The Sensitivity Gap: Culture Wars Don’t Divide Us. It’s Privilege Blindness and Resentment.

~ Laura

In a little town nestled in the Catskill Mountains, the visitor breezed into the downtown deli with her little dog on a leash. This deli is aimed at the new city folk, who come up for a destination wedding or own a second home. They offer a range of sandwiches sourced with local cheeses and a fresh aioli sauce. Across the street, there is a brick oven pizza place where you get can get a white pizza with garlic and fresh ramps. 

In the forests of New York State, this area was always known for flying fishing and hunting. You can drive 40 minutes between towns seeing nothing but rusty trailers and dudes knee deep in babbling brooks looking for trout. Now, you can also see million dollar vacation home peaking through the trees on the peaks of the green mountains. 

This weekend, Steve and I went up to Roscoe, NY for an anniversary weekend away from our adult children who won’t leave our home. We had front row seats watching the awkward relationship between the rich visitors and locals. One night, we sat a bar between a guy who looked a singer from ZZ Top and second homers with jobs in high fashion and real estate. Resentment and privilege is the real culture war that is at the heart of American politics today.

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Published by Laura

16 thoughts on “The Sensitivity Gap: Culture Wars Don’t Divide Us. It’s Privilege Blindness and Resentment.”

  1. One of the worst parts for me of the current political environment is that the biggest, whiniest pieces of shit, people who were resentful of everything in 1990 but couldn’t get anyone to listen to them, are routinely put into news stories as the definitive rural white person.

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  2. William Galston has smart things to say https://www.persuasion.community/p/galston in an interview which is about twice as long as it needs to be (editors! I miss them!)

    I live in a community where Trump got seventeen per cent, and it is absolutely stylish to sneer at his voters. In my experience, people who are getting sneered at tend to be resentful. Not a good dynamic.

    Dave

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    1. “In my experience, people who are getting sneered at tend to be resentful. Not a good dynamic.”

      In the 1980s, I was a nerd with a bad perm and no Internet to find my people. I didn’t go around angry all the time and dehumanizing other people. And then, on top of that, in a few years I grew the f*** up.

      These people being “sneered at” have a whole Internet of like-minded people to hang out with and media broadcasters telling them all day and night how wonderful and truly American they are. Please understand that I am not really feeling sorry for them.

      (Note: every time Laura posts about Roscoe, I get a thrill knowing someone else loves the area as much as I do.)

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      1. Wendy, I’d like to shift the discussion from ‘do these unwashed knuckle draggers have a legitimate grievance?’ to ‘is it unsurprising that these ukds feel aggrieved, and at the chattering class of which we two are members?’

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      2. I’m not Wendy, but I’ll take a shot at answering the question. I’ll grant that the ukds have some legitimate grievances, but no more than anyone else. I don’t think they have them at the so-called chattering classes though.

        Let me try with a direct example: a major issue in rural areas is hospital closures. This is much worse in states that did not expand Medicaid because those reimbursements would have funded and kept open those hospitals. The expansion of Medicaid of course was a part of the Affordable Care Act, the signature policy of the Obama administration. And Barack Obama was certainly the favored president of the chattering classes. The chattering classes actively pursued a policy to help the ukds, and the reaction was to boot Democrats out of office in many districts where they previously represented the ukds in favor of Republicans who actively opposed the policy.

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      6. Yes! We’re going on a day tour in Co. Wicklow tomorrow and then to Edinburgh for 4 days after that.

        Mr. Wendy is wandering around Dublin right now doing some night shooting. I’m looking at my genealogy stuff, inspired by having gone to the EPIC Irish Emigration Museum today.

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  3. Great comments! Sorry that I can’t weigh in. I’m writing LIKE A FIEND. I have never been so disciplined before, so I have to ride this out. Thanks for your patience.

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  4. Why would the Sackler family be assumed to be part of the chattering classes? Because they’re rich? Doesn’t seem obvious that it’s the same thing.

    In any event, if the ukds feel they have a legitimate grievance against the Sacklers, I agree, and they’re not the only ones. But that seems like a very specific grievance against some very specific people. And it doesn’t have much to do with anyone sneering at anyone else.

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  6. Well snobbery and rudeness are nothing new. And certainly the upper classes on all sides of the political spectrum do it – as a student from a blue collar family at Miami University in the 80s I saw it. Campus Young Republicans made stupid derisive comments about unemployed factory workers as the rust belt started rusting. A respected feminist professor took a swipe at the vocabulary of a waitress while sharing an anecdote.

    Why are we forgetting that there has been a big social media campaign creating a sense of grievance among the Trump supports in the last decade? It’s gone beyond blaming “elites” to sowing mistrust in most kinds of expertise. Health care, science, and even basic facts about how the government works are to be mistrusted. A former classmate ranted on my social media page about how much money “illegals” are getting to live in the U.S. I asked what agency / program was administering this aid and of course I got “screamed at” that everyone knew it was true and details didn’t matter.

    Sorry for the long rant – Wendy enjoy your vacation.

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    1. Rudeness goes both ways. “Townies” can be very rude to “summer people.” If an out of towner is unpleasant to the local tradesmen, he may find it really hard to get a plumber.

      As far as I can tell, social media fosters disrespect for everyone.

      Cranberry

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  7. Is “ukd” a thing? Because if not, let’s please not make it happen. Especially because the people we seem to be talking about it – and I say this as a 20-year resident of a tiny purple university town in the middle of a red rural area in a blue state – are often 1) rich landowners, business owners, etc.; 2) in political charge of their own towns/police depts/judgeships etc. Still, somehow, the car dealership owner that makes $150-200k thinks the tenured professor that makes $80k is “elite.” Or, sometimes, the local business owners treat the non-white students from the “big city,” who are decidedly not richer than they are, badly.

    The closure or very bad state of rural hospitals is a huge issue for everyone. It’s just a nightmare.

    I am very jealous of Wendy. I spent a few days in Dublin and loved it.

    af

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