When the going gets tough, the tough go golfing
By These sublimely clueless musings from Lisa Schiffern at the Corner illustrate the strange belief system of the GOP’s true ideological base, which is made up mostly of the American version of what Orwell called “the lower upper class.” Axioms which are key to that system include:
(1) The hardest-working people in America can generally be found at an alumni mixer sponsored by any of our better colleges and universities.
(2) These people got into those schools and then made partner at Latham & Watkins because they worked harder than their fellow Americans.
(3) Raising the marginal federal income tax rate by three percent on the richest 1.5% of Americans is a form of “demonization.”
(4) A low-seven figure annual income does not make you rich. It makes you part of the “working affluent.”
Really, what can one say? Obviously anybody who can believe (1) hasn’t done a day of genuinely hard work in her entire life, and has no idea what that phrase even means. Beyond this the whole post is a textbook example of how utterly blind people like this are to class privilege in general, and what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultural capital” in particular. Can Schiffern even imagine what it’s like to work at a job where you have to ask someone’s permission to go to the bathroom? Can she conceive of what it means to be in a situation where showing any resistance to an employer’s abusive and/or illegal behavior means taking a serious risk that you won’t be able to pay the rent this month? Does she really think there’s a tight correlation between maintaining a virtuous character and who gets into Princeton? Does she actually think that doctors and lawyers and such are the people who, to quote Orwell again, “make the wheels go round?”
Good grief.