What is 'working class' to the champagne socialists? | Hour 1

What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio and Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, I daily show prep with all the links. Become a patron, go to dpekclendershow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button, get every episode for free, write to your smartphone or tablet, and again, thank you so much for your support. So you've heard of the term luxury belief luxury beliefs the plural just by putting an s on the end of it. Yeah, luxury beliefs. This was a term coined by a fella named Rob Henderson. He is an author. I believe he's a is it a sociologist or something like that. A Navy guy wrote a book about, you know, growing up adopted. I think he is. I think he's he was adopted from Korea, grew up in America and joined the Navy and whatnot. Anyway, so he does a lot of writing and you could follow him on Twitter, Rob K. Henderson. It's well worth the follow if you are on X. And he's the guy who came up with this term luxury beliefs, and if memory serves correctly, luxury beliefs are basically, if you are of a certain status in society, in the upper echelon, or you know, people call it, you know, the elites. I call them the foe elites because a lot of them really have done nothing to actually earn some sort of elite status. They were kind of just born into it, or they went to a college to get the credential. I don't consider that to be elite, right, because a lot of times being elite is simply perception. That's it. It's marketing. There are a lot of very very smart people, very very rich people that uh, you know, never went through the credentialing process in order to gain access to that stratosphere. So Rob Henderson, so this luxury beliefs idea is that, you know, people who who occupy that stratup, they they have certain beliefs because they have the luxury of having those beliefs, right, and they may not even carry those beliefs out in their real lives. The other day, I think he posted something about how people who lived people who live in what you would consider to be sort of the most traditional home life pattern tend to be people who espouse these luxury beliefs and these these really progressive ideas, right, So they project down onto the rest of the society through their positions in media, their positions in the arts, Hollywood, right politics, and they project down into the middle class and the quote unquote working class about you know, various moras and standards that we should all live by, or else you are some sort of you know, bigot, you're something ist, you're an ist of some kind. You're suffering from some phobia or some other ism. Right. A really good example of this, I would submit was the and I'm going back aways. I think this was early nineties. I think dan Quayle was the vice president, right, he of the famous misspelling of potato, which wasn't even his fault, but whatever. This guy was a Rhodes scholar, and people made him out to be an idiot, because that's what you know media democrats. But I repeat myself, that's what they do to Republicans. You are either you know, you're either evil or you're an idiot, and you could be both, like you know, Donald Trump. I think they're they cast as both. But dan Quayle was just like this choir boy looking guy, you know, just very very vanilla in like every sense of the term. And but he was a Rhodes scholar. He was a smart guy. But they made him out to be an idiot because he went to some campaign event and he was reading or doing a spelling bee to kids and they gave him they gave him a bunch of cards with the words to read, and the teachers misspelled potato. They stuck an e on the end of it. And so when a kid correctly spelled potato and dan Quail's looking at the card, he says, no, that's not correct, and everybody just mocked him for that, and and you know, Saturday Night Live did bit after bit after bit after bit about it. But one of the things dan Quayle was also known for or was that he was a conservative and he got into a fight with what's her name. I was gonna say Burgess Meredith, but that's the penguin Candice Bergen. She was the star of a TV show called Murphy Brown, and Murphy Brown plays the character is an anchor at you know, some New York City television news station, and so she gets pregnant and she's going to keep the child and she's going to raise the child as a single mother. And dan Quayle said, that's probably not a great, uh, you know, image to be putting out and normalizing for the society. And of course then everybody attacked him, savaged dan Quayle and you know, how dare you and all of this, and I would submit dan Quayle was more right than wrong on that in that when you normalize certain things through the society by saying like this is you know, this is how you are enlightened, This is how the elites think, and if you want to be one of us, this is how you have to think. These are things you have to agree with as well. That's a luxury belief because, as it turns out, if you you know, if you are born to a single parent, chances are you are not going to have a lot of the same opportunities that people born to two parents have. And I don't say that to disparage single parents, not at all. It's it's way harder and the sacrifices are way greater. Statistically speaking, based on the data, when you don't have two parents in the household growing up, you face more challenges. If you don't have a father in the household. Particularly and you're a boy, you are way more likely to you know, not go to college, to end up in jail. And so there are there are real downsides. Of course. You know, when Murphy Brown, this fictitional or fictional character from the you know, elite strata, when she has the child on a TV show, you don't see all of those challenges, the scraping buy from money, the public assistance, you know, you don't see any of that because she has the luxury of that belief, right, Okay. So that's the idea of luxury beliefs coined by Rob Henderson. So he had a very interesting piece the other day at his website, Robkhenderson dot com, and he's talking about our pal Zoron Mom Donnie, the Kami Jihati adjacent mayor of New York City, who is every day looking more and more like Baine. If we ever do another mask mandate, I think like his true form will be complete. But anyway, in a recent New York Times interview, Zorn Mom Donnie struggled to define the term working class, and at one point he's asked by the podcast host, how do you define the working class, and he said, I think if you have to work to pay your bills, I think that that is one definition of being part of the working class. And then, after some pushback from the interviewer, Mom Donnie said he would basically draw the line at about a million dollars a year. So if you don't make one million dollars a year, you're part of the working class. Now, people think Mom Donnie is stupid. He is not right. He is selling this Marxism to people who don't know what it is, and he sells it in these euphemistic, nebulous terms, so nobody really knows exactly what he's talking about. He says, Oh, socialism is about, you know, believing that every person has dignity and seeing the humanity in all people. And that is not what socialism is about. It's not what Marxism is about. Actually, Now, anybody who's a millionaire now gets to be working class. Well why would he say that. Well, he wants a very expansive definition of it to capture as many people as possible for his movement. Right, so you could make. Nine hundred thousand dollars a year and you're still working class. According to Mom Donnie, because that's the income cutoff. The focus on defining class by money. Henderson says, this is revealing. People often conflate social class with economic class. But this is not the way that you should think about what working class is, because that's not really. What it is. And he explains, and I will convey that to you in mere moments. All right. For over a year now, you've heard me talking about Create a video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels, and slides to lasting keepsakes. 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He argues, And I agree that This allows people to talk about economic classes while pretending that we're not actually talking about social classes. Because if you start talking about social class, now you're talking about cultural things right beyond just income, and that makes people uncomfortable. It's easier to talk about somebody's income than it is to talk about educational pedigree, their accent, their hairstyle, their clothing, their taste, or their zip code. But education usually signals social class more clearly than income does. Research has found that parental education attainment is the most important objective indicator of social class. So you don't necessarily have to have gone to college, but if your parents did, then you're probably not quote unquote working class. Income may rise and may fall over a lifetime, but the worldview that you have formed in selective institutions that's what usually endures. And by that standard, college graduates, regardless of their earnings, are not working class. Education also shapes political views more strongly than your income does. So the old joke you know about people getting older and as soon as they make their money and they start becoming republican and all that, that is not necessarily true a PhD. He gives this as an example. A PhD who takes a job driving a taxi will tend to vote like other pds, not like other taxi drivers, especially if he or she also has a parent with a college degree. It's important to note here that the working class is not the same thing as poor. Okay, these are different groups. Upper class is not the same thing as rich. A working class person can become wealthy without moving into a higher social class. Money alone is not enough. If a manual laborer wins the lottery, he is rich, but still working class. The focus on economic class, rather than social class, promotes this belief that we could have an egalitarian society if just everybody had enough money. Right, and this is the pitch of the Marxists. That's the problem. We could equalize everything if we just spread the money around. To phrase Barack Obama, this focus is really convenient for whom the upper and the upper middle classes, very convenient for them to say these things. It allows them to express concern about inequality without ever having to implicate themselves. Right, they can condemn the problems that are faced by the poor, such as limited access to education, or a lack of money for professional clothing, or unreliable transportation, while never confronting the less obvious realities of class signaling. And this gets into the luxury beliefs idea right class signaling. In other words, we're the elites, we're the riches, or we're the upper class or the upper middle class, and these are the things. That we enjoy doing. These are the things. That show sticks like these are the the credentials to be a part of our clique or class. And by the way, these are never written down for anybody to read. Nobody nobody's nobody says down and says okay, uh. In order to be a member of this group, you have to, you know, have a house that looks a certain way, you have to dress a certain way, you have to use certain words, you have to you know, espouse certain beliefs like well, although I will say this, here's a pretty good indication of this kind of class signaling, okay, and has nothing to do with income. And you're going to know it as soon as I start talking about as soon as I give you a couple of details here, you're going to know exactly what it is I'm talking about. Have you walked past a house and seen a yard sign and the yard sign has a lot of words on it, and it says something like in this house or home, in this home, we believe, and then it lists their political positions. Right. That is class signaling. Right, that is communicating to everybody who walks by that I'm better than you unless you also believe all these things. And now that means you are in my class and I am in a better class than you are. So if you want to be in my better class with me, then you need to adopt these same beliefs and maybe put up a yard sign. The assumption, Henderson says. The assumption is that if you could afford the right things, you could pass as upper class. But the main obstacle is cultural, not financial. You can come into money, but if you do not know how to use it in the quote unquote right ways, or you do not understand the signals or the customs the shibalets, you're still going to be shut out and nobody spells out these rules for you. There was a there was an old framing of this, I think, which is probably apropos. But I've not spoken to mister Henderson about this to see if it's true, but I'm gonna go with it. Old money versus new money. Right, there's old money in town and they tend to stiff arm the new money. Charlotte has a really classic example of this. George Schin, former owner of the Charlotte Hornets, new money never was really welcomed into the elite strata in the old money crowd. From the text line this from Bain who says, in the past, I don't know if Bain is the leader of Gotham, but Bain says, in the past, social class signaling involved joining fraternities, button down shirts, khaki pants, penny loafers, and the sorority girlfriend named Peaches. Yeah. I mean these are like the dress codes and the way people dress. He talks about some of that in this piece. It's a very lengthy piece, but there is a part of it where he talks about, you know, it's anecdotal, but these are stories of you know, workplaces where there's a casual dress code and some people don't know what's acceptable and what's not in order to fit into the class of people that populate the office. That's the social class difference. Michael says, if you want to see a good example of poor white trash coming into money and not knowing how to act. Watch the movie Masterminds about the Loomis Fargo armored car robbery. It is hilarious and spot on. I actually I was here. The place that got robbed was right behind us at the studio Loomis that the Loomis Fargo. Uh location, Like I can see it out the window. It's not Loomis Fargo anymore, but it's right out the back window. That's where it happened. And uh uh the late Monroe what white Sides, a lawyer now deceased. He he wrote a magazine, lengthy magazine article. He represented the snitch in the case. I remember covering the case while it was unfolding. It was and so, I mean I did see the movie absolutely, But some of the stuff, like Monroe told me, he got the because they had all They bought all of this stuff for cash, you know, like breast implants for the wife. They bought a velvet elvis I think painting, you know, like a massive one. I mean they they they spent crazy amounts of money. And uh there's a uh in Cramerton I believe it was. And the the Monroe Whitesides, he told me the story that at the auction because they seize all the assets, and then they auctioned it all off after trial. And he said that they had he bought at auction a humid door that they had purchased because they, you know, obviously we got to buy a whole bunch of cigars, because that's what rich people's you know, smoke, is big cigars, all these really expensive cigars. So they bought a humid door. But not knowing how the humid door works, they never they never put any water into it. And so all of the cigars, thousands and thousands of dollars worth of Cuban cigars, they all went bad. They all spoiled inside the humid door because they never put any water. That was the story Monroe told me. But like that's an example, right, Champ as a wise man says, new money screams while old money whispers, and then Bain follows up. Dean Warmer understood the working classes. All right. So Rob Henderson back at his piece. Here he says, what makes somebody working class is not income. Of course, social categories can be difficult to define, but there are identifiable regularities. One thing that distinguishes the working class is the kind of work they do, and how much oversight is involved. So a working class job is often, not always, but is often closely supervised. Okay. A frontline supervisor or a foreman is usually in close proximity to the worker and judges his work as he does it. He says, when I washed dishes from minimum wage, the manager or assistant manager was always walking through the kitchen and the dishroom, keeping an eye on everybody in the back of the restaurant. Okay, So that's one thing. Do you have somebody that's like watching what you're doing all the time. Another feature is danger. Many working class jobs expose people to some degree of physical risk. This is one reason why a cab driver or a roofer counts as working class, while a school teacher, who might earn less than either of those professions, counts as middle class. Right, a school teacher could make less than a cabby, but the school teacher is quote middle class because there isn't any real risk or danger associated with the job. He talks here. Here, here's the part about clothing. He says a clothing style is a giveaway. He talked about a sports journalist friend of his named Ethan Strauss, who said, at NBA games the more expensive the seat, the less likely you are to see the person sitting in it wearing NBA apparel. Well, okay, with the obvious exception of Spike Lee and Bill Murray. Right, so you get people who can afford the floor seats, and they usually are not wearing NBA apparel, wearing the jersey of your favorite player or whatever. Is gousch. I guess is that the way you pronounce that word? I've never known. This is consistent with the general pattern. Working class people are more likely to wear clothes with words on them, T shirts, caps, jackets with brand names or slogans, a T shirt with Goodyear on the front, that kind of thing. Trump knew what he was doing with all those red MAGA caps. The caps upset his critics for obvious political reasons, but there's also an undercurrent of class prejudice at the loud red hat with the all cap letters. You'll see hipsters or post hipsters or whatever wearing loud logos, but it's usually ironic or it's working class LARPing. LARPing means like acting live action role playing larp. The Brooklyn or Silver Lake guy in a NASCAR T shirt that he bought at a thrift store, right, Carhart jackets or Dickey's work pants on people who have never framed a wall, right, Like, that's the kind of thing that we're talking about. Formal dress codes, therefore, are actually useful because they make expectations clear. When everybody knows what they're supposed to wear, it levels the playing field. And we know this, right. We talk about this in relation to schools with school uniforms, right, that levels the field. Same thing in an office environment, if everybody is supposed to wear you know, I guess the uniform in uptown Sharlett is like khakis and a polo or a button down Oxford shirt. Right. If everybody has to wear the same thing, that it levels that that class field. There was. There's also another interesting example here, and it has to do with how people sit in cars. I'm not kidding. I'll tell you what it is in a minute. Rob Henderson quoting a guy named Paul Fussel in his nineteen eighty three book titled Class And in this book, Paul Fussel, Now I don't know if this still applies, but Paul Fussell described how romantic couples arrange themselves in cars okay, And apparently what he found was that different classes of people arrange themselves in the vehicle differently. I gotta tell you, I had never seen this before. Okay, So working class men sit in the front and the women sit in the back. This is obviously if you've got like two couples riding in a car and you're going someplace together. It's like, if me and Christy were in the car with another married couple, we're on our way to dinner or something, how do you. Sit in the vehicle together? And I have to tell you, that's generally how we get in the car. Like if I'm driving, the dude in the other couple, he'll sit in the front seat with me, and the two wives will be in the back seat, mainly because they're going to talk about stuff that we don't care about up in the front. No, I'm kidding, and I don't know why that happens. It's not anything like you back of the bus kind of thing. It's not. It's we just kind of everybody just kind of does it. Yes, Also, there's some leg rooms issues probably, you know, if like the guys are taller so you sit in the front or whatever. But that's the working class model, okay. And then there is the quote middle class model, where you have one couple in front and one couple in back, so me and Christy would sit in the front and the other couple would. Sit in the back. I don't think I have ever done that. Exit Like well, I will say, like recently, we were riding with some friends someplace whatever, and on the way too, I forget where it was that we were going together. On the way there, I wrote in the front with the dude, and then on the way back, I wrote in the back with Christy, and the driver's wife rode up in front. Oh yeah, it was my cousin. She was in the front with her with her man. So that's the quote middle class arrangement. What is the upper middle class arrangement? And I got to tell you this one was odd to me. I have never seen this. I have never been in a vehicle where this has occurred. Maybe you have. Maybe this is something from you know, pre nineteen eighty three that was in this book, and so nobody does this anymore. But here's here's the other arrangement. Spouses trade places. So in this arrangement, if I'm driving Christy would sit in the back seat with the dude from the other couple, and that dude's wife would sit in the front seat with me. Yeah. See, you guys are shaking your heads too, Like, No, I've never heard of this or seen this, he says. Now, this is Rob Henderson. His view on this. Maybe possible explanation for this is to demonstrate to themselves and others that they are superior beings, unbothered by trivial romantic jealousies. I don't know, said, I have no idea. I've never seen that play out. Henderson goes on to say working class people are comparatively unconcerned with being called basic, whereas many upper middle class people lay awake at night terrified that someone might bestow that label upon them. They crave distinction from the commoners. Anyway, The working class is defined not by income, but by a lack of a college degree, especially. If one's parents are not college graduates. Also an absence of control over how their workdays are spent, physical strain or proximity to physical danger in their jobs, and how they dress and carry themselves. Okay, so these are all the things that make up what is quote unquote working class. There was. I remember seeing some lefty online that was complaining about you know these what do they call them, the flotillas, Trump flotilla's or something, or boat parades or something. Right, you get all these people with boats and they're all riding around, they all got maga stuff all over them, and some lefty was complaining like how come, Like how come all these mega people own boats? And like, first off, there's a there's a bias. They are a presupposition that for some reason mega people can't afford boats, right, Like how could they have boats? Because this is supposed to be a status symbol. This is supposed to. Be a way that we, you know, that we send this signal like I have a boat, I'm better than you, I have more money. I can just you know, throw all my money away into this hole in the water. That is what a boat is, he says. But we can expect that these democratic socialists that like mom, Donnie and his base, they're going to continue to focus on income for the obvious reason that few of them are actually working class, but many of them feel financially strapped, and some of that is of course self inflicted. As sociologist Musa Algarbi has written describing people in high prestige, low paying jobs they would prefer to be a freelance writer rather than work as a manager at a cheesecake factory. Mam Donnie is free to define working class however he wants. If he wants to set the bottom the floor there at a million dollars income, fine, he can draw the line at a million dollars if he wants. Regardless of where his line is, the roofer, the hotel maid, and the dishwasher know that he and his base are on the other side of that line though. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patrin at my Patreon page or go to thepetecalanarshow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.