This is why I've been all but screaming at people (mostly on the left, frankly) for years that these people are not the "forgotten men" of the rural working class or whatever. They're middle/upper class, trying to gain even more power. https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1346982504088154113

The common denominator is not being part of a forgotten working class, it is largely a politics of whiteness that adopts a specific lifestyle as an in-group solidarity marker. It may, at times, pantomime a fun-house mirror view of working class life, but it's not proletarian.

It's as authentic as Kelly Loeffler's faux-trucker aesthetic or Don Jr.'s faux-rancher pantomime for Twitter, and deployed for the same reason: pretending to salt-of-the-earth authenticity while being privileged as all fuck.

And yet lots of folks, from the NYT newsroom to the DSA, mistake these people as representing some winnable constituency of "working class voters left behind by Democrat identity politics."