Meritocratic individual success coincided with working-class collectivism’s decline.

Evidence

If the brave new world wouldn’t arrive for the working class, it did arrive for Clough personally. Instead of being at the vanguard of a newly assertive working class, Clough’s period of greatest success coincided with the ebb tide of postwar proletarian collectivism. Clough was sometimes sneered at as a “champagne socialist” because he saw no contradiction between being a leftist and achieving success. Like many born poor, Clough was never able to fully believe that he had finally vanquished poverty from his life — hence, all those TV appearances, ghosted columns and the bung-rumours. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk, 1553

Categorization

• XREF: Ties to the class-traveller double-betrayal psychology from chapter 22 — always performing success, never fully believing poverty is vanquished. — connects to: The socialist meaning of participatory democracy faded while the politics-of-the-self meaning triumphed. — Marianne DeKoven, Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the…, 433; Working-class achievement necessarily erases the origins it proves — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1100; Working class people rationalize the status quo through meritocratic beliefs — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2232 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Working class people rationalize the status quo through meritocratic beliefs #corroborates (0.85) — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 2232
• Meritocracy is a fairy tale masking class as individual choice #corroborates (0.85) — Clara E. Mattei, Escape from Capitalism, 222
• The meritocratic promise of market society disguised its classist foundations. #corroborates (0.82) — Clara E. Mattei, The Capital Order, 1571
• First modernity’s own successes eroded its authority and created self-directed individuals #expands (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 111
• Successful institutions can dissolve from their own premature success #exemplifies (0.72) — Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, 314