“steaming roast beef, gravy, potatoes, okra, green beans, corn bread, and sweetened ice
tea”^56 —large portions of familiar favorites and familiar faces, signaling comforting
stability. For my crowd, a good party means a day of intensive cooking, often not for
people we know well already, but for “people we’d like to know better.” What’s on
display? Novelty is meant to signal sophistication; cultural capital, sociologists would call
it. It’s important to impress, all the more so because the dinner party often serves a work
purpose as well as a social one; it’s designed to cement relationships that will be helpful
in developing a career—colleagues or potential clients or customers.
If food and religion are deep class divides, so is the role of talk. Elite families talk with
their children far more than non-elite ones do.^57 “While working-class people are not
without self-insight and concern about their inward states, nevertheless they are not
typically occupied with their ‘innards’ on the scale of the middle class,” noted a class
migrant, now a professor.^58 J. D. Vance tried going to a therapist but “talking with some
stranger about my feelings made me want to vomit.”^59 This response also reflects the
high value placed on privacy, on not “spilling your guts.” Noted one class migrant who
grew up in North Dakota, “In my family, a conversation about one’s work typically
consumed only six words. (‘How was your day?’ ‘Oh, fine.’) Speaking otherwise, in
detail or with enthusiasm, was to risk display of the dreaded swelled head.”^60 So much
for discussing that amazing book you’re reading.
Still another class divide concerns social networks.^61 Elites typically have a narrow
intimate circle but also have a broad network of acquaintances—“entrepreneurial
networks,” sociologists call them. Entrepreneurial networks help professionals get jobs,
customers, clients, business partners, and business opportunities around the country or
even in other countries.
Elite socializing thus cultivates the ability to get along smoothly with a broad range of
people and impress them with your sophistication. Elite children are taught from a very
young age to shake hands and look strangers firmly in the eye,^62 because their futures
rely on the ability to form and maintain entrepreneurial networks. Studies show that
between 51% and 70% of professionals get jobs through personal contacts, so they
“network” and host those aforementioned dinner parties.^63 This is part of the self-
actualization ethic so central to elite life (see Table 1).
This peculiar combination of the personal and the strategic strikes the working class as
insincere. So does the kind of politicking required for career success in professional and
- Why Does the Working Class Resent Professionals but Admire the Rich?