Conservative voters, I would suggest, tend to resent intellectuals more than they resent rich people, because they can imagine a scenario in which they or their children might become rich, but cannot possibly imagine one in which they could ever become a member of the cultural elite. If you think about it that's not an unreasonable assessment. A truck driver's daughter from Nebraska might not have very much chance of becoming a millionaire-America now has the lowest social mobility in the developed world-but it could happen. There's virtually no way that same daughter will ever become an international human rights lawyer, or drama critic for the New York Times. Even if she could get into the right schools, there would certainly be no possible way for her to then go on to live in New York or San Francisco for the requisite years of unpaid internships.5 Even if the son of glazier got a toehold in a well-positioned bullshit job, he would likely, like Eric, be unable or unwilling to transform it into a platform for the obligatory networking. There are a thousand invisible barriers. If we return to the opposition of "value" versus "values" laid out in the last chapter, we might put it this way: if you just want to make a lot of money, there might be a way to do it; on the other hand, if your aim is to pursue any other sort of value-whether that be truth (journalism, academia), beauty (the art world, publishing), justice (activism, human rights), charity, and so forth-and you actually want to be paid a living wage for it, then if you do not possess a certain degree of family wealth, social networks, and cultural capital, there's simply no way in. The "liberal elite," then, are those who have placed an effective lock on any position where it's possible to get paid to do anything that one might do for any reason other than the money. They are seen as trying, and largely succeeding, in constituting themselves as a new American nobility-in the same sense as the Hollywood aristocracy, monopolizing the hereditary right to all those jobs where one can live well, and still feel one is serving some higher purpose-which is to say, feel noble. In the United States, of course, all this is very much complicated by the country's legacy of slavery and inveterate racism. It's largely the white working class that expresses class resentment by focusing on intellectuals; African Americans, migrants, and the children of migrants tend to reject anti-intellectual politics, and still see the educational system as the most likely means of social advancement for their children. This makes it easier for poor whites to see them as unfairly in alliance with rich white liberals.

— Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber (73%)