The chapter raised pointed questions that were notably absent from the draft that the party put out, both about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s ill-fated decision to run for re-election and the sway of an operative class that had become “generationally wealthy off politics” while steering Democratic strategy.
And it pointedly raised the concern that most senior Democratic strategists in 2024 were “financially secure” and thus removed from the challenges facing many Americans. “It is therefore possible the people ‘in the room’ at the highest levels of 2024 decision making misunderstood the mood and practicalities facing everyday America,” the report read.
I grew up around wealth. Wealthy people who have been poor sorta get it, but can lose it depending on who they hang out with. Wealthy people who grew up wealthy and went on to be wealthy adults don’t understand what lower / lower middle class life is like, what it does to you to live your life with intermittent low level financial stress and peaks of high financial stress. They can have empathy for it, they can see you’re struggling, but the behavior associated with financial instability looks to them like a series of bad decisions and choices they could never see themselves making. Their peer groups overwhelmingly come from the same economic class they do, so they have no social model for what a person making those choices is going through.
Most especially, the human brain uses peer feedback to calibrate it’s own sense of right and wrong and what’s real and what’s not. Wealthy people who spend no time with less fortunate people actually can’t process those people’s lives as something immediate or directly present. They can only think about it abstractly. They can’t connect it to their own inner life. They can be moved by the plight of people in need, but they genuinely don’t get it.
Also, they’re just as short sighted, shallow, selfish and superstitious as any other demographic, and they have inflated senses of their own intellect and capabilities (due to only getting specific kinds of peer feedback), so they tend to be offended (rather than self reflective) when presented with the idea that they don’t understand something.
If we select leaders (of either party) from the upper class (I.E. those who can afford to run for office) we will ALWAYS get willfully out of touch psychology from our leaders. And when we select someone else (A Mamdani, an AOC), it will always look to the wealthy like this person is unhinged (because their actions and rhetoric don’t fit into the rich person’s calibrated sense of reality).
