Liberals Love the Masses; They Just Don't Want to be Seen With Them

WaPo fashion editor/political hostaetwoman waxes poetical about the Kennedys' glorious style.

MKH contrasts this with Givan's disdain of the dress of Chief Justice Roberts' pre-school children.

My big thing, which I've been saying since I started this blog, is that political liberalism is largely an affectation of class-conscious social climbers, who adopt the manners and habits of the classes above them (or what they imagine to be the habits and manners of the classes above them). And very high on that list is political liberalism.

But in trivial manners of taste, too, the bourgeois bohemian class (David Brooks' most famous coinage; ironically enough, he made fun of bobos before confirming he was in fact a dues-paying member of that class*) perpetually seeks to differentiate itself from the tacky lower classes through signalling and self-declaration. Through a thousand affectations, liberals -- including yuppie "conservatives" like Brooks -- are determined to signal that they occupy a higher station.

* Correction: Actually, reading that article about bobos, I see Brooks has always admitted he's a bobo himself.

posted by Ace at 01:19 PM

| Access Comments