A Guide to the Class Warfare of Presidential Politics

By Michael Kinsley - Apr 12, 2012

Everyone says there’s a class war going on in the U.S. If so, it is, at least so far, a war of words.
It’s also a war in which a principal tactic is to accuse the other side of fighting a class war, while denying that you’re fighting one yourself. Meanwhile, everybody claims to be on the same side: the side of the people, against the aristocratic elitist snobs who … where did I park my tumbrel? In this war of words, certain words take on a special weight or meaning. Here are a few:

-- Elitist. The verbal class war is like a game of pin-the- tail-on-the-donkey (or elephant, as the case may be). The goal is to pin the other side with the label of “elitist.” In my opinion -- purloined from writers such as Thomas Frank and Thomas Byrne Edsall -- conservatives continually gin up an essentially phony cultural class war over social issues, to distract people from the economic class war that the wealthy are winning.