I had a boyfriend in Portland, Oregon back in 2010 who got a bunch of Indian casino money each month. He desperately wanted to think of himself as working class.
I did not have any such money and stood for 8 hour shifts in high heels doing people's makeup (back when MAC 'strongly encouraged' high heels).
Anyway, the man went out of his way to buy a vintage Toyota, all the very, very best 'working gear' (his job was doing cocaine in the middle of the day and watching pornography) and of course, Carhartt boots. His justification for all this was
'it'll last a lifetime. I'm not fancy. Unlike you, I'm not superficial.'
The effort this man went to to pretend he was poor was way more work than actually being poor.
Anyway, nothing bad ever happened to him because every wrong turn he ever made was cushioned by money. But he sure was insufferable.
Portland and all the other hipster capitals attract people like him like fleas (and I'm not talking about the vintage flea markets they love going to). I've seen way too many Carhartt-wearing, coke-addled, trust-fund-having hipsters here in NYC.
Late to this article, but gosh, I just moved near to NYC, and the sheer number of well-groomed young fellows I see in spanking new cargo work pants and utterly pristine white wifebeater tanks, zooming around Manhattan on electric skateboards...I've never seen either actual workmen or actual skaters with clothes half so sparkly clean.
A colleague who saw me with Howard Zinn's History of America asked me why I was reading it and I replied so I could know what the enemy was thinking. Which is also why I, too, subscribe to and read The Nation. Always worth a laugh, I hasten to add their writers are not really the enemy, but misguided souls, good writers usually, and have the knack for getting their work into print. I just wish they'd bring someone with the point of view and wit of Christopher Hitchens back.
I don't really view opposing views as necessarily enemies. Because who knows, sometimes they might have a point here and there. I think America would be a better place if more people spent time reading opposing viewpoints instead of just having their views confirmed via echo chamber.
And yes, wit matters. Some writers are more entertaining than others. Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs is a good example. I don't agree with him on much, but he has a unique voice that makes him fun to read.
I really like the term “luxury beliefs” for all this. Perhaps there’s a natural outgrowth of economic conditions to the luxury signifiers. Luxury clothes tend to cover more of your body, like suits as opposed to shorts, because the extra fabric costs more. So in an agrarian economy, rich people were literally showing off the wool or cotton raised by their peasants / slaves. In a knowledge economy, your ideas and beliefs are what signify your status.
On a semi-related note, I had a friend who told me he would never hire someone as a software developer if they wore a suit to their job interview. He said it would tell him that they weren’t good enough at coding and needed to overcompensate. I’ve only ever interviewed one developer who wore a suit to their interview. I hired him and he turned out to be brilliant. It’s a strange quirk that in my industry I have to convince people that not everyone in a suit is dumb.
Lucky for me, I look generally disheveled and unkempt.
Yeah, when I watch movies like The Social Network, they always portray technological geniuses dressing like overgrown children. Wearing a suit is considered old fashioned now and incompatible with the new frontiers of tech.
I'd say that at this point, most of the stuff I read is more car crash and less graceful racing.
I find it more intellectually stimulating to read opinions different from my own. After all, anyone can read articles on their side and agree. But to be able to read articles you disagree with day in and day out and still disagree, now that's a sign your beliefs hold up to skepticism.
Many reasons you are brilliant but especially this. Like the Puerto Rican cat's thing about not being afraid of the public square. If we want to convince others we have to see what our own positions look like from outside otherwise we're just incoherent.
>You may be wondering why someone like me would read the wokest legacy news publication out there. I read The Nation very often. For me, there’s a certain charm to reading the opinions of those you may not agree with.
There's also the more practical point that keeping up with "the lingo" is more or less a requirement in certain professional and social environments if you like having a job, health insurance, and nonzero social credits.
I do agree that being able to read and engage with opinions you disagree with is a civic virtue and preferable to the usual alternative (using george carlin words to accuse your opponents of being eugenicists on twitter). Unfortunately for me, the charm of reading bad woke takes* was somewhat outweighed by the charm of not wanting to throw my computer out the nearest window, and both computers and windows are expensive.
----
*This is not to suggest that non-wokes are incapable of making bad takes, some ridonkulously so. Having said that, the difference is that the average bad non-woke take is likely to just get roasted on twitter and youtube while the average bad woke take has a nonzero chance of being legitimized and implemented by the professional stratum of society.
Definitely. Nearly every professional field requires DEI talk and people all put their pronouns in bio. But not in working-class fields, which tells you a lot.
And the thing about reading bad takes is that you have to go in there and embrace the cringe. Take a look at this article:
Paul Fussell teaches us that of all the people in America, the least free are the middle classes.
The rich have fuck you money and live on dividends. The poor sell labor, so once they clock off, their time is their own until the next shift. The middle class hold onto their jobs by virtue of holding the right credentials and the right opinions and the right consumption patterns (which in turn require endless debt, in case the middle class individual thinks about leaving the cubicle farm).
I noted the reference to "toxic athletic culture" in "The Williams Record" op piece. Progressive types don't like sport - specifically the existence of professional sport, because it gives poor people the chance to become rich and dress extravagantly, and also because of the years of hard work required to achieve a sporting career - it's definitely not a performative activity.
Perez compares 2010 with now; here are a couple of choice paragraphs from the article:
"It was obvious that what would later become wokeness—that prudish passive aggressiveness—was already lurking; the idiotic grievance language wasn’t around yet and rich whites weren’t pathologically obsessed with race and gender like they are now, but the seeds had already been planted.
"Fast forward a few years and the buzz words arrived, as did the love affair with race and white guilt and all the other virtual signaling mumbo jumbo rich white people never shut up about. That’s how rich white people stopped being cool. Someone convinced them that being rich and white is bad and now writers and artists are walking on eggshells. It’s okay to be rich and white, elite whites! Don’t feel guilty!"
As someone who actually clicked on the link next to my username that connects to things I've chosen to write and post on the internet of my own free will, you are one of the few people on the internet who will understand when I say that I am no novice to the wide world of cringe.
This, however, just makes me sad, because short of building a wall and getting Williams College to pay for it, I see little way that people with the mindset and issues expressed in this article can coexist long-term under the same sky with people who do not have the same mindset and issues. (Or even with other people who do have the same mindset and issues.)
This person needs compassion and help. Not the kind of compassion and help they claim to need in the article, nor the kind of compassion and help I am able to give. But compassion and help all the same.
I salute you for being the strength in the world that I lack and writing the things I lack the will to commit to paper.*
People used to try to help and perform interventions on people that were struggling with mental health issues. Now people instead validate other people's neuroses.
And I hope you put out more articles soon. I like your unique style.
Indeed. Therapy culture has shifted a lot as well. One used to take advice from therapists. Now they pay therapists to listen to and praise their ideas.
Thanks for the compliment but that sounds like I'd have to do actual research and work, whereas by being a comment leech on other people's substacks i can get internet validation for free.
Also I'm a cowardly wuss who lives and works in a professional setting and if people were to find out IRL I'm one of those horrible SS anti-wokestaffeln my ability to feed myself without begging for money from my parents would be somewhat diminished.
Another banger, comrade. Fetterman hasn't been seen in weeks after checking into the hospital, while his wife abandoned him. According to Progressives, it's ableist to expect a Senator or President to have a functioning brain.
>According to Progressives, it's ableist to expect a Senator or President to have a functioning brain.
Unless the president in question is orange in which case it is your patriotic duty as a Progressive to speculate harder on their mental fitness and brain capacity than a crypto bro speculates on dogecoin
I'm late to the comments, but this is a fantastic piece.
"If Latinx was a popular term, it would no longer hold elite status. By using a word so garish and offensive to the average Latino, elite Latinos are able to signal their status by just changing a single syllable."
I think this contributes to the invention and reinvention of preferred terms. The rich used to move on to different "preferred" clothing lines once the rabble started joining in. Similarly, once some critical mass of regular Joes and Jills start using terms like "African American" then it's ripe for a "reboot." Now we're back to "black" as the approved term. So it goes.
Also - thank you for sharing the link re: socioeconomic status of "wokes." Jives with my "lived experience" (ha) but far better to have some data.
I'm assuming you're familiar with Rob Henderson's work around this concept (i.e, "luxury beliefs") - although you tease out the idea a little more.
My take of Fetterman was that, whether or not it was built "for purpose" or leaning into his existing fashion/style choices, he was aiming to be the Liberal Trump. He obviously decided that Trump's appeal was about his support for the common man and the fact he did not "fit the part" of a typical politician. It struck me that Fetterman was trying to channel Trump's appeal through a Liberal prism.
Tom Wolfe taught the masses that, while bohos may affect proletarian funkiness, they would be mortified to be mistaken for actual proles.
For that matter, it cannot be underscored enough that woke does nothing to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
To give an example, if multinationals would stop putting up barriers to their workers unionizing, this would result in a transfer of concrete, material wealth to cats and also to black and brown (and white) working class people, which would affect those cats and people more than all the sensitivity training and pronouns in corporate email signatures ever invented.
My avatar is a recent selfie (actually it isn't, some of my colony and I were fooling around with a phone we found using it to take pictures of ourselves).
I'm doing manual subsistence work most of the day and I can clearly understand why rich people dress in branded work wear: Because it's great. It's more functional and comfortable than any other clothes. I mostly wear off-brand clothes but I received a used jacket and hoodie from more expensive work-wear brands as gifts half a year ago and they are my best clothes. I often think that if I ever get well-off, I will always buy such clothes because they are the best. And why would rich people want anything less than the best?
Technically I also don't need the functionality of work wear when I'm resting, taking a walk, having dinner and other things that high status people also do. Still, I strongly prefer the functionality of work wear also then.
We definitely had hipsters in Sweden around 2010. They were young and thin and wore tight, black jeans of the brand Cheap Monday. They also wore glasses with thick black rims and knitted hats. But I haven't heard of them for years, so probably they just went out of fashion.
I wonder how hipsterdom works in Sweden. is it also the same type of people that would be hipsters in America? Young, very college-educated people in urban areas.
As long as hipsters existed, they existed only in (fairly) urban areas (at least a town of, say, ten thousand people was required as a habitat) . They were also young. But they were not from the upper social strata. Rather, they were students of subjects of questionable status with bad career prospects: Social studies, political sciences and the like.
During the last decade working class people have done the main class signalling here. Especially, they get tattoos to signal their social status. Both men and women, but especially men. A few years ago my husband noticed that he was the only one in his football team who didn't have at least one tattoo. Those tattoos are often highly visible: full sleeves are not unusual. I guess that the message is: "I'm fine here, I'm going nowhere". Young male workers can also have more elaborate hair cuts and earrings than men with more prestigious occupations. So the main way of signalling social status is through what you DON'T do. People who hope to fit in on higher levels of society keep to the straight and narrow in order to avoid burning any bridges. Working class people conspicuously burn those bridges.
The tattoo stuff is interesting. In America, tattooing was considered low class for a long time. It was associated with convicts, sailors, and prostitutes. But now affluent people are increasingly getting tattoos and good tattoos are now a sign of wealth.
But I guess in Sweden, things have not changed much. I would be interested in seeing a piece about the social status of tattoos across cultures.
A lot has changed, because twenty years ago tattoos were uncommon. Now they are semi-compulsory for working class men in rural areas. At least they have to skip generations. If one's father has a full-sleeve tattoo, getting one for oneself doesn't appear very rebellious.
I just read a book called Guests of the Sheikh by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It is the story of a woman who accompanied her anthropologist husband to a rural Iraqi village for two years, between 1956 and 1958. In that village the heavily veiled and secluded women got tattoos in order to appear more attractive to their husbands.
Great essay. I will quibble a little bit about bringing up Fetterman growing up rich. I’m not saying you are doing this but I am seeing a trend of people just assuming that someone from a privileged background can’t sincerely advocate for the working class. There were a whole slew of stories about “is Rishi Sunak too rich to care about us?” Thing is- FDR did more for working people than any other president and he came from almost unimaginable wealth. Judge people by their actions not their background.
I wasn't trying to imply that Fetterman could not advocate for the working class because he grew up wealthy. Friedrich Engels also grew up wealthy, yet he definitely was pro-working class. Rather, I am saying that Fetterman might be inauthentic by pretending to be working class when he comes from a wealthy background. Donald Trump bragged about his wealth and claimed to want to help the working class at the same time. I respect that more than a rich person who says "Hey, I'm actually also working class like you all!" It's about authenticity above everything.
> As outward markers of social status such as clothing have now become unreliable indicators of class, expect virtue signaling to rise even further. Perhaps we should go back to the days when rich people were obviously rich just by looking at them. At least then they wouldn’t have to virtue signal all these policies that actively harm poor people.
> Bring back robber baron outfits.
We can't. Clothing is now so cheap that even the poor could afford robber baron outfits if they came back into fashion. Thus they can no longer serve as a status marker.
Stolen valor-
I had a boyfriend in Portland, Oregon back in 2010 who got a bunch of Indian casino money each month. He desperately wanted to think of himself as working class.
I did not have any such money and stood for 8 hour shifts in high heels doing people's makeup (back when MAC 'strongly encouraged' high heels).
Anyway, the man went out of his way to buy a vintage Toyota, all the very, very best 'working gear' (his job was doing cocaine in the middle of the day and watching pornography) and of course, Carhartt boots. His justification for all this was
'it'll last a lifetime. I'm not fancy. Unlike you, I'm not superficial.'
The effort this man went to to pretend he was poor was way more work than actually being poor.
Anyway, nothing bad ever happened to him because every wrong turn he ever made was cushioned by money. But he sure was insufferable.
Portland and all the other hipster capitals attract people like him like fleas (and I'm not talking about the vintage flea markets they love going to). I've seen way too many Carhartt-wearing, coke-addled, trust-fund-having hipsters here in NYC.
Late to this article, but gosh, I just moved near to NYC, and the sheer number of well-groomed young fellows I see in spanking new cargo work pants and utterly pristine white wifebeater tanks, zooming around Manhattan on electric skateboards...I've never seen either actual workmen or actual skaters with clothes half so sparkly clean.
A colleague who saw me with Howard Zinn's History of America asked me why I was reading it and I replied so I could know what the enemy was thinking. Which is also why I, too, subscribe to and read The Nation. Always worth a laugh, I hasten to add their writers are not really the enemy, but misguided souls, good writers usually, and have the knack for getting their work into print. I just wish they'd bring someone with the point of view and wit of Christopher Hitchens back.
I don't really view opposing views as necessarily enemies. Because who knows, sometimes they might have a point here and there. I think America would be a better place if more people spent time reading opposing viewpoints instead of just having their views confirmed via echo chamber.
And yes, wit matters. Some writers are more entertaining than others. Nathan J. Robinson of Current Affairs is a good example. I don't agree with him on much, but he has a unique voice that makes him fun to read.
I really like the term “luxury beliefs” for all this. Perhaps there’s a natural outgrowth of economic conditions to the luxury signifiers. Luxury clothes tend to cover more of your body, like suits as opposed to shorts, because the extra fabric costs more. So in an agrarian economy, rich people were literally showing off the wool or cotton raised by their peasants / slaves. In a knowledge economy, your ideas and beliefs are what signify your status.
On a semi-related note, I had a friend who told me he would never hire someone as a software developer if they wore a suit to their job interview. He said it would tell him that they weren’t good enough at coding and needed to overcompensate. I’ve only ever interviewed one developer who wore a suit to their interview. I hired him and he turned out to be brilliant. It’s a strange quirk that in my industry I have to convince people that not everyone in a suit is dumb.
Lucky for me, I look generally disheveled and unkempt.
Yeah, when I watch movies like The Social Network, they always portray technological geniuses dressing like overgrown children. Wearing a suit is considered old fashioned now and incompatible with the new frontiers of tech.
Footnote 2 -- I love it. The whole essay is eloquent and right on target, but footnote 2, priceless.
I'd say that at this point, most of the stuff I read is more car crash and less graceful racing.
I find it more intellectually stimulating to read opinions different from my own. After all, anyone can read articles on their side and agree. But to be able to read articles you disagree with day in and day out and still disagree, now that's a sign your beliefs hold up to skepticism.
Many reasons you are brilliant but especially this. Like the Puerto Rican cat's thing about not being afraid of the public square. If we want to convince others we have to see what our own positions look like from outside otherwise we're just incoherent.
>You may be wondering why someone like me would read the wokest legacy news publication out there. I read The Nation very often. For me, there’s a certain charm to reading the opinions of those you may not agree with.
There's also the more practical point that keeping up with "the lingo" is more or less a requirement in certain professional and social environments if you like having a job, health insurance, and nonzero social credits.
I do agree that being able to read and engage with opinions you disagree with is a civic virtue and preferable to the usual alternative (using george carlin words to accuse your opponents of being eugenicists on twitter). Unfortunately for me, the charm of reading bad woke takes* was somewhat outweighed by the charm of not wanting to throw my computer out the nearest window, and both computers and windows are expensive.
----
*This is not to suggest that non-wokes are incapable of making bad takes, some ridonkulously so. Having said that, the difference is that the average bad non-woke take is likely to just get roasted on twitter and youtube while the average bad woke take has a nonzero chance of being legitimized and implemented by the professional stratum of society.
Definitely. Nearly every professional field requires DEI talk and people all put their pronouns in bio. But not in working-class fields, which tells you a lot.
And the thing about reading bad takes is that you have to go in there and embrace the cringe. Take a look at this article:
https://williamsrecord.com/455979/opinions/notes-from-a-fat-btch-on-williams-fatphobia-anti-blackness-and-ableism/
Paul Fussell teaches us that of all the people in America, the least free are the middle classes.
The rich have fuck you money and live on dividends. The poor sell labor, so once they clock off, their time is their own until the next shift. The middle class hold onto their jobs by virtue of holding the right credentials and the right opinions and the right consumption patterns (which in turn require endless debt, in case the middle class individual thinks about leaving the cubicle farm).
~ Great article, Sheluyang, thank you.
I noted the reference to "toxic athletic culture" in "The Williams Record" op piece. Progressive types don't like sport - specifically the existence of professional sport, because it gives poor people the chance to become rich and dress extravagantly, and also because of the years of hard work required to achieve a sporting career - it's definitely not a performative activity.
This called to mind an excellent interview article I read recently - with Alex Perez, a Cuban-American who was a pro-baseballer and when his career hit the skids he was accepted into the Iowa Writers' Workshop (https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america).
Perez compares 2010 with now; here are a couple of choice paragraphs from the article:
"It was obvious that what would later become wokeness—that prudish passive aggressiveness—was already lurking; the idiotic grievance language wasn’t around yet and rich whites weren’t pathologically obsessed with race and gender like they are now, but the seeds had already been planted.
"Fast forward a few years and the buzz words arrived, as did the love affair with race and white guilt and all the other virtual signaling mumbo jumbo rich white people never shut up about. That’s how rich white people stopped being cool. Someone convinced them that being rich and white is bad and now writers and artists are walking on eggshells. It’s okay to be rich and white, elite whites! Don’t feel guilty!"
Trying to think of how, if someone tried to write a satirical piece of this kind of vent-letter, it would look any different from this...
As someone who actually clicked on the link next to my username that connects to things I've chosen to write and post on the internet of my own free will, you are one of the few people on the internet who will understand when I say that I am no novice to the wide world of cringe.
This, however, just makes me sad, because short of building a wall and getting Williams College to pay for it, I see little way that people with the mindset and issues expressed in this article can coexist long-term under the same sky with people who do not have the same mindset and issues. (Or even with other people who do have the same mindset and issues.)
This person needs compassion and help. Not the kind of compassion and help they claim to need in the article, nor the kind of compassion and help I am able to give. But compassion and help all the same.
I salute you for being the strength in the world that I lack and writing the things I lack the will to commit to paper.*
*electrons on a hard drive, but you get my point.
People used to try to help and perform interventions on people that were struggling with mental health issues. Now people instead validate other people's neuroses.
And I hope you put out more articles soon. I like your unique style.
I think you’ve captured the essence of what ails much of society in those two sentences that start your reply, Sheluyang.
And, as always, your entire post is insightful and never more timely.
Indeed. Therapy culture has shifted a lot as well. One used to take advice from therapists. Now they pay therapists to listen to and praise their ideas.
Thanks for the compliment but that sounds like I'd have to do actual research and work, whereas by being a comment leech on other people's substacks i can get internet validation for free.
Also I'm a cowardly wuss who lives and works in a professional setting and if people were to find out IRL I'm one of those horrible SS anti-wokestaffeln my ability to feed myself without begging for money from my parents would be somewhat diminished.
Another banger, comrade. Fetterman hasn't been seen in weeks after checking into the hospital, while his wife abandoned him. According to Progressives, it's ableist to expect a Senator or President to have a functioning brain.
>According to Progressives, it's ableist to expect a Senator or President to have a functioning brain.
Unless the president in question is orange in which case it is your patriotic duty as a Progressive to speculate harder on their mental fitness and brain capacity than a crypto bro speculates on dogecoin
I'm late to the comments, but this is a fantastic piece.
"If Latinx was a popular term, it would no longer hold elite status. By using a word so garish and offensive to the average Latino, elite Latinos are able to signal their status by just changing a single syllable."
I think this contributes to the invention and reinvention of preferred terms. The rich used to move on to different "preferred" clothing lines once the rabble started joining in. Similarly, once some critical mass of regular Joes and Jills start using terms like "African American" then it's ripe for a "reboot." Now we're back to "black" as the approved term. So it goes.
Also - thank you for sharing the link re: socioeconomic status of "wokes." Jives with my "lived experience" (ha) but far better to have some data.
I'm assuming you're familiar with Rob Henderson's work around this concept (i.e, "luxury beliefs") - although you tease out the idea a little more.
My take of Fetterman was that, whether or not it was built "for purpose" or leaning into his existing fashion/style choices, he was aiming to be the Liberal Trump. He obviously decided that Trump's appeal was about his support for the common man and the fact he did not "fit the part" of a typical politician. It struck me that Fetterman was trying to channel Trump's appeal through a Liberal prism.
Yes. Rob Henderson shared this essay on Twitter, so I know he's read it and agrees.
And comparing Fetterman to Trump is well put. Rich trust fund kid saying he loves the working-class rural folks.
Tom Wolfe taught the masses that, while bohos may affect proletarian funkiness, they would be mortified to be mistaken for actual proles.
For that matter, it cannot be underscored enough that woke does nothing to change the way the economic pie is sliced.
To give an example, if multinationals would stop putting up barriers to their workers unionizing, this would result in a transfer of concrete, material wealth to cats and also to black and brown (and white) working class people, which would affect those cats and people more than all the sensitivity training and pronouns in corporate email signatures ever invented.
Which is precisely why they won't do it.
They will never give up their own privilege, but will act like they have none.
Who or what are "cats" in this context? (My only familiarity with use of that term to describe people is in the beatnik era "cool cat" sense.)
Felis catus.
My avatar is a recent selfie (actually it isn't, some of my colony and I were fooling around with a phone we found using it to take pictures of ourselves).
Can you imagine if cats were able to unionize?
Ah, OK, sorry, didn't think about the avatar!
It's hard to sniff noses through a screen.
I'm doing manual subsistence work most of the day and I can clearly understand why rich people dress in branded work wear: Because it's great. It's more functional and comfortable than any other clothes. I mostly wear off-brand clothes but I received a used jacket and hoodie from more expensive work-wear brands as gifts half a year ago and they are my best clothes. I often think that if I ever get well-off, I will always buy such clothes because they are the best. And why would rich people want anything less than the best?
The thing about these Carhartt hipsters is that they don't need the functionality of workwear.
I am curious though, do you have hipsters in Sweden? What are they like?
Technically I also don't need the functionality of work wear when I'm resting, taking a walk, having dinner and other things that high status people also do. Still, I strongly prefer the functionality of work wear also then.
We definitely had hipsters in Sweden around 2010. They were young and thin and wore tight, black jeans of the brand Cheap Monday. They also wore glasses with thick black rims and knitted hats. But I haven't heard of them for years, so probably they just went out of fashion.
I wonder how hipsterdom works in Sweden. is it also the same type of people that would be hipsters in America? Young, very college-educated people in urban areas.
As long as hipsters existed, they existed only in (fairly) urban areas (at least a town of, say, ten thousand people was required as a habitat) . They were also young. But they were not from the upper social strata. Rather, they were students of subjects of questionable status with bad career prospects: Social studies, political sciences and the like.
During the last decade working class people have done the main class signalling here. Especially, they get tattoos to signal their social status. Both men and women, but especially men. A few years ago my husband noticed that he was the only one in his football team who didn't have at least one tattoo. Those tattoos are often highly visible: full sleeves are not unusual. I guess that the message is: "I'm fine here, I'm going nowhere". Young male workers can also have more elaborate hair cuts and earrings than men with more prestigious occupations. So the main way of signalling social status is through what you DON'T do. People who hope to fit in on higher levels of society keep to the straight and narrow in order to avoid burning any bridges. Working class people conspicuously burn those bridges.
The tattoo stuff is interesting. In America, tattooing was considered low class for a long time. It was associated with convicts, sailors, and prostitutes. But now affluent people are increasingly getting tattoos and good tattoos are now a sign of wealth.
But I guess in Sweden, things have not changed much. I would be interested in seeing a piece about the social status of tattoos across cultures.
A lot has changed, because twenty years ago tattoos were uncommon. Now they are semi-compulsory for working class men in rural areas. At least they have to skip generations. If one's father has a full-sleeve tattoo, getting one for oneself doesn't appear very rebellious.
I just read a book called Guests of the Sheikh by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea. It is the story of a woman who accompanied her anthropologist husband to a rural Iraqi village for two years, between 1956 and 1958. In that village the heavily veiled and secluded women got tattoos in order to appear more attractive to their husbands.
Great essay. I will quibble a little bit about bringing up Fetterman growing up rich. I’m not saying you are doing this but I am seeing a trend of people just assuming that someone from a privileged background can’t sincerely advocate for the working class. There were a whole slew of stories about “is Rishi Sunak too rich to care about us?” Thing is- FDR did more for working people than any other president and he came from almost unimaginable wealth. Judge people by their actions not their background.
I wasn't trying to imply that Fetterman could not advocate for the working class because he grew up wealthy. Friedrich Engels also grew up wealthy, yet he definitely was pro-working class. Rather, I am saying that Fetterman might be inauthentic by pretending to be working class when he comes from a wealthy background. Donald Trump bragged about his wealth and claimed to want to help the working class at the same time. I respect that more than a rich person who says "Hey, I'm actually also working class like you all!" It's about authenticity above everything.
> As outward markers of social status such as clothing have now become unreliable indicators of class, expect virtue signaling to rise even further. Perhaps we should go back to the days when rich people were obviously rich just by looking at them. At least then they wouldn’t have to virtue signal all these policies that actively harm poor people.
> Bring back robber baron outfits.
We can't. Clothing is now so cheap that even the poor could afford robber baron outfits if they came back into fashion. Thus they can no longer serve as a status marker.
If you ever go to Austin, check out the Daniel Johnston murals. Then get out before the hipsters get to you.