Episode Details

Some talks stick under your skin. This one did.

On this week’s Keep Going I sat down with Mechele Dickerson, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Law. Her new book is called “The Middle Class New Deal: Restoring Upward Mobility in the American Dream.” It comes out in January 2026.

I picked up the pitch because I have the same nagging feeling everyone else has. The middle class we grew up hearing about feels thin now. Like an old photograph in a cracked frame.

Mechele has spent more than a decade trying to write this book. That part alone makes her a good guest for a show about success and failure.

She started years ago with a book on homeownership. While she worked on that, she kept seeing a larger pattern. Families were not just locked out of houses. They were locked out of everything we used to connect with a stable life. She saw people who made a decent wage yet could not do basic “middle class” things without strain.

So she built a bigger project. She sold the first version of the book to a press. The idea was clear. It is harder than ever for lower and middle income people to become and stay middle class. It is even harder if you are not white. Then the world started shifting under her feet.

The 2016 election hit. Commentators suddenly cared about “middle class anger” and “anxiety.” She did not buy the story as it was told, but she knew she had to respond to it. So she rewrote the book to fit that moment.

Then 2020 arrived. A pandemic tore through the same families she had been studying. You cannot write about money, housing, and work in this country and ignore those years. She rewrote again. That second rewrite blew up. Reviewers tore it apart. The publisher walked away. A decade of work, gone in one email.

This is the point where many people quietly give up. Mechele did something different. She took the hit, walked away for a season, enjoyed Thanksgiving and Christmas, then came back and started from page one. A third draft. New press. New title. Same core idea.

That alone is a lesson. Sometimes the work is right and the timing is wrong. Sometimes you are right and the gatekeeper is wrong. You rest. You come back. You keep going.

The rest of the talk dug into what “middle class” even means. Mechele uses a simple income band, roughly seventy five to one hundred thirty thousand dollars a year. She picked it for a practical reason. It is the range many universities use when they hand out tuition breaks to families they see as “middle income.” It also adjusts over time, which matters.

She is quick to note that income does not land the same in each place. That money looks one way in Abilene, Texas, and another in Austin. Still, the markers are familiar. A home you can afford. A job with health care and some sort of retirement plan. The ability to send your kids to college without wrecking your own future. Maybe a bit put aside for shocks.

Her bluntest point is simple. We did not arrive here by magic. The old middle class was built by policy. The GI Bill sent people like my dad to college. New mortgage rules turned owning a house from a rich person’s trick into something workers could reach. Employers built health and pension plans when they could not raise wages during the war.

We treat those pieces as background now. They are not. They were choices. They could be made again in new forms.

Instead, college costs have climbed far faster than inflation since the eighties. Need blind admission is fading. “Merit” scholarships tilt money toward kids from richer families who look good on paper. Employers use a bachelor’s degree as a filter, so a diploma has become a ticket to even knock on the door.

On housing, the ladder keeps moving up. The ave