Middle class.

Within sociology, the term middle class denotes the position within a nation’s class system located between the society’s elites (or upper class) and the lower class. The middle class, then, is one of several social classes identified by sociologists and the media, and although the differentiation between the upper, middle, and lower classes of a society may seem readily apparent, it is often difficult to accurately determine what constitutes membership in each of these classes and where one class ends and another begins. Sociologists and economists differ in the definitions of who and what constitutes the middle class in twenty-first century American society, as several important social and economic changes over the past fifty years have blurred the boundaries between classes, thus rendering them much less rigid than in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Nevertheless, the middle class is often still perceived as the bedrock of American society, and politicians often deliberately attempt to appeal to middle class voters.