The point is, Brooks’s young guest was freaked out by salami and tomatoes in a way she wasn’t by enchiladas and refried beans. Though the young woman might have been of Mexican background (Brooks doesn’t say), in a place like Texas, say, Mexican food is ordinary cuisine even working-class white people.
.. I had to live with the disdain of some members of my Louisiana family for my allegedly fancypants and inauthentic tastes. It was all class anxiety on their part, but they found a way to put the knife in emotionally over these things. They were reverse snobs, and were at times really mean about it. I don’t believe that is excusable. That said, the fact that I was far more comfortable moving in cosmopolitan settings, and had more cosmopolitan tastes, meant that I had doors open for me, professionally and otherwise, that they would not have had.
.. I mentioned that when I arrived in Paris, the Dutch friends who were supposed to meet me had left a message at my hotel saying they had to cancel.
“What did you do?” said my dad, with tremendous concern.
“Checked in and spent the next few days exploring Paris on my own,” I said, as if it was no big deal. Because it wasn’t.
My father was visibly astonished.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Said he, “I would have just sat there in the hotel until it was time to go back to the airport.”
He wasn’t joking. He was serious.
.. conservatives tend to be “low openness” individuals — that is, people who are much less willing to try new and unfamiliar things.
.. So when the culture redefines a major life milestone, such as marriage, it trivializes one’s own milestone experience by imbuing it was a sense of contingency, threatens to deprive one’s children of the same experience, and thus threatens to make the generations strangers to one another.
.. This, by the way, is why I have a very short fuse for front-row pretenses to “diversity,” which are usually only skin deep. The white man who only has a high school education, and who lives in a trailer park on the outskirts of Bunkie, La., will never enjoy the privilege of, say, Jerelyn Luther, the black Yale student whose name lives in deserved infamy as Shrieking Girl. The refusal of the front-row Establishment to recognize the reality of class privilege, which is in large part cultural privilege, is a major barrier to meaningful reform. The way front-row kids in power assuage their status anxiety is by hiring more diversity deans, which is a lot easier than confronting the complexities of class.
Over the past generation, members of the college-educated class have become amazingly good at making sure their children retain their privileged status. They have also become devastatingly good at making sure the children of other classes have limited chances to join their ranks.
.. Since 1996, education expenditures among the affluent have increased by almost 300 percent, while education spending among every other group is basically flat.
.. Richard Reeves of the Brookings Institution recently published a book called “Dream Hoarders” detailing some of the structural ways the well educated rig the system.
The most important is residential zoning restrictions. Well-educated people tend to live in places like Portland, New York and San Francisco that have housing and construction rules that keep the poor and less educated away from places with good schools and good job opportunities.
.. zoning restrictions in the nation’s 220 top metro areas lowered aggregate U.S. growth by more than 50 percent from 1964 to 2009.
.. Educated parents live in neighborhoods with the best teachers, they top off their local public school budgets and they benefit from legacy admissions rules, from admissions criteria that reward kids who grow up with lots of enriching travel and from unpaid internships that lead to jobs.
.. I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop.
.. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette.
.. the educated class establishes class barriers not through material consumption and wealth display but by establishing practices that can be accessed only by those who possess rarefied information.
.. To feel at home in opportunity-rich areas, you’ve got to understand the right barre techniques, sport the right baby carrier, have the right podcast, food truck, tea, wine and Pilates tastes, not to mention possess the right attitudes about David Foster Wallace, child-rearing, gender norms and intersectionality.
So different to the countries of old Europe, still weighed down by the legacies of feudalism. British politicians have often felt the need to urge the creation of a “classless” society, looking to America for inspiration as, what historian David Cannadine once described, “the pioneering and prototypical classless society.”
.. A key attraction in socialist systems — the main one, according to Orwell — is the eradication of class distinctions. There were few to eradicate in America. I am sure that one reason Downton Abbey and The Crown so delight American audiences is their depictions of an alien world of class-based status.
.. Class division becomes class stratification when these advantages — and, thus, status — endure across generations. In fact, as I’ll show, upper-middle-class status is passed down to the next generation more effectively than in the past and in the United States more than in other countries.
.. But I think some of the most popular efforts to date have diagnosed the class fracture incorrectly. Some analysts have let the upper-middle class off the hook (yes, that would be you) by pointing at the “super-rich” or “top 1 percent.” Take the new rock star of economic history, Thomas Piketty. For him, inequality is pretty much all about the top 1 percent.
.. This class, according to Murray, is defined as much by elitist culture — tastes and preferences — as by economic standing, and accounts for just 5 percent of the population.
.. Robert Putnam, in Our Kids, has a broader group in mind. “When I speak of kids from ‘upper class’ homes,” he writes, “I simply mean that at least one of their parents (usually both) graduated from college.” This represents, Putnam estimates, “about one third of the population.” Putnam’s concern is really with the bottom third, who he fears are being left behind.
.. my editors would have preferred me to use “upper class,” too. But I stuck with the longer, uglier, wonkier “upper-middle class.” This is not just semantics. If people are encouraged to think inequality is an upper-class problem, something important is lost. Most of us think of the upper class as the thin slice at the very top, but the tectonic plates are separating lower down. It is not just the top 1 percent pulling away, but the top 20 percent.
.. one in seven — adopts the “upper-middle class” description. This is quite similar to the estimates of class size generated by most sociologists, who tend to define the upper-middle class as one composed of professionals or managers, or around 15–20 percent of the working-age population.
.. America’s growing class division does not mean that categorical inequalities on the basis of race, ethnicity, and gender have disappeared. If anything, the relative position of black Americans has worsened in recent years
We know who he alienates by this behavior — and that includes many mainstream Republicans as well as Democrats. But who is the audience he is playing to?
.. Mr. Trump and his die-hard followers delight in the shock value of violating social and political norms. They revel in the thumb in the eye. It’s intrinsic to the president’s appeal to his base, and it’s increasingly clear that either deliberately or impulsively, both his conduct and his policies are aimed at that base and not beyond it.
.. There is something about his swagger, his unabashed embodiment of a time when women were eye candy and arm candy. And there is something about the way he strikes back at women who anger him that seems to resonate for some men.
.. The uncomfortable larger question is whether this president’s behavior is encouraging and unmasking resentments about women’s place in society.
.. “A subset of men whom Trump appeals to is threatened by women in power,” she said. “They feel their dominance in society is threatened. This is not coming — generally — from college-educated men or those in suburban or urban centers with strong economic prospects.”
.. unless other political leaders address class grievances, Mr. Trump’s appeal will continue to resonate.
.. “Trump’s persistent insults to high-profile women play to that part of his base that has long been incensed at a definition of political correctness that includes women, L.G.B.T.Q. people, immigrants and other groups — but leaves out working-class whites nursing the hidden injuries of class,” she said. “So long as class remains unacknowledged as a key source of social disadvantage, Trump’s insults will feel to some of his supporters like a delicious poke-in-the-eye of elites.”
.. Mr. Trump has in fact turned politics into performance art. Some have likened what he does to insult comedy of the type practiced by Don Rickles. But insult comics are quick to point out that there is a crucial difference. “Insult comedy underneath it all is about affection,”
.. “I saw Trump be a roastmaster at the Friars Club, but he doesn’t have the skill to do this kind of thing with the right intention underneath it. Is it entertaining to some? I don’t find these tweets entertaining in the least. It’s off-putting and it gets to a scary bully level.”
.. Others were overjoyed that Mr. Trump was upsetting “snowflakes,”
.. others believed that the president was justifiably striking back against attacks on him from Ms. Brzezinski and her co-host, Joe Scarborough. Some insisted there was no sexism involved, that women aren’t exempt from criticism and have to learn to take it, just as men do.
.. Ms. Matthews thinks Mr. Trump’s reaction is more visceral than strategic. “He can’t stand to be criticized, especially by a woman, and he can’t stop himself from lashing out,” she said. “There is no strategic audience he is winking and nodding to. However there is a segment of his base that enjoys his political incorrectness — even at this extreme — and I would say his misogyny.
.. Yet criticism, even from Republicans, has not deterred Mr. Trump and some of his supporters in the past — witness how many denounced him over the Access Hollywood tapes. The president has paid no discernible political price for his actions. So that leaves the question very much open whether behavior once ruled unthinkable is again permissible in America today.