is directly tied to private ownership and control of modest assets. That did/does exist to a greater extent in the USA and some countries. It's why they are trying to make it so we own nothing. And they own everything and make us rent it from them.

I can literally go to most areas of the South and find a thriving and clearly defined "middle class" separate from the poverty/lower class and the rich folks of the town. You can physically see when you move from each neighborhood.

Heck, my wife just last week remarked how different life feels compared to before when she used to live at home and each bill required scrounging up dollars every week, whereas now we just autopay and ignore them while having enough money to just buy things on whims (reasonable things, not like a boat). We bought a house (in this economy!), we have multiple children, and are surrounded by neighbors who mostly are doing about the same. Compared to my homeless and further trailer trash days, I am so many steps above that middle class is the only definition possible.

It exists, people just don't want it to. Because if its still possible, then it means they can't just blame the economy and politics (though those are really bad) for all their "have nots" and have to realize they also just failed to accomplish enough in their life. They'd rather have been nickle and dimed by Taco Bell trips, vacations, and all the other fleeting money losses.

By the time I was old enough to know what it meant, they were already calling it an upper middle class and a lower middle class.

So ... probably not for the past 50 years.

It existed in the US from 1945-2001, the end of WWII to the end of the Clinton administration, if you define "middle class" as a cohort of people able to maintain a one-job household and afford a mortgage on a new house.

The Middle-Class has long existed for quite some time. I can tell you with absolute certainty that it has a unique culture and a unique perspective that I (as an upwardly mobile under-class person) have never really understood and have engaged with.

You're kind of thinking of the Lower Middle-Class people who are buying everything out on credit and can't really afford the payments on their Middle-Class lifestyle.

Actual Middle-Class people see their house as an investment vehicle, and have an IRA (or other such retirement fund), and are attempting to navigate the professional-managerial class social systems in order to give themselves and their kids opportunities within that realm. They have at least $20,000 in savings. To them, golf clubs are expensive, but it's not a big loss to go out and buy some. They DO NOT tolerate shopping at Wal-Mart because they don't like the products, and also don't really like the lower class. When they go out to eat, they think that "The Olive Garden" is bottom of the barrel. They are very NIMBY, and they are typically some kind of faux-Christians that mimick something you'd see off the Hallmark Channel.

Politically, I despise them. They are the kind of "Conservatives" that unironically say shit like, "I hate that I'm forced to chose between Trump and Biden again, they're both as bad as one another. We need real Conservative leadership in this country, with real conservative values, like Paul Ryan!" They are unironic Jeb Bush supporters. As for the middle-class Leftists: they will tell you Obama was the greatest president we ever had, and Joe Biden unified the country. I still see the "Hate Has No Home Here" signs that have been out for 4 straight years.

I hate them.... SO MUCH.

They throw away food ALL THE TIME!!! They never eat left-overs, unless it's "meal prep".

The issue is that they are so intwined in the monetary and social side of maneuvering through the middle-class towards the upper-class that they inherit a lot of luxury beliefs, accept the middle-managerial establishment at face value, and have no real understanding of what it's like to be poor, especially when you have Poverty Thinking. They literally can't help the poor, and most likely they were never actually poor themselves, so they just like to look generous. However, they don't really have the skills, thinking, or connections to actually be upper-class, or manage the kind of finances an upper-class person has to manage; so it remains perpetually out of reach. Getting to that first million dollars in asset wealth is wildly more difficult than getting to the 2nd million, and they don't really know that.