(Found this short essay through Ace of Spades this morning, and found it interesting. The contempt displayed by our political and social bi-coastal elite towards the flyover country, working class has become especially marked of late.)
Participants in the Jan. 6 event are dangerous because they are unbelievers. They cannot be bribed into drinking the fake, racial grievance Kool-Aid at a time when being a “good citizen” means embracing falsehoods, it is this honesty that truly does make them dangerous.
That essay follows pretty closely my theory about “status anxiety” by the “clerisy class.” I notice the author of “Hillbilly Elegy” is now running for the Senate in Ohio. This has brought horror and fear to the clerisy at the Chicago Sun Times.
Vance today is a fixture of the Trumpist right, but that isn’t the way he debuted. Not at all. Rarely does a nonfiction book make the kind of splash “Hillbilly Elegy” did in 2016. I was part of the cheering section. Vance emerged as an authentic voice of the working class ”” a self-styled “hillbilly” no less ”” to declare that the problems of many working-class people were largely self-inflicted.
Yes, we don’t have to take these low class types seriously.