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Wednesday 21st of January 2026

2007 financial crisis Why would we expect people from the classes that are most insulated from economic downturns to feel a sense of urgency about an economic crisis that hit the most vulnerable Americans the hardest? Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential election Most white  working-class people voted for Donald Trump and the through line that you find is whiteness, not class and not gender. It's not like he only got men; he got a majority of white women too. So if you look at categories of white people you find Trump being dominant among them, in part because of the appeal he made, but also in part because the Republican Party has effectively become in this country the party of white people. Ta-Nehisi Coates © 2017 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential primaries This is what happens when social and political elites disdain blue-collar white males and their families for decades on end © 2016 Kwiple.com
2016 Presidential election Trump's rebellion was born at the intersection of two toxic American myths, the post-racial society and the classless society. Matt Taibbi © 2016 Kwiple.com
Abortion To women like myself, they [abortion rights] are the bare minimum of human rights. To working-class women, who often see motherhood, not work, as the key source of social honor, obsession with abortion rights among well-off women is selfish, exemplifying lack of an adequate devotion to family. Seen in this light, opposition to abortion rights becomes, for high-school educated women, a way of claiming social honor. Joan C. Williams, The Guardian, August 23, 2017 © 2016 Kwiple.com
American Dream Government assistance is said to undermine the American dream. Wait. Undermine whose American dream? Nancy Isenberg, White Trash © 2016 Kwiple.com
American Jews  Jews earn like Episcopalians, and vote like Puerto Ricans. Milton Himmelfarb © 2017 Kwiple.com
Authoritarianism A number of elements contribute to authoritarian predispositions in lower-class individuals. Low education, low participation in political or voluntary organizations of any type, little reading, isolated occupations, economic insecurity, and authoritarian family patterns are some of the most important. These elements are interrelated, but they are by no means identical. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man © 2021 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Marriage has become a mark of status, increasingly the preserve of the wealthy and educated. Today, 26% of poor, 39% of working-class, and 56% of middle- and upper-class adults aged 18 to 55 are married, according to research by Opportunity America and the American Enterprise Institute. This compares with 51%, 57% and 65% respectively in 1990. The Guardian, October 7, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Caste and class The soil grows castes; the machine makes classes. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Children Poor kids who do everything right don't do better than rich kids who do everything wrong. Advantages and disadvantages, in other words, tend to perpetuate themselves. Washington Post, October 18, 2014 © 2016 Kwiple.com
Class Government by  the upper class promotes government for  the upper class and government for  the upper class is often bad for everyone else. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Class [In] a recent employment study … sociologists Lauren A. Rivera and Andras Tilcsik sent 316 law firms résumés with identical and impressive work and academic credentials, but different cues about social class. The study found that men who listed hobbies like sailing and listening to classical music had a callback rate 12 times higher than those of men who signaled working-class origins, by mentioning country music, for example. Joan C. Williams, New York Times, May 28, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Class The old notion that politicians from different classes essentially want the same things — that the interests of the mechanic “can be more effectually promoted by the merchant” [as Hamilton said] — is deeply mistaken. On the important economic issues of the day, members of Congress routinely vote with class. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Class Policy-makers from blue-collar backgrounds change classes when they enter politics, but they do not appear to change their policy perspectives. Neither do business owners, technical professionals, or legislators from other lines of work. The proceses that give rise to class-based differences in legislative voting continue to operate long after lawmakers enter public life. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government © 2019 Kwiple.com
Class struggle Hey, hey, that's OK You're gonna work for us one day Chant repeated by fans of a Newport Beach, CA, high school football team losing to a team from Costa Mesa, CA Quoted by Joan Didion in “Where I Was From”  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Class struggle I'm not trying to turn you into a bourgeois, Naomi. If the bed is too luxurious, we can do it on the floor. Alexander Portnoy, protagonist in Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint  © 2016 Kwiple.com
Class struggle I used to believe that the debate over wealth distribution should be conducted separately from the poverty debate in order to minimize attacks on antipoverty advocates for engaging in “class warfare.” But now we literally cannot afford to separate the two issues. Peter Edelman, So Rich, So Poor © 2016 Kwiple.com
Class struggle The new class struggle is between the haves and the have yachts. saying © 2015 Kwiple.com
Class struggle People are more violently opposed to fur than leather because it's safer to harass rich women than motorcycle gangs. Alexei Sayle © 2015 Kwiple.com
Class struggle The social conflicts which  which industrial life must have fomented,  and which were so terrible in the Flanders  of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,  were already in embryo in the very period of city evolution [in the 11th century].  The antagonism between capital and labor is thereby revealed to be as old as the middle class. Henri Pirenne, Medieval Cities © 2023 Kwiple.com
Class struggle There is a class warfare, all right, but it's my class, the rich class, that's making war, and we're winning. Warren Buffet © 2019 Kwiple.com
Class struggle When elephants fight, the grass suffers. 0 East African proverb © 2015 Kwiple.com
Congress Although women and minorities were still underrepresented [in Congress] at the end of the twentieth century, both groups gained considerable ground during the postwar period. In sharp contrast, working-class Americans — who have made up more than 50 percent of the labor force for at least the last hundred years — have never made up more than 2 percent of Congress. Nicholas Carnes, White-Collar Government [2013] © 2019 Kwiple.com
COVID-19 coronavirus [A] kind of pandemic caste system is rapidly developing: the rich holed up in vacation properties; the middle class marooned at home with restless children; the working class on the front lines of the economy, stretched to the limit by the demands of work and parenting, if there is even work to be had. New York Times, March 27, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Criminal justice How about we go back to [Paul] Manafort? Breaking into his house. What is he, a drug dealer? Rudy Giuliani, on the Mueller investigation and  courtesies owed to white collar criminals, Sean Hannity interview, May 2, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Elites Social inclusion may be a growing public mantra of the far upper class. But economic extraction remains among its core operating principles. David Callahan © 2017 Kwiple.com
Employment The crucial problem isn't creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable. … So what will the useless class do all day? Yuval Harari, The Guardian, May 8, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Fox News Fox's great insight wasn't necessarily that there was a great desire for a conservative point of view. The genius was seeing that there's an attraction to fear-based, anger-based politics that has to do with class and race. Blair Levin © 2019 Kwiple.com
Liberalism The poorer strata everywhere are more liberal or leftist on economic issues; they favor more welfare state measures, higher wages, graduated income taxes, support of trade unions, and so forth. But when liberalism is defined in non-economic terms — as support of civil liberties, internationalism, etc. — the correlation is reversed. The more well-to-do are more liberal, the poorer are more intolerant. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man © 2021 Kwiple.com
Identity politics If there is one thing to be salvaged from Marxist thought – and, really, I must insist on just the one – it is relative indifference to matters of blood. The stress was always on material interest as the motor of history. By rejecting Marx, the US remained free and prosperous, but also defenceless against identity neuroses. Janan Ganesh, Financial Times, January 16, 2019 © 2019 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary standing still (stan'ding stil), participial phrase. Synonym for running harder and harder. © 2017 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say As long as you don't give a shit about politics, you'll be shit on by those who do © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Trump officially declares class war decades after it started — — — His proposed tax plan overwhelmingly benefits him, his kids, his ilk © 2017 Kwiple.com
Lies If I ever thought of these as lies, I soon came to see them as part of the etiquette of poverty — a means of getting by for the poor and also a gift we give to the rich, a practice that lets us avoid talking about the uncomfortable differences between us. Over time, it becomes second nature. Observing this etiquette doesn't feel dishonest because its falsehoods recognize the deeper truth that many of society's institutions are hostile to the poor. Lying to the landlord keeps a roof over our heads. Lying to the social worker keeps our family together. Lying to ourselves allows us to believe it's all going to be OK, somehow, someday. Joshua Hunt, New York Times, July 13, 2022 © 2022 Kwiple.com
Meritocracy  After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like Young’s dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chance to rise created a new hereditary class structure. Educated professionals pass on their money, connections, ambitions, and work ethic to their children, while less educated families fall further behind, with less and less chance of seeing their children move up. George Packer, The Atlantic, July/August 2021 [Michael Young was the author of The Rise of the Meritocracy ] © 2021 Kwiple.com
Meritocracy The argument of the book is that if the soil creates castes the machine manufactures classes — classes to which people can be assigned by their achievement rather than ascribed by their birth. In so far as this has happened, social inequality can be justified, and, to avoid too blatant a contradiction, such justification is almost always needed in a democratic society which has bowed to equality as far as elections are concerned. Otherwise the people who exercise power are going to be undermined by self-doubt and people over whom the power is exercised become indignant and subversive because they deny that the others have any right to lord it. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Meritocracy No longer is it just the brilliant individual who shines forth; the world beholds for the first time the spectacle of a brilliant class, the five percent of the nation who know what five per cent means. Michael Young, The Rise of the Meritocracy  © 2021 Kwiple.com
Politics Experience shows that the cardinal point to which the rich man directs his efforts, consciously or unconsciously, is preserving his economic “security,” and that unconditional, ruthless political idealism is found, if not exclusively then mostly, among the classes who own nothing and who are thus entirely outside the group with an interest in preserving the existing economic system in a given society. That is especially true in exceptional — that is revolutionary — periods. Max Weber, “The Politician's Work” in Charisma and Disenchantment, translated by Damion Searls © 2020 Kwiple.com
Public discourse  This is what the sociologist Howard Becker calls the “hierarchy of credibility”: Those at the top of the social hierarchy don't have to prove their claims; they're just taken for granted. But claims made by those on the bottom are burdened by skepticism and demands for proof. Eleni Schirmer and Louise Seamster, New York Times, May 26, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Entrepreneurs – America's true heroes – deserve more respect than employees © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say Immunize corporate executives against criminal prosecution © 2017 Kwiple.com
Republicans say The poor must suffer disease that the rich may flourish © 2017 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say America is a classless society © 2016 Kwiple.com
Sleepers at the wheel say We're all this together © 2015 Kwiple.com
State of the union c Class-based segregation transcends race-based segregation © 2017 Kwiple.com
State of the union c Democrats work to raise the bottom and cap the top Republicans work to push most middlers to the bottom and raise the remnant to the top  © 2017 Kwiple.com
State of the union c Human cockfighting attracts billionaire investors glad to profit from hoi lolloi pugilists pounding one another into submission © 2016 Kwiple.com
Supreme Court Two recent Supreme Court rulings — one ending affirmative action in university admissions and another vetoing  Joe Biden's student debt forgiveness plan — have been lambasted by progressives as yet more evidence that the judicial branch is wrecking America. But there is a silver lining to almost everything, and I can see one here. The Supreme Court has unwittingly elevated the issue of income inequality, and the need for class-based educational reform in the US. Rana Foroohar, Financial Times, July 17, 2023 © 2023 Kwiple.com
Surely you jest “Scholars” attend charter schools, “students” attend public schools  © 2017 Kwiple.com
Tech bros say You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. Greg Gopman, CEO of AngelHack, kvetching about San Francisco's homeless © 2016 Kwiple.com
Trumpism In the person of Donald Trump, resentment entered the White House. It rode in on the back of an alliance between a tiny subset of super-wealthy 0.1 percenters (not all of them necessarily American) and a large number of 90 percenters who stand for pretty much everything the 9.9 percent are not. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Unions White-collar professionals tend to appreciate what unions did for their parents. But they don't view today's janitors or nurse's aides in the same way. Andy Stern, former president, Service Employees International Union © 2017 Kwiple.com
Vietnam War One aspect of the conflict, by the way, that I will never ever countenance is that we drafted the lowest-income level of America, and the highest-income level found a doctor that would say that they had a bone spur. That is wrong. That is wrong. If we are going to ask every American to serve, every American should serve. John McCain © 2017 Kwiple.com
Vietnam War Vietnam was a place where the elite went as reporters, not as soldiers. Almost as many people from Harvard won Pulitzer Prizes in Vietnam as died there. David Halberstam © 2017 Kwiple.com
Voting Vote theft is class war by other means. Greg Palast, Billionaires and Ballot Bandits © 2015 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality In between the top 0.1 percent and the bottom 90 percent is a group that has been doing just fine. It has held on to its share of a growing pie decade after decade. And as a group, it owns substantially more wealth than do the other two combined. In the tale of three classes (see Figure 1), it is represented by the gold line floating high and steady while the other two duke it out. You'll find the new aristocracy there. We are the 9.9 percent. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality Perhaps the best evidence of the power of an aristocracy is to be found in the degree of resentment it provokes. By that measure, the 9.9 percent are doing pretty well indeed. The surest sign of an increase in resentment is a rise in political division and instability. We're positively acing that test. You can read all about it in the headlines of the past two years Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
Wealth inequality We are the people of good family, good health, good schools, good neighborhoods, and good jobs. We may want to call ourselves the “5Gs” rather than the 9.9 percent. We are so far from the not-so-good people on all of these dimensions, we are beginning to resemble a new species. Matthew Stewart, The Atlantic, June 2018 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
White-collar workers What we are witnessing is the emergence of a new white-collar working class, subject all the regimentation and discipline of its predecessor, but lacking the latter's solidarity, its willingness to organize and to fight its cause in the workplace. Simon Head, Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Humans Dumber © 2016 Kwiple.com