It’s depressing how much of the discourse about “what working class people think” on left Twitter is driven by people who went to grad school and are working backwards from what their peers (whom they hate) think, and inferring working people all think the opposite.

“I was engaged in vicious status competition for years with my classmates from NYU, and the reason they leapfrogged me is because I’m actually a worker, and they oppressed me. Workers all think like me”

These people don’t even have a good idea what professionals and upper income people think. They’re so narcissistic they extrapolate from their art history PhD cohort to every person in the US who ever went to college, or works in an office.

This gives them a false sense—easily falsified by generalized, non-anecdotal data—of what the “elite” believes, and then they simply invert this to come up with workers think. They aren’t even thinking of workers are their own agents, just mirror rich people

It’s all just the same status competition game they’ve always been doing with their peer group. They failed out of the track for mainstream academic or corporate success and now compete for status in terms of authenticity and moral purity instead

It’s all just a game. Workers are not real people in this formulation. “Voice of the worker” just becomes a new point of competition to one-up their eternally one-upping peers.