Over the past few years — and, really, the past few decades — we’ve seen a steady assault on the well-being, and the social standing, of the working class, and a decline in upward mobility. And as people start to notice and object, the response has been to double down.

Even before the pandemic, the income divide was widening. While the upper and upper-middle classes, what demographer Joel Kotkin calls the “Gentry Class,” flourished from the initial tech boom to the present, income and general well-being for the middle and lower-middle classes stagnated or declined. Manufacturing jobs went overseas, and those left unemployed were snidely told to “learn to code.” (Then the coding jobs were sent overseas, too, or assigned to underpaid foreigners on H1B visas).

If you weren’t making it in 21st-century America, people were told, it was because you were a loser, even as those who were making it changed the rules to make sure that they stayed on top.

Occasionally the mask slipped, as with Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark, or Barack Obama’s snide reference to people “bitterly clinging” to their guns and their religion. Increasingly, though, the mask wasn’t there at all. The upper classes draw a lot of their self-esteem from a claimed superiority to the working class, which requires a lot of put-downs for its maintenance.