Wednesday, July 11, 2018

Bobos in minivans

Liberal pundits have their blind spots. None is more obvious at the moment than their ability to pivot from ridiculing attempts to draw attention to the upper middle class as a group politically relevant to America's polarization (see the reactions to Richard Reeves and David Brooks) to being outraged at favourable media coverage of Trump's US Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh drawing from his professors at Yale and his carpool parent friends.

Of course, if you're an actual Marxist, it's easy: Kavanaugh is simply a bourgeois tool of the all-controlling 1 percent whose own views and lifestyle are inconsequential.

But without that lens, you're looking at the politics and trying to figure out: how is it that amid all the possibilities and Trump volatility, the Ivy Leaguer, the diligent Catholic school parent with his own upbringing of "deferred gratification" parents, and yes, the reliable carpooler, came out of the mix? The horrible possibility is that it's the political power of that class that keeps them in the top layers of government even with severe cross-currents below.

UPDATE: The Tiger Mom (Amy Chua) endorses Kavanaugh on the basis of her daughter's (a Yalie) successful judicial clerkship with him!

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