Sarah Palin's Theory

If in 2004, the Republicans' strategy was to pit the working class against the upper class by reinforcing the illusion that the Democratic party favors the wealthy, then this election season they seem to be pitting the middle class against the poor. Sarah Palin pretends to embody so-called "Blue-Collar small town hockey moms" (if you can afford hockey equipment, you've got some money kicking around somewhere) who actually have lots of money. I read an interesting article in Slate about how living in Alaska, manual jobs such as laying bricks, commercial fishing, etc. can make a huge amount of money compared to doing the same job in any other state. The Palin's apparently made over 200,000 dollars this year. And yet, they perceive their social status as "rednecks". They're like the people who drive a Japanese SUV truck to the megachurch/mall to worship Jesus to the strains of a Christian Screamo band and buy giant stereos to play their Toby Keith mp3's. In fact, Toby Keith or Garth Brooks or Big and Rich, Rascal Flatts, those are the musical analogs to what I'm talking about: utterly mainstream, commercial public figures who pander to a fictitious and vague notion of 'old-fashioned country values'. in order to convince the unsophisticated wealthy that they are actually down-trodden. Yet now that the upper middle class of my generation are all permanent grad students, the educated are now lower middle class, and the people who avoided student loans and went straight into corporate jobs are now upper middle class, the "traditional wisdom" that educated people are wealthy and uneducated people are not no longer makes the same sense.