Why Do Conservatives Hate Soy Lattes and Striped Pants So Much?
Snooty coffee, silly veggies and the age-old art of smearing liberals
By JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH, Politico Magazine
January 09, 2014
Erstwhile marijuana dabbler David Brooks got back to basics this week, writing in his New York Times column in the style that made him famous—cracking wise about how upper-middle-class professionals enjoy things like boutique hotels and edamame.
Brooks has made dispensing these sorts of generalizations a pastime, skewing liberal elites for their consumption habits since his breakthrough bestseller, 2001’s Bobos in Paradise, wherein he noted that liberals adore NPR, Thai food, Doris Kearns Goodwin and that sort of thing.
Today, the deployment of these tropes is widespread. And why not? They’re descriptive, funny and don’t require the use of any actual evidence. Certainly liberals partake in their own caricaturing—right-wingers inhale NASCAR fumes, enjoy sex with family members and are crazy about their guns—but without the gusto that their conservative counterparts bring to the game.
Indeed, associating liberals with the effete and supercilious dates back to the 19th century, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Unlike, say, England, America has always thought of itself as a classless society,” he told me. That fact has made it difficult to rouse hatred against a single economic sect, even if it deserves such opprobrium. Harnessing convenient tropes and cultural signifiers has always worked just fine, and when done well, has the added advantage of directing middle-class resentment away from the merely rich and affixing it to the “elites” instead.
(More here.)
By JORDAN MICHAEL SMITH, Politico Magazine
January 09, 2014
Erstwhile marijuana dabbler David Brooks got back to basics this week, writing in his New York Times column in the style that made him famous—cracking wise about how upper-middle-class professionals enjoy things like boutique hotels and edamame.
Brooks has made dispensing these sorts of generalizations a pastime, skewing liberal elites for their consumption habits since his breakthrough bestseller, 2001’s Bobos in Paradise, wherein he noted that liberals adore NPR, Thai food, Doris Kearns Goodwin and that sort of thing.
Today, the deployment of these tropes is widespread. And why not? They’re descriptive, funny and don’t require the use of any actual evidence. Certainly liberals partake in their own caricaturing—right-wingers inhale NASCAR fumes, enjoy sex with family members and are crazy about their guns—but without the gusto that their conservative counterparts bring to the game.
Indeed, associating liberals with the effete and supercilious dates back to the 19th century, says Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley. “Unlike, say, England, America has always thought of itself as a classless society,” he told me. That fact has made it difficult to rouse hatred against a single economic sect, even if it deserves such opprobrium. Harnessing convenient tropes and cultural signifiers has always worked just fine, and when done well, has the added advantage of directing middle-class resentment away from the merely rich and affixing it to the “elites” instead.
(More here.)
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