Upper-class nonconformity to work ethics blocks disciplining the masses.

Evidence

These phenomena proper to the upper classes will make more difficult any coercion on the working masses to make them conform to the needs of the new industry. In any case they are determining a psychological split and accelerating the crystallisation and saturation of the various social groups, thereby making evident the way that these groups are being transformed into castes just as they have been in Europe. — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1128

Categorization

• XREF: Central to the toolkit’s concept of hegemony: ruling-class behavior must model the norms it imposes, or coercion loses legitimacy; carries forward into how exclusionary orders depend on ruling-class exemplarity. — connects to: Middle-class respectability politics simultaneously attacked working-class idleness and upper-class hedonism. — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 857
• SEED: Essay angle: how regimes of discipline fail when the elites exempt themselves from the very norms they preach — fashion, environmentalism, health, nationalism.