Over at Alicublog, Roy Edroso finally lays it square on Megan McArdle’s child-of-privilege taunting:

Though McArdle may not have noticed it, the coastal as well as the middle states are full of people who work like dogs to maintain a decent life, and many have noticed — despite the political sideshows and their occasional attendance upon popular sporting events — that the order McArdle and her allies support has made things worse for them.

There is something about McArdle’s and other conservatives accusations—and, for that matter, the gestalt assumption of the entire spectacle of diagnostic news media—that the left is full of aesthetic pussies¹ that I’m just not prepared to deal with on the level of fair discourse. One of my core beliefs is that people oughtn’t stir their passions too deeply into their debates, and that they should do their best to aspire to something which is truthful, not just good-feeling. By my own admission, I am not prepared to do this here. It cuts to the quick. So with that proviso:

In mainstream political debate, it wouldn’t be OK for any candidate or any pundit to call all blacks welfare-sucklings. It wouldn’t be OK for any candidate or any pundit to call everyone south of the Mason-Dixon line cousins. So why the hell is it OK, time and time again, to slander everyone with left-of-center political ideals with the accusation that they are isolated cultural bigots?

I’m not exasperated on a political level with this sniping. Politics are dirty, and daintiness deserves to be steamrolled when it comes to getting elected. I’m exasperated with it culturally and personally. I’m exasperated because when rich kids like Megan McArdle suggest that—despite all practical evidence wielded to the contrary—I’m a child of snobbery it makes me genuinely want to punch them. It isn’t just a weapon of political cynicism. It’s a flat-out insult.

I find it pretty distasteful to drag out ‘working-class credentials’ to counter these kinds of points, and I’m not going to do it here. I’ll be honest with the fact that I am privy to plenty of privileges, the first of which was the great luck to be born in the United States. But the fact that I can come back from picking up garbage in the Yard in order to pay my termbill and then read a blog post in which a rich Manhattanite with an Atlantic sinecure sneeringly abuses “coastal folk,” it goes beyond what I can personally take without some raving.

¹ I use this purely for its unparalleled descriptive and cultural quality, not because I want to introduce masculinity as the object of the conversation.