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The Virginia Giuffre suicide brought to mind an idea I've been thinking about for a while: populism works best without the people. Rob Henderson and many others have talked about how certain ideas promoted by the upper class disproportionately harm the lower class. In his book Troubled, he wrote:
The problem is that people who entertain populist ideas like the above wind up shoved into the same part of the political spectrum as all these people who rave about "pedophile rings." Along with the internet personalities who won't endorse QAnon outright but pander to their QAnoner supporters with equivocating crap like "why can't they release the Epstein documents? I'm not saying there's a conspiracy, I just want TRANSPARENCY IN GOVERNMENT. Just asking qwestchins!" The populist movement winds up embracing the same mentality of helplessness Henderson is criticizing. Many of the Epstein victims admit they did it voluntarily for money, but you can't say that because it gets in the way of the narrative of helpless proles victimized by evil sex-trafficking finance guys.*
You can only really stand up for the people by keeping them at arm's length.
*The QAnoners are convinced that happens ALL THE TIME but Epstein is the only example they can point to, which is why we're still hearing about it five years after Epstein's death and will probably keep hearing about it for decades more.
I am not sure that I see the similarity between "the people on the top got lucky" and QAnon.
Mostly everybody has a story which explains why they are not on the top, and "the people at the top just got lucky" is one such story, while "the people at the top are all lizardmen, and they won't allow humans to join" is another.
The other thing to consider in "hard work" vs "getting lucky" is that being a hard worker is not 100% a choice, but also subject to genetics and nurture, e.g. governed by luck at least in part.
Hard work is necessary, but luck also is a part of it. "I work hard and my dad's a plumber" versus "I work hard and my dad is a partner in KPMG", you tell me who you think is going to get further in life.
JD Vance is a legitimate "I came from poor stock, worked hard, and made it" success story, and look at the shit he gets for his political allegiance. Kamala Harris ran in part on "I grew up in a middle-class family" (where middle-class is supposed to mean "upper working class/lower middle class", i.e. 'just like one of you schlubs') but she is the daughter of university professors. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison between "is Vance more privileged than Harris because he's a white male and she's a biracial female, versus his family were poor and he grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and her mother only divorced once and she grew up between California and Canada". It'd be an intriguing problem to do a privilege walk between them!
I think the word privilege is mostly used by wokes. For them, recognized sources of privilege are ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation and being able-bodied1. Social class is not part of it.2 Fighting for the rights of some straight white cis-men would be giving aid and comfort to the enemy, after all. Also, this makes determining the privilege level of random strangers so much more convenient -- just check their skin color and their gender, and if the person is openly LGBT or in a wheelchair. No need to delve to deep into their childhood or finances. The good news is that a poor white guy can still be an Ally, just as a rich white guy. But for cultural and economic reasons most Allies end up being well-off whites (it is much easier to support BLM when you live in a gated community and are a lawyer than when you live in a flat downtown and are a small time store owner). And the label the SJ left uses for (mostly poor, mostly white) folks who are not on board with their platform is, or course, "deplorables".
Personally, I think that economic inequality is likely the most significant inequality within Western societies, and most of the difficulties certain ethnicities encounter are downstream of them being economically disadvantaged. But I also believe that there are a lot of other inequalities, and that crucially that it is not useful to simply sum them up -- that there is no single scalar score which describes privilege in a useful way. Being white is advantageous in some ways. Being male can be an advantage in some situations. Being female can also be an advantage. Being beautiful, young, or hot can be an advantage or disadvantage depending on the situation. It very much depends on individual situations, specific cultural contexts (being gay is orders of magnitude less of a deal if you are living in a student dorm in a coastal city than if you are living in a rural house with your religious parents, for example).
Regarding Vance, part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election, and in my mind, this is a severe moral failing which can not be excused by having had a difficult path in life -- not unless your defense is "I would literally starve unless I took a job in the White House".3
1 Terms and conditions apply. Being on the spectrum might gain you a iota of sympathy, but will not protect you from accusations of toxic masculinity, for example.
2 Yes, the pdf you linked uses economic observables. So technically poor white people get awarded points. I am just arguing that this is not how people actually move up on the totem pole of victimhood in the real world.
3 I suppose that SJ also has plenty of shibboleths, but mostly they require people not to voice certain ideas (e.g. HBD), and don't require them to loudly proclaim that the sky is green like Trump does.
Given the people who turned on a dime from "election denialism about the 2020 election should be made a crime!" to "Trump stole the 2024 election!" reusing all the tropes they said beforehand were fake, conspiracy theory, etc. (the voting machines being rigged, fake ballots and the rest of it), this shocks me less and less every time I see it trotted out.
Indeed, I'm half-inclined to start to come around to "hey, maybe the 2020 election was rigged!" 😀
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My experience in woke circles is that poor people of color get bonus points on the oppression checklist, while poor white people don’t.
Unless the woke speaker is obviously cornered or trying to recruit a poor white person, in which case they briefly revert to doctrinaire Leninism for as long as it takes to keep up the charade in front of their new “ally.”
There was a blog post somewhere about how a lot of poor people, black and white, are intuitively suspicious of philosophizing and big words, essentially, so I don’t know how successful overall this is as a tactic, or if wokeism dropped it at some point.
But I have seen the tactic in operation before.
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