Like all elites, we use language and mores as tools to recognize one another and exclude others. Using words like problematic, cisgender, Latinx and intersectional is a sure sign that you’ve got cultural capital coming out of your ears. Meanwhile, members of the less-educated classes have to walk on eggshells, because they never know when we’ve changed the usage rules, so that something that was sayable five years ago now gets you fired.

This is giving reactionaries – who have shown time and time again that they do not deserve the benefit of the doubt – entirely too much credit. These aren’t well-intentioned folks who are anxious about keeping up with changing social norms; they know the norms they like, that of an idealized 50s or 60s white America, and they want to go back. They want to be able to say “Mexicans are a bunch of rapists and drug dealers,” like Trump said, and have everyone around them nod along.

Even the one decent point about people with more education (and from more elite schools) re-shaping the job market is at best half baked. It doesn’t mention how we’ve gutted career options for people with less than a bachelor’s degree. It doesn’t mention how we simultaneously made it impossible for most people to pay off college as they go through it. It doesn’t mention the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and housing.

It of course does not attempt to describe the alliance between these sorts of legitimate working-class grievances and the rest of the reactionary political project, or how actually addressing those grievances could undermine that alliance.