Class and Santorum

" David Brooks, the conservative columnist in The New York Times wrote that Santorum satisfied the criteria of a working-class candidate: He's patriotic, anti-elitist, family-oriented, openly religious and a balanced-budget conservative. Newspapers everywhere have uncritically reported or implied that Santorum is a working-class candidate. Brooks tends to confuse class with demographics, status, values, sentiments and taste. Recall that "working-class vibe", as if being working class were a image to cultivate, as if being working class were an option, like choosing what kind of car to drive or shoes to wear. I suspect that class, to conservatives like Brooks, isn't a social reality at all. Instead it's an abstraction, like a language. With this language they can paint a picture of the kind of Republican they want to see in the campaign, one whose authentic conservative values overwhelm fealty to Big Business. Sadly, there is no such thing. The Republican Party has always been the party of capital. So they imagine this creature into being, and the more they do, the more class seems to be a figment of the imagination.

Class is real of course and though there are many ways to indicate it (education tends to be the most popular) the surest is power. Yes, income tells us a lot about class, but too little is said about the role of power. If you have no capital, then you have nothing with which to survive in a free-market economy other than selling your labour for money. From the beginning, you are at a disadvantage. Part of the price of this fundamental exchange is that you partly surrender control over your time, energy and even your body. If you have a boss - a real boss - you're working class. If your dad or mom has a real boss, more so.

...A curious aspect of the conservative mind, at least as evidenced by Brooks, is that when faced with facts, it retreats into a mushy hard-to-define sphere of values and status. That's why, I think, Brooks is comfortable talking about class as long as class is a "vibe" and not something concrete like socio-economic power. And just as conservatives tend to imagine into being political creatures whose conservative principals cannot be swayed by Big Business, they tend to imagine into being a working-class voter who is not reminded every day of his disadvantage to capital every time he sells his labour for money. Sadly for conservatives of this mind, there is no such thing...

After losing his Senate seat in 2006, Santorum cashed in as a lobbyist. His net income is $3 million. He never had a working-class job, a working-class wage or a working-class boss...Santorum is no more working class than Romney."

FROM HERE