LISTEN UP
If people don’t internalize that the rich are better than them, exploitation becomes unbearable. But it’s hard to convince anyone of that directly because it’s humiliating and mostly nonsense. Instead, you can get them to swallow it indirectly by turning their contempt downward. If they think, this person is beneath me because they failed and deserve it, then it quietly follows that I’m beneath others because I failed and deserve it, without ever saying it aloud. That’s why your stereotypical lower-middle-class republican often rages hardest against the poor, welfare, and redistribution, even though they'd benefit. Their class position makes their exploitation sting more, and the hostility they project onto those below them is how they repress that awareness.The same logic repeats on a collective scale. Take affluent white liberals as an example. The erosion of their group’s interests by the global elite also cuts against them, but to avoid feeling complicit or reactionary, they frame it as moral progress. Cue the familiar NYT line: these people are uneducated, anxious, clinging to outdated identities, which really means these people are losers, and I owe them nothing. And just like before, the loudest voices in this chorus aren’t true elites but the strivers just beneath them, the top 10 to 20 percent, whose anxiety about sliding into “lesser” status fuels a desperate need to separate themselves from those they look down on.
