Michael Lind is at it again. Everyone’s favorite incomplete Republican convert is of course haranguing the Occupy protests, insisting that for a variety of reasons only a certain species of racist shit-eater can be truly populist and the Democrat Party is dominated by latte-sipping elites blah blah blah blah blah.

The thing is, this is something that passes for analysis so often in the media that seeing it trotted out here shouldn’t surprise me. I suppose folderol of that specific character going up on Salon is what’s doing it (although the fact that they recently published a non-paid advertisement for a group of pickup artists should have blunted that concern a little).

The thing is, I’m sure I’ve made my background a matter of the public record, but if not, here it is: around 1992, when I was five years old, my parents began working together to get my dad, sick and tired of an unfulfilling career as an electrical engineer, qualified as a medical doctor. He started out wanting to do anesthesia, and has settled into dealing with trauma.

The point is, at around the same time my father started having to take out large amounts of student debt and my mother had to stop working her usual service-industry jobs permanently instead of temporarily to deal with a string of babies being born. The decision knocked us out of the lower middle class and into the student poor.

Lind, of course, doesn’t see any of this as work. Electrical engineering takes a degree and involved mostly freelancing, so it’s the vocation of a decadent sit’n'thinker, and my mom’s eight-hour shifts selling decorative arrangements, flowers, and home furnishings (a trade that required a significant amount of on-the-job training, as the service industry had yet to completely suck the marrow from their workers’ bones) were unanswerable to unionization and besides only sold things that other people made. Besides which, to be wholly blunt, to a man that idealizes “horny-handed sons of toil”, anything my scrawny high-school-only mom could do could hardly qualify, could it?

It’s a species of knock-on to laborism shared by Orwell at his worst – an obsession with sweaty, hard men doing sweaty, hard things and an overriding contempt for anyone who deliberately spurns a life of honest muscular toil, even people who work themselves to the bone doing things outside of the canon of manly labor.

The crucial thing is that it’s an elitist view. Lind is a lifelong political operative and Orwell was a scholarship-educated belle-lettrist; the idea of the honest poor doing honest work for an honest day’s wage is unsustainable by the realities on the factory floor, where compensation has always had more to do with custom and demand than skill or work. In fact, the cruelly arbitrary reality of a system in which some menial workers make enough to buy a car and some make too little to rent a flop is one of the original motive forces of the socialist movement – partially from the bottom, but partially as well from decadent elites, the children of ‘honest toilers’ who made good but never forgot the shit they were born into.

At least in Orwell’s day, though, there was a ‘working man’ to be fetishized in this manner. The industrial product of the first world generally and America especially, through both honest movement of capital to countries with lower productivity (and thus lower wages) and rent-seeking currency, wage, and labor manipulation by ‘tiger’ economies under the approving gaze of financier-dominated US governments , has more or less been shattered. (It doesn’t help that the bipartisan soft-Reaganite movement of mergers, acquisitors, and tech-jobbers deliberately smashed the industrial state for their own profit and were cheered on by the crowned heads of the economic academy.) At every turn, labor has been cut off at the fucking knees by an organized, right-wing political movement and has been encouraged to blame the Dirty Fucking Hippies for every moment of it. It’s bait Lind has eagerly swallowed – not because of his experience with unionized labor, because I’m not sure what if any he actually has. No, he swallowed it because he spent the 80s and 90s being a Reaganaut activist, and can’t bring himself to admit that the people he was dutifully following orders to villify were blameless.

The destruction of the American labor union came from within – it came from bosses servile to a Carterite consensus that political change through electoral politics was a failed model, that Washington was intrinsically instead of sectionally rotten; it came from writers and speakers and publishers willing to buy a bill of goods to strike out at a culture the country hated and feared; and more than anything it came from the pension funds, a little Trojan Horse of managerialist cash-above-all hypercapitalism in the breast of the labor movement.

In short, there’s a reason that the private unions have been largely gutted, and there’s no reasonable way to make that reason the kids in the street in New York and other cities around the country. Like me, most of them were born to parents who stopped getting promotions and raises regularly when they were children, and have never had a stable or useful job. Lind has no fucking idea what it’s like to mature into a country where double-digit joblessness is the new normal. He wouldn’t know what work now means if it jumped up and bit him. And if he were jost an elitist shit, that would be one thing; but no, he’s sure he knows what labor is and wants.

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The main line of Lind’s articles has generally been that there is a decadent academic latte-sipping creative class that dominates the Democrat party with its identity politics (which all decent white people despise natch) and its ideas about ‘nudging’. (The fact that Lind’s reflexive ‘bipartisanship’ has contributed to an environment in which no one on any side of the political spectrum believes in electoral politics as an engine for change is irrelevant; when Bloomberg and his pals try to ‘transcend’ politics by throwing money at bloodless capitalist automatons and by undermining faith in partisan elections, it’s innovative and hopeful and good; when professional antagonists of public-sector unions suck the blood from their charges with ‘incentives’ transparently intended only to screw people out of promised pay and work, it’s innovative and potentially Messianic; when progressives occasionally take power and use small amounts of taxpayer money to subsidize the adoption of expensive but long-term beneficial changes in consumption patterns, it’s patronizing and elitist.)

But more than that, he’s sure that these people, these gross horrible disgusting mongrels and race-traitors and layabouts, are committing a grave offense against the Working Man by – let’s be honest – not getting their solids via Hungry Man, not getting their clothes via K-Mart, and not getting their news via a Fox affiliate.

This is a view of the poor – that they are desperately loyal to their beloved Walton chain warehouse and horrible big-city elitists are looking to take it away, oh noes – that can only be sustained by someone who has never been poor or even seen poverty up close. This is the view of someone who has gone to the supermarket for cheap bourbon and admired the toily honesty of the sturdy, beat-down men and their fat, prematurely aged wives pushing carts of frozen vegetables and meat.

I might not have come by a childhood of hunger and want the honest way, by my dad’s union bowing to Whip Inflation Now and letting the bosses throw him out on his ass, but I can tell you that nobody who lives through that likes or wants it. Target’s entire business model is substantiated by exactly that – by being a big-box shop with prices and merchandise accessible to people on a budget which doesn’t wipe your nose in the fucking destitution of America’s post-industrial hellscape. If you give those beat-down men or those run-down women a million dollars, they will never darken Wal-Mart’s door again.

I don’t know if they’d shop at Whole Foods. I sure wouldn’t, but never mind that – I think running into a leftist who wasn’t obsessively loyal to what Lind imagines is our core culture of fancy consumption would give him hives – they’d just avoid Lind’s beloved big-box shitholes like the plague.

Here’s a man who believes that the working poor go out and raise credit to buy SUVs because big man like big car hnnngh. Makes sense, if you’re a patronizing shit, but when you only have one car you need to fit your entire family into it and drive them anywhere, and the SUV is a cheap, horrible way of achieving that. The idea that the Common Man is in love with low fuel efficiency or constant fucking engine problems is impossible to believe if you’ve ever met one. If you live in the imaginarium of talk radio, sure, it’s all culture, and that’s Lind’s gimmick.

“The working man loves the owning class fucking him up the ass,” says Lind, “and how dare you get in the way, you horrible decadent faggots”. The idea that when we get money we spend the rest of our lives sleeping on our backs is surely neither here nor there.