OVERPRODUCTION OF ELITES: The Most Dangerous Class in America? High Education/Low Income Voters. “The Lumpencommentariate is a larger and growing class of political actors who provide the ground troops and the numbers for the woke mob. . . . AWFLs are an easy target for critics of woke because they are highly performative and have the resources to showcase their supposed virtue in ways that break through culturally. They have The View, Race2Dinner, and move in social circles that amplify and influence culturally elite institutions. They are also similar enough in class to be recognizable to most people as overlapping with their own bourgeois aspirations, while at the same time loudly rejecting the comforts of bourgeois life, while enjoying them. In other words, they are grossly hypocritical and easy to mock. The Lumpencommentariate is a distinct breed, typically younger. They share the same education and, if anything, even more radical politics born of resentment rather than vague guilt born out of unearned wealth. This is the base of support for truly radical politics. Highly-educated but low-income voters who feel betrayed by society.”

Kenneth Anderson had some thoughts on this quite a while ago:

In social theory, OWS is best understood not as a populist movement against the bankers, but instead as the breakdown of the New Class into its two increasingly disconnected parts. The upper tier, the bankers-government bankers-super credentialed elites. But also the lower tier, those who saw themselves entitled to a white collar job in the Virtue Industries of government and non-profits — the helping professions, the culture industry, the virtueocracies, the industries of therapeutic social control, as Christopher Lasch pointed out in his final book, The Revolt of the Elites. The two tiers of the New Class have always had different sources of rents, however. . . . The OWS protestors are a revolt — a shrill, cri-de-coeur wail at the betrayal of class solidarity — of the lower tier New Class against the upper tier New Class. It was, after all, the upper tier New Class, the private-public finance consortium, that created the student loan business and inflated the bubble in which these lower tier would-be professionals borrowed the money. It’s a securitization machine, not so very different from the subprime mortgage machine. The asset bubble pops, but the upper tier New Class, having insulated itself and, as with subprime, having taken its cut upfront and passed the risk along, is still doing pretty well. It’s not populism versus the bankers so much as internecine warfare between two tiers of elites. The downward mobility is real, however, in both income and status. The Cal graduate started out wanting to do ‘sustainable conservation.’ She is now engaged in something closer to subsistence farming.

It’s easy to have a comfortable life now, but people have been raised to crave distinction.