[chao-]

>Now the hip drinks are craft beers and fine wines, and a former factory worker forced to work menial part time jobs is looked down upon for drinking what he can afford, Bud lite and coke.

Two related articles that may inform your discussions of this topic:

http://www.vox.com/2016/4/21/11451378/smug-american-liberali...

http://www.stirjournal.com/2016/04/01/i-know-why-poor-whites...

For context, and lest anyone think I'm taking a cheap shot at liberalism or progressivism, I definitely see myself in the first article. Particularly in my teens and early twenties, I was about as smug as they came. Then I went meta-smug by posing as an angry libertarian, and was utterly insufferable. These days, I think and feel much the same, I just don't go out of my way to socially advertise it (or I put more effort into not making others feel small?).

>There are major class shiftings and reorganizations going on, and people living in and near large prosperous cities have largely been immune and isolated from it.

One place a prosperous urbanite might bump into this shift is when a city winds up with a commuter police force due in part to high rent.

[tcoppi]

Those are both good articles that express much better than I the trends I am seeing. Particularly, in the Vox article, when it talks about G.W. Bush being a "dumb hick", you can see shades of this with Trump and his rhetoric today.

[phantarch]

Thank you for sharing these articles. The first one from vox really feels like it underlines not only the smugness that's crept into liberalism, but also its tone is exasperated and at times even pleading.

It feels like a reflection of the mood of our general political discussion, where people are pissed off with the echo chamber and not getting the empathy that's needed from either direction to make livable decisions. This feels like one of those situations where human nature hasn't changed, but the internet has fundamentally altered social dynamics.