Lovely. My own daughter, born below "working class" has quit the NYTimes. Six times. Ha! I can't afford that luxury. But hey, no t.v. either. Ever. Thx for "Nailed it," hammering away!
Apropos of Jong's remark's about Palin, Camille Paglia wrote a great piece about her in 2008, I think for Salon, in which she said (and I paraphrase) that Palin was the realization of the American feminist dream--great career, supportive at-home (and good looking) husband, and children. Needless to say, the article didn't sit well.
It's funny - just last night I was thinking about the critical points in my thought evolution that caused me to start to question, and then ultimately turn away from, the Democratic Party many years ago, when I realized they were no longer what they used to be (not that I've drifted toward the Republican Party, either). Similar to you, I suddenly saw the condescending smugness and the "we knew what's best for you" arrogance for what it actually is. It has only gotten worse, and more in your face, since then.
I wonder who the NYT writers and readers are. Were they born very wealthy, with no contact to lower-middle class people? All abstracted as deplorable? Or did they come from a working class background, and have become snobs as they despised their roots?
I think it has to do with both work and social environment. I work as an engineer - the most heart breaking experience I had was when a company I worked for closed the unionized plant, but kept their design engineering offices. I was young, running through the plant to get to a management training program in my Dilbert outfit. All I saw was people 20 years older than me crying, knowing they will never get a job like this again. I worked in finance (market modelling) for a few years - and i notice these guys have never experienced anything like this. Until 2008.
«All I saw was people 20 years older than me crying, knowing they will never get a job like this again.»
From a harsh economic point of view that meant that their labor had become overpriced in a global market, so from that point of view they were price-gouging their employer, and so their employer got rid of them.
If you wanted to have your house repaired and you got the usual bid from Helen in your neighborhood for $20,000 done in 4 weeks, plus pension contribution, 4 paid holidays, paid sickdays, and then Hui or Ramesh from two towns away sent you a bid for $4,000 done in 2 weeks, all included, no pension contributions, no paid holidays, no paid sickdays, what would you do? Think that Helen is great and and you should pay her more than 5 times the market rate or save $16,000 to improve your own living standards instead of hers?
The problem with people that "will never get a job like this again" is that those people have a much higher cost of living in the USA than the people replacing them have in most other countries which are low-income but also lost-cost, while the USA used to be high-income and high-cost and is still high-cost but becoming low-income outside of the upper-middle and upper classes. For the USA to become low-cost would means a lot of real estate, finance, and other rentiers to lose their fantastic margins (for example 30-40% of private pensions go to finance companies).
If one grew up poor or working class and aspired to a middle-class life, NPR, the New Yorker, the NYTimes seemed breadcrumbs to eating cake. But eventually the working class has realized the people who run these organizations didn't live a life of lay-away, eviction, and Greyhound buses. Social media showed us that the culture framing people are different from actual working people. I threw my stack of NYers out when Erica Jong called Sarah Palin white trash and Katie Coric belittled her reading and where she went to school. There aren't enough ALL THINGS CONSIDERED to consider that most people won't ever be able to see themselves as "down with the people" for not flying business class.
Here is the 2008 Jong quote about Palin that made me re-think the NPR infused world:
"White trash America certainly has allure for voters. Some people think rednecks are more nerican than Harvard educated intellectuals of mixed race." (Huffington Post, 2008).
Just love that you do a Commenter of the Week. Go Kathleen! Applaud your highlighting other voices that are trapped behind the Ivy League/DEI/“I’m so much smarter than you” curtain.
To be fair, I’ve known NPR folks and they aren’t rich. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion of them are making median salary and doing the grind like everyone else. Still, one would expect that would increase solidarity not erode it…hence the true issue with intersectional ideology.
I think a more relevant question is whether their families were sufficiently wealthy to enable them to pursue whatever they wanted (finances be damned). Matt has written quite a bit about the shift in demographics (specifically, the new prevalence of privilege and fancy pedigrees) in journalism. Luxury beliefs are much easier to come by when one has parents who can backstop any failed idealistic ambitions, I guess.
One of the little-studied and little-remarked effects of the post-WW2 years was the growth of class stratification between the middle middle class and a "graduate degree aristocracy" at the household income decile just below "1%" status. The Well-Educated Aristocracy often holds views that inveigh against "the wealthy"- but it's like being above the clouds on Mount Olympus. You don't have to be at the summit to enjoy a protected and comfortable life above the clouds. (The Greek pantheon of gods only wishes they had it so good. In 2024 America, everything is amazing...)
I think this explains why Democratic Party tax proposals call for raising income tax rates on the top 1%-2%, rather than including the much larger cohort of the top 10%.
«the growth of class stratification between the middle middle class and a "graduate degree aristocracy" at the household income decile just below "1%" status. [...] why Democratic Party tax proposals call for raising income tax rates on the top 1%-2%, rather than including the much larger cohort of the top 10%»
That is still using "identity politics" markers like education to associate with political positions, but politics is by and large about money, about material interests, and the difference is between the 20-40% of upper middle class people with real estate in rising markets (and often the same people also have good defined benefit pensions).
A lot of young (and not just) members of the "graduate degree aristocracy" live in tiny flats paying huge rents and will have tiny pensions, while a lot of older members of the at-most-community-college live in 4 bedroom houses or large city flats they bought for cheap in the 19870-1990s and have comfortable defined benefit pensions.
Many of those at-most-community-college oldies who fought to squeeze higher wages and pensions out of corporate profits and higher taxes for welfare out of higher income taxpayers now vote for lower wages and pensions and lower taxes and welfare because that is "socialism" (because it goes to someone other than themselves).
“It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”
I didn't really intend my comment to focus on economics (although that's how it reads.) It was intended to be more about Ontology.
I was trying to make note of the ontological dilemma of growing up safe, secure, nice, and polite amid safe, secure, nice and polite surroundings, and then entering into the rest of the world naive and trusting, imagining that kindness will always be taken and given in kind- instead of kindness potentially being taken as weakness and worked, either through threat and intimidation or through con games and deception. Liberals who grow up in placid and cheery environments have a tendency to assume that everyone is going to recognize, respect, and approve a default stance of assuming common trust and benevolence from the jump. It doesn't work that way. Ground rules for human social conduct are different in tougher circumstances, and tougher circumstances abound. Oppression doesn't just come from the top of the institutions of Power; it can also show up from below. (The refusal to admit that possibility is one of the fatal flaws of doctrinaire Marxism.) And swindlers can come from any class background.
I don't view people growing up in fortunate circumstances as some enemy class of everyone else. That's vulgar Marxism. (It would also require me to be self-hating, which I'm not.) A safe and secure social climate for childhood and early youth should be more like a common right than an accident of birth. It would be a really bogus goal to seek to get rid of "privileges" like living life in a kind, civil, and trusting community, in the name of equality and equity.
It's just that actually achieving that social climate is about more than politicians legislating liberal nostrums targeting problems of institutional oppression. As many of the people who live in the most crime-beleaguered neighborhoods will tell them. If they're willing to ask. On that score, the perspective of many of the liberal top 10% contingent is unbalanced to the point of fatuity. They think they know already. The "left-liberal" contingent tends to construct their stated political stance mostly as a way of feeling good about themselves (without ever having any common touch with the people whose fate they seek to improve.) A sort of secular piety, with no special urgency to it.
That said, at least part of the left-liberal stance, particularly by the wealthy, is related to a felt obligation to not act like selfish racist people. People from affluent and wealthy families who ascribe to right-wing views often have another kind of unbalanced ontology: they view their privileged backgrounds as proof of their intrinsic merit, and as a result they're prone to act in frightfully selfish and amoral ways.
So while the limousine liberals of the Left often lack the fortitude to test their beliefs and remedies to see whether they're real or illusory, at least they're rich people who don't act like this:
All too many affluent or wealthy liberals have a terrible tin ear for communicating with ordinary Americans, and their public policy solutions are too often more about what they would prefer to think than about what's actually happening. But at least they aren't Tate Reeves and his crew.
Yes - the top 10% (and really the top 1%) are in their corner to a far greater extent than would be possible if the party hadn't abandoned most of its former base. I just keep waiting for most of its former base to realize it. It's too easy to distract/bamboozle them with other (free) tricks, I'm afraid.
So Erica Jong went from Fear of Flying to Fear of Flying Coach? 😁
Spit out my coffee. Thank you!
LOL - well played.
Thank you for this morning laugh
Kathleen, you nailed it with a vengeance.
Lovely. My own daughter, born below "working class" has quit the NYTimes. Six times. Ha! I can't afford that luxury. But hey, no t.v. either. Ever. Thx for "Nailed it," hammering away!
Apropos of Jong's remark's about Palin, Camille Paglia wrote a great piece about her in 2008, I think for Salon, in which she said (and I paraphrase) that Palin was the realization of the American feminist dream--great career, supportive at-home (and good looking) husband, and children. Needless to say, the article didn't sit well.
Spot-on, Kathleen.
It's funny - just last night I was thinking about the critical points in my thought evolution that caused me to start to question, and then ultimately turn away from, the Democratic Party many years ago, when I realized they were no longer what they used to be (not that I've drifted toward the Republican Party, either). Similar to you, I suddenly saw the condescending smugness and the "we knew what's best for you" arrogance for what it actually is. It has only gotten worse, and more in your face, since then.
Regarding Rednecks vs. mixed race Harvard types..... I don't think, I know who is more American. It sure isn't those in Cambridge.
Congrats, Kathleen! Spot on!
I wonder who the NYT writers and readers are. Were they born very wealthy, with no contact to lower-middle class people? All abstracted as deplorable? Or did they come from a working class background, and have become snobs as they despised their roots?
I think it has to do with both work and social environment. I work as an engineer - the most heart breaking experience I had was when a company I worked for closed the unionized plant, but kept their design engineering offices. I was young, running through the plant to get to a management training program in my Dilbert outfit. All I saw was people 20 years older than me crying, knowing they will never get a job like this again. I worked in finance (market modelling) for a few years - and i notice these guys have never experienced anything like this. Until 2008.
«All I saw was people 20 years older than me crying, knowing they will never get a job like this again.»
From a harsh economic point of view that meant that their labor had become overpriced in a global market, so from that point of view they were price-gouging their employer, and so their employer got rid of them.
If you wanted to have your house repaired and you got the usual bid from Helen in your neighborhood for $20,000 done in 4 weeks, plus pension contribution, 4 paid holidays, paid sickdays, and then Hui or Ramesh from two towns away sent you a bid for $4,000 done in 2 weeks, all included, no pension contributions, no paid holidays, no paid sickdays, what would you do? Think that Helen is great and and you should pay her more than 5 times the market rate or save $16,000 to improve your own living standards instead of hers?
The problem with people that "will never get a job like this again" is that those people have a much higher cost of living in the USA than the people replacing them have in most other countries which are low-income but also lost-cost, while the USA used to be high-income and high-cost and is still high-cost but becoming low-income outside of the upper-middle and upper classes. For the USA to become low-cost would means a lot of real estate, finance, and other rentiers to lose their fantastic margins (for example 30-40% of private pensions go to finance companies).
I have often enjoyed Ms. McCook's comments on these boards over the past 5 years!
To help with my assisted listening applications, could we get the comment typed out? I have a hard time zooming in to read the comment.
Overall love the idea though!
If one grew up poor or working class and aspired to a middle-class life, NPR, the New Yorker, the NYTimes seemed breadcrumbs to eating cake. But eventually the working class has realized the people who run these organizations didn't live a life of lay-away, eviction, and Greyhound buses. Social media showed us that the culture framing people are different from actual working people. I threw my stack of NYers out when Erica Jong called Sarah Palin white trash and Katie Coric belittled her reading and where she went to school. There aren't enough ALL THINGS CONSIDERED to consider that most people won't ever be able to see themselves as "down with the people" for not flying business class.
Here is the 2008 Jong quote about Palin that made me re-think the NPR infused world:
"White trash America certainly has allure for voters. Some people think rednecks are more nerican than Harvard educated intellectuals of mixed race." (Huffington Post, 2008).
Told you it would come to this... Remember you heard this first from from a Blue Ridge Hillbilly!
Nice framing Kathleen!
“All Things NOT Considered” should be the name of NPR’s program.
Just love that you do a Commenter of the Week. Go Kathleen! Applaud your highlighting other voices that are trapped behind the Ivy League/DEI/“I’m so much smarter than you” curtain.
Kathleen is one of the commenters here that is always dropping truth bombs! Appreciate reading her input!
To be fair, I’ve known NPR folks and they aren’t rich. I wouldn’t be surprised if a significant portion of them are making median salary and doing the grind like everyone else. Still, one would expect that would increase solidarity not erode it…hence the true issue with intersectional ideology.
I think a more relevant question is whether their families were sufficiently wealthy to enable them to pursue whatever they wanted (finances be damned). Matt has written quite a bit about the shift in demographics (specifically, the new prevalence of privilege and fancy pedigrees) in journalism. Luxury beliefs are much easier to come by when one has parents who can backstop any failed idealistic ambitions, I guess.
One of the little-studied and little-remarked effects of the post-WW2 years was the growth of class stratification between the middle middle class and a "graduate degree aristocracy" at the household income decile just below "1%" status. The Well-Educated Aristocracy often holds views that inveigh against "the wealthy"- but it's like being above the clouds on Mount Olympus. You don't have to be at the summit to enjoy a protected and comfortable life above the clouds. (The Greek pantheon of gods only wishes they had it so good. In 2024 America, everything is amazing...)
I think this explains why Democratic Party tax proposals call for raising income tax rates on the top 1%-2%, rather than including the much larger cohort of the top 10%.
http://www.mybudget360.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/12/income-percentile.jpg
«the growth of class stratification between the middle middle class and a "graduate degree aristocracy" at the household income decile just below "1%" status. [...] why Democratic Party tax proposals call for raising income tax rates on the top 1%-2%, rather than including the much larger cohort of the top 10%»
That is still using "identity politics" markers like education to associate with political positions, but politics is by and large about money, about material interests, and the difference is between the 20-40% of upper middle class people with real estate in rising markets (and often the same people also have good defined benefit pensions).
A lot of young (and not just) members of the "graduate degree aristocracy" live in tiny flats paying huge rents and will have tiny pensions, while a lot of older members of the at-most-community-college live in 4 bedroom houses or large city flats they bought for cheap in the 19870-1990s and have comfortable defined benefit pensions.
Many of those at-most-community-college oldies who fought to squeeze higher wages and pensions out of corporate profits and higher taxes for welfare out of higher income taxpayers now vote for lower wages and pensions and lower taxes and welfare because that is "socialism" (because it goes to someone other than themselves).
https://blissex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/dt19890418-1.gif
https://blissex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/poliboomerjustmovecheaprent.jpg
https://blissex.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/poliboomerhadallleftusbill.jpg
David Frum, a semi-sensible Republican, wrote already in 2011:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/conservatives-david-frum-2011-11/index4.html
“It’s fine to be unconcerned that the rich are getting richer, but blind to deny that middle-class wages have stagnated or worse over the past dozen years. In the aftershock of 2008, large numbers of Americans feel exploited and abused. Rather than workable solutions, my party is offering low taxes for the currently rich and high spending for the currently old, to be followed by who-knows-what and who-the-hell-cares. This isn’t conservatism; it’s a going-out-of-business sale for the baby-boom generation.”
Your observations are all valid.
I didn't really intend my comment to focus on economics (although that's how it reads.) It was intended to be more about Ontology.
I was trying to make note of the ontological dilemma of growing up safe, secure, nice, and polite amid safe, secure, nice and polite surroundings, and then entering into the rest of the world naive and trusting, imagining that kindness will always be taken and given in kind- instead of kindness potentially being taken as weakness and worked, either through threat and intimidation or through con games and deception. Liberals who grow up in placid and cheery environments have a tendency to assume that everyone is going to recognize, respect, and approve a default stance of assuming common trust and benevolence from the jump. It doesn't work that way. Ground rules for human social conduct are different in tougher circumstances, and tougher circumstances abound. Oppression doesn't just come from the top of the institutions of Power; it can also show up from below. (The refusal to admit that possibility is one of the fatal flaws of doctrinaire Marxism.) And swindlers can come from any class background.
I don't view people growing up in fortunate circumstances as some enemy class of everyone else. That's vulgar Marxism. (It would also require me to be self-hating, which I'm not.) A safe and secure social climate for childhood and early youth should be more like a common right than an accident of birth. It would be a really bogus goal to seek to get rid of "privileges" like living life in a kind, civil, and trusting community, in the name of equality and equity.
It's just that actually achieving that social climate is about more than politicians legislating liberal nostrums targeting problems of institutional oppression. As many of the people who live in the most crime-beleaguered neighborhoods will tell them. If they're willing to ask. On that score, the perspective of many of the liberal top 10% contingent is unbalanced to the point of fatuity. They think they know already. The "left-liberal" contingent tends to construct their stated political stance mostly as a way of feeling good about themselves (without ever having any common touch with the people whose fate they seek to improve.) A sort of secular piety, with no special urgency to it.
That said, at least part of the left-liberal stance, particularly by the wealthy, is related to a felt obligation to not act like selfish racist people. People from affluent and wealthy families who ascribe to right-wing views often have another kind of unbalanced ontology: they view their privileged backgrounds as proof of their intrinsic merit, and as a result they're prone to act in frightfully selfish and amoral ways.
So while the limousine liberals of the Left often lack the fortitude to test their beliefs and remedies to see whether they're real or illusory, at least they're rich people who don't act like this:
https://www.localmemphis.com/article/news/politics/mississippi-gov-tate-reeves-played-part-delaying-repairs-jackson-water-system/522-39311431-7621-437b-9ed4-d5e589e9a4f9
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tate_Reeves
All too many affluent or wealthy liberals have a terrible tin ear for communicating with ordinary Americans, and their public policy solutions are too often more about what they would prefer to think than about what's actually happening. But at least they aren't Tate Reeves and his crew.
Yes - the top 10% (and really the top 1%) are in their corner to a far greater extent than would be possible if the party hadn't abandoned most of its former base. I just keep waiting for most of its former base to realize it. It's too easy to distract/bamboozle them with other (free) tricks, I'm afraid.