What Is The "Working Class?"
Relevance: Morris Katz was recently on Ezra Klein's pod. Article references how Katz, a Tribeca-born political strategist, was seeking a candidate in main who could appeal to a "cultural working class identity". But this approach often fails as it can leave out the actual working class, as it is focused on the visual markers rather than the true lived experience.
"There is a failure worth understanding here. Whether Platner was actually a working class American was never really the point. What mattered was whether he looked and felt like one. They needed a character to fill a role. The entire operation was so focused on finding someone who fit the part that they neglected the flags in Platner’s background.
We’ve built an entire political vocabulary around a group that everyone claims to represent and nobody has bothered to define. In the gap between the image and the reality, the people who actually need help keep getting left out."