the United Kingdom Independence Party, the revanchist movement of economic nationalists behind the Brexit referendum vote

the rich cavalcade of class fantasias kicked up by this bizarre presidency

he, too, has put pecuniary oceans between himself and his socioeconomic origins via a long and lucrative tour in investment banking

raised in genuinely insalubrious circumstances

[...] the only time the economic circumstances of the people become important is in their cynical and strategic deployment as cultural signifiers enabling the conspicuous display of a political leader’s putative earthiness.

The right’s full-on moral panic over Ocasio-Cortez’s allegedly spurious working-class identity reached a bathetic crescendo in January

Behind all this frenetic policing of culturalized class authenticity is a deep and worsening contradiction at the heart of Anglo-American politics on the right. Modern conservatism on both sides of the Atlantic has frequently bedecked itself in an of-the-people rhetoric in the face of a range of hard-to-refute egalitarian and redistributive critiques. We know this much about the spread of right-wing populism across the generations: it’s what happens when elites can no longer excuse their status on the grounds of kingly magnificence and exceptional genealogy. Instead, they have to turn to a range of bogus emotive rhetorical strategies to arrogate authority from below. Historically, liberals—as distinguished from the socialist left—have been swift to object to this sort of thing, priding themselves on their rationality, fairness, and ironclad faith in meritocracy. In the United States, Trump is a bogeyman for liberals precisely because he is regarded as the zenith—or nadir, as the case may be—of a uniquely unmitigated strain of demagogic truth-avoidance; the same can be said in the United Kingdom for Robinson and the Bad Boys of Brexit. But this placid and complacent mode of counterattack sidesteps, perhaps deliberately, the question of why liberals throughout the Anglosphere—and, indeed, beyond—are engaged in almost precisely the same thing they want to hang Trump or Farage out to dry for.

Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, Lionel Jospin, and their many epigones were, very pointedly and precisely, not the left but assumed as a matter of course that they would retain the loyalty of the traditional left

their hyperbolic excesses and elisions are blatantly obvious to the people whom they are professing to speak for

similarly parlous risk