I've read TFA and another one linked by TFA. I did enjoy the reads and the links but... In both articles the author seems to contradict himself, more than once.
For example:
> The affluent have decoupled social status from goods, and re-attached it to beliefs.
> it is those who have more to start with (i.e., upper-class individuals) who also strive to acquire more wealth and status.” Plainly, high-status people desire status more than anyone else.
So which one is it to achieve status: goods/wealth or beliefs?
Or this:
> It used to be high-status to hold a job and take care of your family. Not so much anymore. Those who sit at or near the apex of the social ladder (who decide what behaviors are prestigious) have decided that family stability is unimportant.
> The people with the most money and education—the class most responsible for shaping politics and culture and customs—ensure that their children are raised in stable homes.
Once again: which one is it?
Then in both articles there's the same mechanism of saying basically "it's not visibly the fault of X, but under the hood it's actually the fault of X".
I mean: how can you argue with people who consider that everything that is wrong on earth is the fault of the "rich" and that even if the rich have good values, it's their fault that the poor have bad values?
"They do A, they say A. But they think B. Hence the poor are suffering".
Another take is that intellectuals, including in universities, have been very hard at work in the west (both in the EU and the US), since decades, to push the religion of the state. And what stands between the state and the individual? Religion and family, for a start.
And in a deliciously ironic turn of events, it's the one class leftist intellectual from universities (there are no right-wing intellectuals in universities anymore) hate the most, the "rich", that managed to push back against that narrative and raise their kids perpetrating the notion that being a united family is a good thing.
I really don't buy it that the rich are oppressing the poor by showing united families. And no amount of quoting french intellectuals is going to change my mind.