Conflating the ruling class’s portrait with the whole country is a social-imagination error.

Evidence

In the book he speaks, again and again, of a ‘country’; but what he gives us is a portrait, by and large, of the cruel and claustrophobic world of its ruling class. That world he seems to know very well, but to think of the portrait of rulers as a portrait of the ‘country’ itself is an error, I think, not only of politics, narrowly conceived, but also of the social imagination. Hence the remarkable fact that while Rushdie talks constantly of politics, all the political acts represented within the matrix of the novel are demagogic, opportunistic, self-serving, cruel, or at best petty. — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 597

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: People mistake their culturally tinted worldview for objective reality. — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice: How to Communicate…, 155; Conflating class-State with regulated society is a reactionary middle-class error; Confusing a thin literary culture with real popular unity produces political failure (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• A novel about rulers misrepresents the nation itself #exemplifies (0.90) — Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory, 261
• People mistake their culturally tinted worldview for objective reality. #expands (0.85) — Holm Gero Hümmler, Ulrike Schiesser, Fact and Prejudice, 155
• Conflating class-State with regulated society is a reactionary middle-class error #expands (0.85)
• Confusing a thin literary culture with real popular unity produces political failure #expands (0.80)
• Americans mistakenly believe they are different from other nations. #exemplifies (0.80) — Neil Sheehan, A Bright Shining Lie, 121
• Reformists mistake ideology’s ideal image for a reality to be realized #expands (0.75)