Thomas Frank: Ann Coulter and David Brooks play a sneaky, unserious class card

Post-Ferguson and Staten Island, conservatives are trying to divide with the snob card again. Too bad Dems let them

A few days ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks took the occasion of the outrage in Ferguson, Missouri, to call for a national effort to combat “classism,” an unfortunate form of prejudice that, he says, results from widening inequality. Nowadays, Brooks asserted, “classism intertwines with racism” to produce a truly monstrous complex of attitudes toward the people at society’s bottom.

If you are a newcomer to the culture-war labyrinth, you might be surprised to hear a leading conservative deplore “classism,” because it’s the right’s beloved free-market system that has opened the yawning crevasse between the classes—between the people who work and the people who own. But in truth class grievance is central to the cosmology of modern conservatism. They love nothing more than to denounce snobbery—just as long as they are able to attribute that vice to scholarly liberal weaklings who disdain the plainspoken ways of middle America. David Brooks himself wrote one of the best-known iterations of this stereotype, back in the days when people were just beginning to associate red states with proletarian authenticity and blue states with upper-class pretension. (And back in October, he argued against the scourge of “partyism”.)