Filed it under, “Damn, I wish I said that.”:
… and you’ve got that “Ways of the Working Class” textbook on your desk, don’t you, Peggy? I’ll bet it’s heavily indexed with Post-Its, sticking out from the thick pages in a pastel rainbow. Does anyone else find it surreal that she tries to dismiss Palin’s alleged pretensions to middle-class origins by explaining that her father was a school track coach, and her mother was the school secretary? Whoa, you got her there, Peg. She might pose as a moose-hunting soccer mom, but she was to the manor born. What fools we middle-class conservatives were, to accept this scion of soccer-coaching royalty as one of us, just because she hid her imperial velvet beneath a plaid shirt.
That was Dr. Zero responding to this puzzling statement by Peggy Noonan:
She is not working class, never was, and even she, avid claimer of advantage that she is, never claimed to be and just lets others say it. Her father was a teacher and school track coach, her mother the school secretary. They were middle-class figures of respect, stability and local status. I think intellectuals call her working-class because they see the makeup, the hair, the heels and the sleds and think they’re working class “tropes.” Because, you know, that’s what they teach in “Ways of the Working Class” at Yale and Dartmouth.
My reaction to the sheer ass-backwardness of Noonan’s claim is, “What the Hell?”
As a member of the “Conservatives who Count” club, it would be helpful if Noonan explained the “class system” to us so we could be spared from confusing our “tropes” in the future. I would ask, however, that Ms. Noonan use small words and short sentences for those of us, like Palin, never learned to think.
Just kidding Pegs, we get it. You and the members of your club resent it when the commoners question, nay disagree, with the Republican ruling class. The problem is, you don’t get it. Robert Stacy McCain puts it this way:
Whatever one says pro or con about Palin, I believe the anti-elitist impulses of the Palinistas are valid and legitimate. Their "populist" resentments are entirely justified by the undemocratic beliefs and practices of the snobs who pat themselves on the back by celebrating the hegemony of a phony "meritocracy."
The problem is that segment of the Republican party that oscillates between ignoring the base and belittling the base yet expects the base to hang on their every word and do the party’s bidding. Sarah Palin has made it clear that she is not beholden to the elites, and you know what, neither is the base.
Dr. Zero’s excellent piece.
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