Who Is “Ruining America”?
13th July 2017
This David Brooks column called “How We Are Ruining America” has received lots of attention on the internet, but I don’t think we have commented on it. According to Brooks, members of the college-educated upper middle class — the top 20 percent or so — are ruining America by making sure their kids have good opportunities and, supposedly, making sure that kids from lower classes don’t get them.
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Brooks’ beef is that the college-educated upper middle class is excluding other people’s kids from access to the opportunities their kids have. But Brooks has just told us that the way we confer these opportunities is to embrace behavior codes that put cultivating successful children at the center of life.
This tactic is available to members of all classes. Anyone can embrace behavior codes that put their kids at the center, and generations of immigrants and poor people have done. If, today, too many members of lower classes don’t embrace these codes, then they, not members of the upper middle class, are excluding their offspring from access to opportunities.
The reason why proles are proles is because they act like proles. The primary identifiers of social class are behavioral, especially in these days when it’s fashionable for upper-class people to mimic the dress and speech patterns of lower-class people.
The whole proglodyte Narrative is about denying that Fashionable Victim Groups have agency. They are the way they are because they can’t help it, so it’s Not Their Fault. Only those who are among God’s Chosen, like the Obamas, can rise above their background and become real people rather than just interchangeable units of a racial or sexual or political Identity Group.