I obviously don't know David Brooks well enough

But when he started talking about changing poverty in NO, I thought he might talk about more money for underfunded schools and for assistance programs and health care.

But no, apparently, the problem with poor people is that they don't know how to act right, like middle class people do. They don't expect to go to college, so they don't. They expect to have children as teenagers, so they do. While I admit that expectation plays a real and tangible role in oppression, David Brooks gets entirely turned around. He talks about a "culture" of "dysfunctionality" that just needs to be broken up and integrated into "functioning" society. Instead of characterizing these "expectations" with the complexity they deserve, acknowledging that they are the effects of long-standing oppression that must itself be addressed, he says we just need to shuffle the lower-class into the middle-class.

He clearly has these expectations himself. He expects "failure" from the lower-class. He thinks only the middle class can "save" them. He is part of this machine that says that there is something wrong with people below the poverty level that puts them there. If these expectations exist, they do so only because they have been put there by decades of laws and rhetoric that have been saying the same thing.

And, of course, poor people don't care if they have to be uprooted and move somewhere new, away from their neighbors and family. They're just happy for a "blank slate".

I think it's amazing how success is defined as getting a high level of education, making a lot of money, and acting "middle class", which I'm guessing all classes above "middle" do as well. So, basically, success means not being born poor. Huh. So the classes in power set the rules, give everyone their starting chips, and then blame people for not winning.

And I am still interested in who exactly the "middle class" are. As far as I can tell, they are a fictitious group that exist solely so that politicians can pretend that they care about "good, regular people". Do they exist?