This article is fascinating. It echoes something that's been floating around my brain for a while, but which has defied previous attempts at articulation.

Kitsch - in the Marxist interpretation - is a tasteless commodification that doesn't KNOW that it is tasteless. https://twitter.com/JimmyLevendia/status/1290445940172759045

Remember the song "Little Boxes" (made of ticky tacky). Both the rich and the poor generally look at middle class people as, in a sense, class LARPers. Kitsch was the physical manifestation of this LARPing.

The poor, to the middle: why are you pretending to be rich? We all know you're not rich. Be authentically poor like the rest of us and stop pretending.

The rich, to the middle: you will never be us. We will always see through your emulation of us. We're on to the next thing.

It ties into something I read on SSC a while back about a sort of class barber pole effect in values and matters of taste. What is cool for rich people today will be lame by the time it filters down to middle class folks trying to climb the ladder.

Kitsch is not a permanent state. What was once a display of wealth will eventually become a middle class thing, then a poor thing. And eventually it may recycle back to the top.

Eventually we may see the very wealthy once again emulate kitsch.

SSC: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/

But when it happens, you can be sure there will be no mistaking for an activity of the poors and the middles. A person can understand - and even emulate, sometimes - folks adjacent to their position (a step higher, a step lower).

But beyond that is class 'here be dragons'.

Circling back to the original article linked by @JimmyLevendia, Catholicism itself became a kinda-sorta kitsch. It's certainly not associated with the wealthy, at the moment (who have their own post-Protestant Wokism - though that is now descending to the masses).

Hispanics and Irish are largely Catholic, of course, and neither have a reputation for being fashionably wealthy to any great degree. Their values would not be mistaken for the values of the wealthy and powerful.

Though a couple hundred years ago, it was very different.

Different in the sense that many powerful rulers were devoutly Catholic - or at least pretended they were, anyway.

Today, even Protestantism is largely unfashionable. A middle class thing more than anything.

The Religious Right often claims that Christians are oppressed, though when Leftists challenge them on this (claiming they are privileged instead), it's difficult for the Rightist to articulate what's really going on.

What the Religious Right is getting at is that they realize everybody considers them unfashionable. Lame. A religious box full of ticky tacky to be made fun of and lambasted.

Whether we can legitimately define this as "oppression" I don't know. But it's a thing.

Put simply, the Religious Right - and much of the American middle class as a larger whole - realizes that the powerful and wealthy consider their whole lives to be kitschy. A store full of old people collectible souvenir plates.

But it's not just in consumer goods - in the financed SUVs and suburban neighborhoods - it's in their habits, mannerisms, beliefs, faith, etc... it's all kitsch. Yesterday's fashion. High WASPs are gone. The Optimates have left the building. They are kitsch.

When pink shirt and his wife stood off the BLM masses, people started making fun of their kitschy house (which someone dredged up an article for). Old Baroque pieces. Wood paneling. A mansion out of the Gilded Age, maybe.

It all looked like kitsch, too.

Here are college kids on the Internet - who probably make whatever the minimum is as a Starbucks barista - making fun of some pretty well-off rich couple's kitschy taste.

Some $15/hour rando: don't they know that stuff isn't cool for rich people anymore? Lolol. So dumb!

The silver lining in all this - to counterbalance @0x49fa98's more generally pessimistic takes - is Wokism may have its own expiration date. As it spreads to middle class Karens aping their betters, and college kids aspiring to be proper Brahmins, it loses fashionability.

Soon, the very wealthy, the powerful, the connected old guard - whatever you call them - may have to select new values, if only to distinguish themselves and their values from activist baristas and screeching poors rioting downtown.

Wokism may one day be as kitschy as a store full of souvenir plates and boomer memorabilia. It may be as unfashionable as a sincere Mass, or a room full of evangelicals talking about how man walked with dinosaurs.

This, too, is accounted for in the SSC barber pole theory. Eventually what is at the bottom circles around to the top again. There are cycles. Mid-century modern was a style the rich liked once. Then the middles. Then kitsch. Circled back to the rich. https://twitter.com/DeanBradleySFF/status/1290480200799547395

Now, HGTV is full of mid-century modern shit, and so it's descending into the middle again. It moves down the barber pole... and eventually comes around to the top again.

Yes. That was part of the article, too. The very rich, even if they ape the manners of the poor, will not be MISTAKEN for the poor.

But it's possible they could be mistaken for the middle, which engenders feelings of horror. https://twitter.com/NoLongerBennett/status/1290481734643904512