CDFingers wrote: Tue Aug 17, 2021 8:52 am https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/ar ... ss/619492/

It's an excellent article that took me three days to read and digest. The main premise is that the generation who's about 35 years old ("the creative class") right about now are the key to the future. Well, duh. But it's way more than that in the article. Brooks goes through how this generation became itself and how it has control but has no strategy yet for the future. This is a very rich treatment, so quotes just don't cut it. He provides context for demographic groups he analyzes. Very good article, rich like a fat sauce in winter.

CDFingers

Bobo is a portmanteau word used to describe the socio-economic bourgeois-bohemian group in France, the French analogue to the English notion of the "champagne socialist". The term is used extensively in Paris, France, where it originates. The geographer Christophe Guilluy has used the term to describe France's elite class, who he accuses of being responsible for many of France's current problems.

The term was originally introduced into the English language by the cultural commentator David Brooks to describe the 1990s descendants of the yuppies in the book Bobos in Paradise (2000). Brooks describes Bobos as "highly educated folk who have one foot in the bohemian world of creativity and another foot in the bourgeois realm of ambition and worldly success"

If creative-class types just worked hard and made more money than other people, that might not cause such acute political conflict. What causes psychic crisis are the whiffs of “smarter than” and “more enlightened than” and “more tolerant than” that the creative class gives off. People who feel that they have been rendered invisible will do anything to make themselves visible; people who feel humiliated will avenge their humiliation. Donald Trump didn’t win in 2016 because he had a fantastic health-care plan. He won because he made the white working class feel heard.

The bobos believe in human dignity and classical liberalism—free speech, open inquiry, tolerance of different viewpoints, personal autonomy, and pluralism—but our class has not delivered for the people outside it. On our watch, government and other public institutions have deteriorated. Part of the problem is that, steeped in an outsider, pseudo-rebel ethos, we never accepted the fact that we were a leadership class, never took on the institutional responsibilities that go with that acceptance, never got to know or work with people not in our class, and so never earned the legitimacy and trust that is required if any group is going to effectively lead. According to the Institute for Advanced Studies in Culture, 65 percent of Americans believe that “the most educated and successful people in America are more interested in serving themselves than in serving the common good.”

Into this fraught, every-which-way class conflict walks Joe Biden. Weirdly, he stands outside it.

Biden is the first president since Ronald Reagan without a degree from an Ivy League university. His sensibility was formed not in the meritocracy but in the working-class neighborhoods of his youth. Condescension is alien to his nature. He has little interest in the culture-war issues that drive those at the top of the hierarchies, and spent his 2020 campaign studiously avoiding them. Biden gets prickly when he is surrounded by intellectual preening; he’s most comfortable hanging around with union guys who don’t pull that crap.

Biden’s working-class version of progressivism is a relic from the pre-bobo era. His programs—his COVID-relief law, his infrastructure bill, his family-support proposal—represent efforts to funnel resources to those who have not graduated from college and who have been left behind by the creative-class economy. As Biden boasted in an April speech to a Joint Session of Congress, “Nearly 90 percent of the infrastructure jobs created in the American Jobs Plan do not require a college degree; 75 percent don’t require an associate’s degree.” Those are his people.

If there is an economic solution to the class chasms that have opened up in America, the Biden legislative package is surely it. It would narrow the income gaps that breed much of today’s class animosity.

lurker wrote: Tue Aug 17, 2021 7:45 pmthank you.

If creative-class types just worked hard and made more money than other people, that might not cause such acute political conflict. What causes psychic crisis are the whiffs of “smarter than” and “more enlightened than” and “more tolerant than” that the creative class gives off.

shinzen wrote: Wed Aug 18, 2021 10:20 am Let's not copy entire articles and post them here- don't want any issues with the actual owners of said content.

YankeeTarheel wrote: Wed Aug 18, 2021 11:13 am Seems obvious: It's racism. "We're White and they (dems) are giving EVERYTHING to Blacks, immigrants, etc, that's rightfully OURS! "

CDFingers wrote: Wed Aug 18, 2021 12:23 pm From the article, it seems to be more of an entitlement that has so far been mismanaged. While the Boomer cohorts might seem whiter, the younger ones, the creative class are of mixed color. One problem is they congregate only among themselves and so leave out lots of folks, who then become angry.

It's a complex situation. I think it could be unified around a climate response. If only there were a way to show how to make a profit while addressing that issue. Redefine "profit"?

CDFingers

YankeeTarheel wrote: Wed Aug 18, 2021 12:39 pm Entitlement and bigotry, including racism, go hand in hand, like salt and pepper.