Enter the Downwardly Mobile Anti-Hero Politicians

In Whit Stillman’s 1990 film “Metropolitan,” a clutch of gentlefolk in a Park Avenue salon ponders the hushed concept of downward social mobility, which threatens to “doom” them.

A generation later, however, the downwardly socially mobile have followed the empowerment playbook of every other out-group, even deftly deploying in their service a new vanguard of downwardly mobile anti-hero politicians.

Graham Platner, Katie Wilson, John Fetterman, and Jack Schlossberg embody a type incrementally more noxious than liberal loudmouths — namely, liberal loudmouths who live off their parents.

The profiles of these four require only cursory summary. The Maine-iac Graham Platner did not attend Hogwarts, but Hotchkiss, which is close enough. His father is a lawyer and his grandfather was a renowned architect. His parents paid for his house, and his mother is reportedly the purchaser of his “haul” as a pretend blue-collar oysterman.

Seattle Mayor Katie Wilson is the product of a familiar tragic environment that often leads to descent into downward social mobility, madness, and democratic socialism — a household headed by two college professors. She dropped out of college six weeks before graduation and her parents were still helping her with her rent and childcare at age 43, immediately before she was elected.

Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman collected degrees but no paychecks while on his parents’ dole into his 40s, right up to the time he was elected. Neither his parents nor the Pennsylvania electorate apparently required him to get a decent suit. Even Republicans are inclined to indulge his slumming act, just because he only votes with the Democrats 99 percent of the time.

JFK grandchild Jack Schlossberg has expanded to the cybersphere the Kennedy family’s propensity for embarrassing imbalanced behavior in public places. Multiple degrees from Yale and Harvard have stood between him and gainful employment for a decade. There could be no better profile of a candidate to run for Congress in Manhattan’s “Silk Stocking District.”

All four of these specimens carefully cultivate their downwardly socially mobile personae. Fetterman wears hoodies, Wilson endures the itch from moth-eaten thrift shop fare, and Platner and Schlossberg prefer to go without clothes, or at least shirts.

The downwardly socially mobile were historically consigned to shamed obscurity both within their families and in public — 30-year-olds afflicted with lassitude were no longer mentioned in Christmas cards, and they were briskly described euphemistically when polite inquiries were made of their parents.

But today, “He doesn’t have a job, he sleeps late, I pay his rent, and he’s thinking of running for the U.S. Senate” sounds neither implausible nor unrespectable, at least in Democrat circles.

In a different era, these politicians would have shriveled and melted like the Wicked Witch of the West when rivals disclosed their torpor and ineffectuality.

Instead, Fetterman and Wilson cruised to election, and Platner continues to lead in the polls, each shrugging off once-fatal damning references to their downward social mobility. Schlossberg may have his work cut out for him, downward social mobility being one thing and seeming personality disorders being another.

The commentariat loves to assay the increasing prevalence of children living in their parents’ homes long into adulthood, unmarriable man-childs, and even studies indicating that few in the top decile of income in one decade are still there in the next.

Thus, unsurprisingly, the Democrats — in their zeal to represent every out-group, no matter how unsympathetic, annoying, and entitled they may be — have given the downwardly mobile the representation they do not deserve.

Indeed, some elected Republicans have been less than strivers and achievers, but none quite in the category of the four horsemen of Democrat downward social mobility described above. Let’s hope we Republicans can simply continue to endure the odd gadfly, ingrate and misogynist and not, like the Democrats, add occupants of subterranean parent-abided man caves to that list.

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