Having recently finished "Hillbilly Elegy," this interview reminded me of similar themes. America doesn't really have a meaningful discourse on class I suspect because the Soviet machine dominated it for so long it became a kind of third-rail topic.

If you are from a working class background, or find yourself navigating it, what you notice about people who have left it is they leave behind that very "dignity," (or honour) that defines working people. They become placeless, "political," "from anywhere," as opposed to "from somewhere."[1] It's because an elite education broadens your perspective so that the symbols and things you previously thought were meaningful and powerful don't figure in with the same significance when you see the bigger picture of possibilities. What working people treat as a localized cultural dignity can seem like superstition when viewed against much greater power in a global context and perspective. This dignity is still important, but higher education "pops," you out of that view.

The side effect (or cause of problems) of this is that today, even the most elite institutions do not create enough cultural distance between working people and the new administrators, and so you have this insecure burgher class in America who define themselves with displays of contempt for "white trash," "rednecks," etc, because even their advanced education and high paying jobs (or cultural capital) do not provide them with enough distance and certainty that they are in fact sufficiently different, that working people wouldn't even register as a threat to their identity.

The reason a "noble," person can treat people equally is because there is absolutely no danger of the association harming their identity and position. It's also why country people can seem extra egalitarian, because they just don't have a stake in the affectations of city class navigation.

You can also see how the most militant critics of working class values and of the underclasses' dignity systems and honour codes are the people who most closely resemble them, or perceive they are only a few paychecks away from them: "artists," with middling if any higher education, unionized workers, city dwellers with precarious culture and media jobs. The lower middle who need to distinguish themselves and work harder so they don't lose, "everything," and be reduced to those people they are trying so hard to separate themselves from. On the upper end, there is a kind of haughty mystification at why anyone would actually fear wearing red or blue in certain neighbourhoods, but when they say they don't understand, what they mean is they don't need to.

This negative cycle of downward class anxiety and neuroticism from the new middle just provokes entrenchment of working tribe values and reactionary views, and you get the culture wars of today. America's new elite is not exceptionally elite by historical standards, and it knows it, and their impostor syndrome is expressed mainly as contempt for an underclass and the scapegoating of working class people.

The solutions are more complex, but the problem seems stark as day.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/22/the-road-to-so...