Systemic Classism

At his new digs, which I’ll probably put in my blogroll today, Scott Alexander posts an open letter to Republicans. Or maybe that’s not what it actually is—it may be a warning to Democrats of the risks their party is taking. It’s titled “A Modest Proposal for Republicans: Use the Word ‘Class'”. If you’ve read Swift’s “A Modest Proposal”, the template for such, it may suggest why I question to whom it is being addressed. It’s a critique of the new incipient upper class, adherents to

a made-up mystery religion that college-educated people invented so they could feel superior to you. Why are they so sure that “some of my best friends are black” doesn’t make you any less racist? Because the whole point is that the only way not to be racist is to master an inscrutable and constantly-changing collection of fashionable shibboleths and opinions which are secretly class norms.

In the piece you’ll find a number of themes I’ve sounded here pretty regularly over the years. That insisting that jobs that don’t pragmatically don’t require a college education require one which is actually a strategy for limiting access and subsidizing college administrators. Evidence for that includes that we’re spending three times as much in real terms on college education as we did thirty years ago but that’s not reflected in the wages of college professors—it’s reflected in administration payrolls.

That populist Republicans are erring in not making common cause with people whose beliefs are closer to theirs than they are to those of the Democratic leadership which includes many of the constituencies on which Democrats have depended for the last 80 years as well as those they’re depending on for the future.

It’s long and a bit hard to excerpt but I recommend reading the whole thing.

Here’s another snippet, on how greatly separated the mainstream media are from most Americans:

67% of US families watch the Super Bowl – what percent of New York Times editors and reporters do? 20% of Americans go to religious services weekly – how many of those work for the New York Times? How come 96% of political donations from journalists go to Democrats? Your job is to take a page from the Democratic playbook and insist there is no reason any of this could be true except systemic classism, that any other explanation is offensive, and it’s the upper-class media’s moral duty to do something about this immediately.

to which I’d add that 20% of Americans drive trucks as their primary vehicles. I wonder how many New York Times, Washington Post, or CNN journalists do? He proposes redubbing the “mainstream media” as “the upper class media”, tying them to the new would-be upper class.