This Could Be Fun

Harvey wrote

I have lived on my current street since 1986. I know some people have college degrees, but we have many blue collar peeps and I never asked them if they went to college or not. Before that I had no neighbors (old dirt road far from anyone). Before that I was in college. Before that I lived with my folks.

I'm not sure you can test for this.  In this "job" (head NYSB dude) I live a the world with both flatlanders and mountain peeps.  I'd say ask the people who really know me to figure out whether I am insulated from the realities that face Americans. I can say that I try hard to do it.

It is likely true that many liberals live insulated lives of cultural and intellectual isolation, but it is equally true of conservatives. The construction of a bubble around an individuated life is part of human nature, but with typical idiocy and hypocrisy, American culture has issued a one-way, exclusive indictment against isolation for liberals and no one else. To condemn people of progressive politics for insular thinking and living is the equivalent to prosecuting a petty shoplifter for theft, while ignoring the bank robbery spree of a modern-day John Dillinger. Liberals, by any criteria, are the mildest offenders.

When was the last time any mainstream commentator suggested that a rural, white Christian conservative Sunday School teacher escape her bubble and befriend a group of black lesbians? Can anyone recall ridicule of a right-wing, suburban housepainter who believes God watches his every brushstroke for not attending a public lecture from an award-winning evolutionary biologist?

The absence of criticism against the conservative bubble, which is undeniably smaller and tighter that the liberal bubble, demonstrates that American culture has condescended to the conservative with, to resurrect an old George W. Bush chestnut, “the soft bigotry of low expectations.”

No one reasonable really expects right-wing Christian conservatives to escape their own cocoons. People who applaud when a political candidate proposes banning Muslims from entering the country can know nothing about Islam. Voters can support someone who called Mexican immigrants “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” without ever knowingly meeting a Latino who emigrated from Mexico. This brand of conservative bubble of bigotry and ignorance actually damages the country and results in destructive public policy.

Insulated progressives might adopt snobbery when considering the daily routine of “hillbillies” and “rednecks,” but they actively support political leaders who aim to alleviate poverty. The coating of the conservative bubble is often so dense that it prevents inhabitants from accurately identifying their own interests.

One of the funny-if-it-weren’t-so-sad ironies of America’s political discourse is that many white Republicans display greater outrage when NFL players refuse to stand for the national anthem as a silent protest against police brutality than they do when unarmed black teenagers are shot down in the street. A fun bubble-bursting rhetorical technique for anyone frustrated by a white Republican ranting about the evils of the Black Lives Matter movement is to reply with the inquiry, “Are you black? You look white, but you seem to have some expertise on the issue of black experiences with law enforcement.” I have not yet heard any exhortations against white America for failure to bust out of its racial bubble

The biggest problem with the reductive politics of cultural signifiers is that the signifiers are always in flux. For instance, in his quiz, Charles Murray asked, “Have you or your spouse ever bought a pickup truck?” Fifty years ago, ownership of a pickup truck may have indicated a hardscrabble lifestyle far removed from the metropolitan “bubble” — farmers, ranchers, loggers, and so on. This is no longer true. Despite an enormous decline in agricultural jobs (there was a 14 percent decrease in farm jobs alone from 2001 to 2013), the Ford F-150 (the base model of which starts at $27,000) has become the most popular vehicle in America, especially among those with an annual income of more than $200,000. Anyone with roots in the suburbs can testify that many a cul-de-sac is now lined with beefed-up Rams and Silverados used solely to commute to air-conditioned office jobs. What out-of-touch columnists consider bona-fide symbols of working-class authenticity are often just the hallmarks of well-off white suburbanites with bad taste.

This kind of misguided prejudice is also apparent in liberal circles. A few months ago, Keith Olbermann, the unofficial head of the #Resistance, criticized Trump for hosting Sarah Palin, Ted Nugent, and Kid Rock at the White House, whom he called “trailer park trash.” Classism aside, Olbermann fell into the same trap as Brooks, Murray ,and others — he saw white people with bad fashion sense and assumed they must dwell at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Obviously, all three of Trump’s guests are now multimillionaires, but even pre-fame they were far removed from poverty. Sarah Palin’s hometown of Wasilla, Alaska is a suburb of Anchorage; her father was a science teacher and she enrolled in a four-year college immediately after high school. Ted Nugent was raised in the Chicago suburbs; Kid Rock the Detroit suburbs, where he grew up in a home that was recently put on the market for $1.3 million. Palin, Nugent, and Rock are exactly who the statistics show propelled Trump to victory — the comfortable white middle class.

The working class that actually exists bears little resemblance to the fantasies of the affluent, highly educated hacks who are paid to vomit their thoughts into newspaper columns. The new American working class is far more likely to be bussing tables at Applebee’s than wolfing down reheated appetizers until their Dockers rip. But many columnists put outsize focus on the most traditionally masculine blue-collar professions, many of which make up a negligible percentage of the total workforce. Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans work in manufacturing, and the coal mines of Kevin D. Williamson’s imagination employ just 0.019 percent of all workers. Service workers make up the largest portion of American non-farm laborers, at 71 percent, and the fastest-growing job markets are in nursing and caretaking, both of which overwhelmingly employ non-white women. When Brooks writes that to be accepted into the upper class, one must “possess the right attitudes about gender norms and intersectionality,” we know what he means. The implication is that the working-class subject is old, white, and male by default, and that the inherently elite concepts of racism and sexism are thrust upon him by the well-off and well-educated. This is a strawman, created so that Brooks can avoid the fracas he would provoke if he openly argued against whatever he means by “gender norms.” Either way, if having a progressive take on gender were really a requirement for entering the elite, the decidedly retrograde Brooks would be on the other side of that gourmet sandwich counter