The Back Row Versus The Front Row

The real divide in white America

A woman named Lilly Gaddis recently went viral for a video bemoaning how “theater kids and nerds” run our society. "So, all those nerds in high school, like the weird theater kids and the anime people. You know who I'm talking about, the people we didn't hang out with, so they've grown up now, and they're the ones making the laws," Gaddis warned in her TikTok.

She says these “dorks” like Mark Zuckerberg never got laid and now they’re taking out their resentment with terrible policies. She concluded her video with a rally cry to the cool kids to stand up to these nerds. "They were massive losers in high school, and they're massive losers now. It's time to put the nerds back in their place,” she exclaimed.

This video was a hit with RW Twitter and conservatives. It aligns with a popular conception on that right-wingers were the popular jocks in high school while the libs were the nerds. It’s obviously reassuring to imagine that your side are the cool kids and the other side are the losers. But it’s probably not the best way to imagine politics. If you’ve been in right-wing circles, you realize that most were probably not jocks in high school. That doesn’t mean they’re all weirdos (though there are a fair number of those types). It just means this dynamic doesn’t actually capture the political and social divide among white Americans. 

If we’re going to use a school metaphor for America’s divide, the better dynamic is front row kids versus back row kids. Coined by journalist Chris Arnade when Donald Trump first took the nation by storm in 2016, it  illustrates what separates white conservatives and white liberals. It doesn’t cover the racial divides in America–just what distinguishes white Americans from one another.

According to Arnade, the front row is:

anybody who comes from an elite school, Princeton, Harvard, the Ivies or has a postgraduate degree, Ph.D. They’re mobile, global, and well-educated. Their primary social network is via college and career. That’s how they define themselves, through their job. And within that world intellect is primary. They view the world through a framework of numbers and rational arguments. Faith is irrational, and they see themselves as beyond gender. You can describe this using other frameworks, like “the Acela corridor” types.

The back row, in his opinion: 

encompasses a lot of types of people, but it’s defined by its difference with the front row. It’s not just the “white working class,” it includes minorities, black kids who are stuck in east Buffalo or central Cleveland or Bronx in New York. Mostly they don’t have an education beyond high school degree and if they do it’s kind of cobbled together through trade schools and community colleges and smaller state schools. Their primary social network is via institutions beyond work such as family. And their community is defined geographically, meaning they generally don’t leave where they grew up. They might leave for 5-6 years to go to the military, take jobs that bring them to Alaska for a few years, but they’ll come back.

Arnade imagines this as a traditional class divide between the haves and have-nots. In reality, it’s a bit different.

I mostly agree with Arnade’s assessment of the front row, but I would say its emphasis is on credentials rather than wealth (an underemployed Ph.D would still be front row) and would include the entire upper-middle class, not just the super elites. They are the college-educated whites becoming solid Democratic voters..

I would disagree more with his assessment of the back row. Adding minorities to the mix muddles the picture and makes this a conflict of poor versus rich. That’s not the right way to look at it. Back row kids would include all the less credentialed whites who live in flyover America, both rich and poor. A car mechanic and a millionaire who owns multiple car dealerships would both be in the back row. These are people who didn’t take the credentialed path in life. Some may have gone to college, but not a top-tier school and they didn’t get a graduate degree. Many of these people care deeply about their job and many of their social connections come from their work. What separates them from the back row is how they got ahead in life and their social tastes.

Arnade sees this as a class war, but it’s more of division within a literal classroom. If you were a star student, always raising your hand, and working diligently on homework, you were a person striving to make your way in life. You would develop traits that would make you inherently trust authority and adopt society’s mandated beliefs and values. If the teacher figure displays her pronouns, so do the front row kids. You can imagine the stereotypical front row kid all grown up and now celebrating her law firm meeting its diversity and inclusion goal on LinkedIn. Traditionally, deference to authority and conformity to prevailing norms would be conservative. But that’s not how it works in our present order. Liberalism is the rule, and front row kids adopt it in large part to get ahead.

The back row kids weren’t that big of fans of school. Some focused on football, others on smoking weed. What defines them is that they weren’t killing themselves over homework and worrying about whether they’d get into the Ivy League. They had other concerns. They didn’t like the suck-ups in the front row, raising their hands and trying to please the teacher. They didn’t care about following the rules and knowing what the teacher thinks is right and wrong. They preferred their own way. The stereotypical back row kid didn’t go to college, bounced around jobs until settling on a trade, and now eagerly shares Alex Jones videos about pedophiles on X. 

This class is more willing to challenge authority and question the world around them. They are prone to reach very stupid answers on what the front row is hiding from them, but this mistrust naturally comes from the hostility towards those in power. As Lilly Gaddis articulates, the back row views the front row as a bunch of nerds and themselves as the cool kids deserving of  power. They feel like the have-nots, even if they’ve achieved economic security.

While some back rowers have more money and live better lives than that of their front row peers, they resent the strivers’ cultural and structural power. The front row infuses most of our entertainment, news, and school lesson plans with their ideas and biases. They serve on the federal judiciary, rule the universities, and sit on the corporate boards. What does the back row have? Local city councils and school boards that are still subject to the wrath of the front row if they do something the front row doesn’t like. 

The back row can have a nice life and many of its members do achieve the American Dream. But they don’t have real power–the front row does, and that naturally makes the back row mad. 

This is a good way to view the Trumpist moment in American politics. Conservatives want to own the libs because they see them as smarmy suck-ups who deserve to be taken down a notch. They don’t want to listen to the teacher handing out Pride flags. They want a Twisted Sister-style takeover of the classroom where they put Trump in charge and the front row kids get their comeuppance. 

This isn’t quite the “wholesome” front row and back row divide Chris Arnade imagined. His vision was still rooted in goofball leftism and  envisioned this as a battle between the poor and ultra-rich. It’s better seen as a battle between the credentialed and the un-credentialed, the strivers and the slackers, the academics and the salesmen. The back row isn’t quite a multiracial working class–it just didn’t give as much of a shit about school as the front row.