The politics of YPIS

Who is it who uses the expression, "your privilege is showing"? In those words, or that message phrased otherwise?

YPIS, we may imagine, is the cry of the underdog. After so much 'well, we all know how it is to have yacht troubles,' someone who sure does not will finally reach a breaking point and inform the group as much.

Or we figure it's a phrase picked up at liberal-arts colleges, once awareness has been raised of the fact that not everybody was fortunate enough to go to high school at Andover, to have parents with advanced degrees, to be white. It's born, in other words, of liberal guilt. It's liberal haves trying to create safe spaces for (largely theoretical) have-nots. As in, sure, everyone in the room has a yacht, but let's remember that if someone yacht-less were to enter, they'd feel really bad if their yachtlessness were highlighted.

Both of these are about the calling-out of cluelessness, and are ways of upholding (or introducing) political correctness. They're about alerting the oblivious to structural inequalities. In doing so, maybe they're inspiring some sort of movement to level the playing field, or maybe not. Bringing us to...

I tend to think YPIS falls further to the right of the left-right spectrum than we might think. This for two reasons. First, there's the fundamentally conservative use of YPIS, or more to the point, of the (not universally appreciated) expression, "first-world problems." It's the assumption that by verbally acknowledging privilege, inequality has been sufficiently addressed, removing the need for any social-justice concerns. It reinforces the divide between an "us" that has and a "them" that does not. It seems to be about being ill-at-ease with one's own privilege, but actually gives the impression that this privilege is in no way precarious.

Second, of course, is scrappiness oneupmanship. This is when YPIS is used to demonstrate that, while Party B is where he is in life just 'cause, Party A, you know, "built it." This is important because YPIS is generally used among those who now have, either by or on behalf of those who claim they once didn't have. Even if it's rarely the cry of the actual self-made (who, when not trying to make it as politicians, tend to play down their humble origins), YPIS is a plea in favor of self-made-ness.

All of this comes back to, and was partially inspired by, the Brooks-Douthat noblesse oblige argument. What, for some conservatives, makes a Romney better than an Obama is that a Romney knows knows knows knows knows he's privileged, whereas an Obama - who well remembers what it's like not to be in that world - maybe does not. Romney has no self-conception as scrappy, whereas Obama might.

If it's the classic cluelessness - not knowing how to do basic chores, say - then a meritocratic elite would seem to win out. But maybe not? Precisely because today's meritocrats don't get how much they have (goes the argument whose conclusion I don't buy, as I'll get to...), they don't create a stoic, austere life stage for their young. Thus, most glaringly, today's college experience. Students have the audacity to live in Target-furnished splendor.

As I see it, though, the reason meritocratic elites aren't interested in having their college-student offspring sleep on splintery boards isn't that they're trashily nouveau. It's that they understand that their status is precarious, even if it's not as precarious as all that, although In This Economy... Knowing you're from a well-established family is quite different, you-can-just-relax-wise, than knowing your parents both went to law school. Psychologically, at least. There's not the same psychological need, then, for meritocrats to embrace artificial rituals intended to mimic hardship. Even in a poorly-functioning meritocracy, there's the sense, however unfounded it may be, that one could lose everything at any time.

So does this mean that we should resign ourselves to born-leader-ish leaders, to graying Ken dolls out of Nick at Nite who gosh darn get things done? Far as I'm concerned, that doesn't really solve the YPIS issues. If the meritocrats (born-rich and otherwise) imagine they're less privileged than they really are, the patrician always-hads, for their part, tend to imagine that their own experience might be defined as "normal." This was, at any rate, my experience at school with people from Romney-like families. They on the one hand knew to feel grateful for what they had, but on the other, imagined that everyone with less was "poor." Making them, of course, middle-class. Noblesse oblige is an interesting idea, but if the nobles fail to see the gradations, if they believe anyone who can't afford to send a kid to private school is basically tragic, if this, then... And as I finish some must-do tasks now, I shall let commenters finish the thought below, or let lurkers finish it silently.