HIGHER EDUCATION BUBBLE UPDATE: What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get: People with Generational Wealth Control America, but Don’t Understand It. “America has the equivalent of a class apartheid. Our systems—of education, credentialing, hiring, housing, and electing officials—are dominated and managed by members of a ‘comfort class.’ These are people who were born into lives of financial stability. They graduate from college with little to no debt, which enables them to advance in influential but relatively low-wage fields—academia, media, government, or policy work. Many of them rarely interact or engage in a meaningful way with people living in different socioeconomic strata than their own. And their disconnect from the lives of the majority has expanded to such a chasm that their perspective—and authority—may no longer be relevant.”

Plus: “College attainment is more than a matter of educational status; it is also a marker of class comfort. . . . To many Americans, classism is the last socially acceptable prejudice. It’s not hard to understand the resentment of a working-class person who sees Democrats as careful to use the right pronouns and acknowledge that we live on stolen Indigenous land while happily mocking people for worrying about putting food on the table.”

The most damning thing about the “comfort class,” though is that while they’re comfortable and insulated from consequences, they’re also for the most part terrible at what they do. Academics, bureaucrats, journalists, corporate flunkies — unlike the people putting food on the table, it’s hard to quantify what they do, and often what they do is socially destructive.