Detroit's robust unions shaped the very idea of an American middle class; figures as diverse as Henry Ford, Reinhold Niebuhr and Berry Gordy began their world-changing careers there.
Canby cut a typically east-coast American middle-class figure.
She is a non-establishment, lower middle-class figure.
I can walk for half an hour or more and see nothing more than the occasional middle-class figure in the distance.
Mr. Glover played the conservative, middle-class figure, the one with the family and the lawn and the suit and the boat, while Mr. Gibson played the more explosive, unpredictable, dangerous half of the pair.
This, in part, is what dooms to irrelevance any attempt by the middle-class figures who now dominate the Labour party to paint Cameron as "out of touch" just because of his education at Eton: for the overwhelming majority of the British people, the Oxford-educated Eds Miliband and Balls will seem as remote from their lives.
By his over-optimistic reckoning there are almost 300m people in the middle class, a figure which will rise above 650m a decade from now.
But even when we take the latter out, the overwhelming majority in that group of "losers" are from the "old, conventional" rich world (labeled notionally "US lower middle class" in figure).
Not surprisingly, 9 out of 10 such "winners" were from the "resurgent Asia" (they are notionally labeled "China's middle class" in the figure).
Now here come the Kochs, with their oil fortune and their naked attempt to buy the election for Romney -- living proof for voters that Romney has an agenda, and the middle class doesn't figure into it, except as the easy mark.
