masterplum posted... Another really interesting one
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/09/blame-the-bobos-creative-class/619492/
This seems
really self-aggrandizing as well, albeit in a different way than the Frum piece was.
The right word is escaping me for this type of guilt complex but there's a lot of conflation and overstating going on in Brooks's description of the "creative class" he professes to be a part of is and to be at fault for our current political divide as well as a misdiagnosis and some blindness on what's happening on the right.
Like it's kind of weird to read because he seems to be over-inflating the power and influence of the group he claims to be part of... while at the same time blaming it for a myriad of issues which it isn't really entirely responsible for.
I actually think a microcosm of the whole pretension of the piece can be found in this one sentence. He asks rhetorically, "So who's of a higher social class? The guy in the boat, or the kid with the fancy words?"
- This is an easy question - It's the guy in the boat. Was this supposed to be a stumper?
- The "fancy words" in question here is "Abolish ICE" which isn't very fancy. For someone who places the blame at the feet of the elite snobbery and condescension towards the (white) working class he sure is acting like a model example in categorizing that as "fancy."
- I purposely parenthesize the "white" in white working class there because with perhaps one or two exceptions where he's mostly alluding to someone else's writings he seems to default to "working class" which just *claps* isn't *claps* the *claps* same. This has been a personal pet peeve of mine since coverage of the 2016 election liked to conflate WWC and working class as the same to explain Trump's win. Trump performed well with the WWC, Clinton still won the rest of it. Don't put this shit on everyone else. It's literally the "economic anxiety" shtick all over again.
While he correctly notes some movement within the Democratic party re: less of a focus on things like unions in favor of social/cultural issues it's not like Republicans picked it up. It just ended up fading behind a lot of culture war stuff. Union power diminishing within the Dems
is problematic but where he places the blame on, again, this "creative class" I'll note that it was the 2004
Bush campaign under Rove's direction that really pushed super hard on making social culture war stuff front and center, thinking that by pushing it across the states they could drive turnout in Bush's favor because, at the time, they felt they'd benefit from opposition to gay marriage, etc. But, though on a far lesser scale than what Trump unleashed, once they started feeding their base what they
really wanted (instead of the
GOP elite's dreams of unregulated late-stage capitalism) they couldn't really dial it back and so we've been "fighting" it ever since - again, we've been on this trajectory for a loooong time now - Trump just threw a barrel of gasoline on it. But secondly, I'll note that this isn't some
new phenomena that magically arose over the past two decades or so that would encompass his thesis here - the upper class (economics) has always been anti-union and an element of it has always existed in both parties. Just now the Dems were fighting political battles on more fronts and those of them within the Dems had a prime opportunity to bury it in the priority list for the party as a whole. This is bad and should be undone (though not to the detriment of other issues, we can walk and chew gum at the same time) but wasn't some "creative class" caused problem.
On his misdiagnosis of the right and how they've been "shut out" of the "creative class" when it's more like, for once they started facing something closer to actual competition and took their ball and went home and started their own parallel operation. Conservative voices are shut out of the mainstream media? Last I checked Fox News is
still the #1 network in the ratings. You've got Newsmax trying to toe the line between the crazed parallel world of the fringe right and mainstream (they're carried by a ton of cable providers!), and then OANN for those who even those two aren't quite enough for. Sinclair dominates local news which is the news that arguably has the most insidious impact. So miss me with that, really.
This is a complex issue with many, many,
many contributing factors but if we're looking for primary causes you're going to come a lot closer to the mark with any of: The Southern Strategy, Gingrich's antics in the run-up to the '90s, and racial backlash to Obama's election than anything this article tries for.
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xp1337: Don't you wish there was a spell-checker that told you when you a word out?
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