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In reply to the discussion: Clerk loses job for refusing to let customer use welfare money to pay for cigarettes [View all]HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)told by upper class dems they don't look right, smell right, eat right, behave right and are too stupid to know what's good for them?
this is where the historic charge of "elitism" comes from that the right manipulates to such good effect.
hey dems, try defending the working class for a change.
here's another thread that can't get any traction on this "liberal" board:
Looking a little further into this moral ideology, it revolves around the dichotomy of stigma and respectability. The reason why Thorpe is so revolted is that she has been stigmatised. She is a respectable 'working mother' (I chose the phrase carefully), and she has been made to look like one of them, a scrounger, a social parasite, the worst sort of person....
if paid work, a commodity whose stock increases as it becomes more scarce, is the ultimate guarantor of respectability in English culture - this is a truism - it is so to the extent that unemployment and poverty are associated with a social demonology, an image of criminal violence, uncultured hedonism, and savagery. So, embedded in respectability is an image of an ideal life, part of whose appeal is that it is clearly demarcated from the dissolute lives of those whom people now call, without embarrassment, 'the underclass'...
But who produces this social image of the ideal life, to which workers aspire? For whom is one respectable? Obviously, the answer is, in part, the people who produce social images: the class of professionals, from media and academia, to the upper reaches of social work and civil service, whose function it is to reflect on social problems, critically account for them, and prescribe some form of intervention...Notice, when watching the interview, that Stratton's metropolitan, upper middle class manners, don't seriously veil her attack - but they do make it seem almost natural that she should be treating her subject in this abusive, judgmental, moralising way. She deploys the skills of her class, their ways of speaking to social inferiors, with persuasive authority...
http://www.leninology.com/2012/05/what-bbc-newsnight-did-to-shanene.html
i think it's brilliant.