Fear of Falling, Chapter 4

This chapter focuses on the "New Class", a term originally coined by Marxists to refer to the technocratic class running Communist societies.  They weren't capitalists (by definition), but they also weren't workers.  It got appropriated to deride liberal technocrats in the West, and apparently in the 70's was applied to upper-middle-class people with degrees and desk jobs.  She highlights a few ironies that many others have noted as well, but in 1989 I think these were somewhat fresher insights:

1) Many of the conservative intellectuals critiquing this class were comfortable urban dwellers who wrote for a living and (politics aside) were remarkably similar to those they critiqued.  They were class traitors, in a way.

This is often noted when conservative pundits critique "liberal elite" culture.

2) Of course, the liberal technocrats were class traitors themselves, in that they support policies that required progressive taxation of people with upper incomes. This is inevitable if the project of modern policy is the improvement of society and remediation of social inequality.  It's a big, expensive project, and you can only fund big, expensive projects by taxing the people who actually have the money.

3) At the same time, these upper-class advocates for redistribution are disliked by the "working class".  Some of this is because of cultural differences (which also makes the situation of conservative pundits ironic), but not solely.  If you want to "fix" society and "fix" inequality then you will have to, at a minimum, do something about the poor.  Fears of moral hazard (sometimes justified, but not always) mean that you can't just hand out money.  And the systems in which people exist also matter, so beyond handing money to the poor you'd need to look at infrastructure, regulations, etc.  All of this means that you'll be addressing a certain stratum of society, and trying to engineer them.

If you hand enough largess to a certain stratum of society then maybe they'll accept your efforts to engineer them.  Maybe.  But this stratum is not perfectly demarcated from the "working class" that is not necessarily super-comfortable but at least doesn't feel an acute need for redistribution.  Because they are not perfectly demarcated, efforts to engineer the social conditions affecting the poor will also affect the "working class" or "lower-middle class."  They won't like that.

They'll like it even less if they're facing social engineering (with its downsides) while their taxes go into redistribution to others.  Some of those others might be objectively undeserving layabouts.  Many more will be perceived as such.  Some might be objectively deserving hard luck cases, but not all will see them as such.

An over-simplified view of the left and right in 21st century America is that the left is a coalition of the upper-middle class and the poor, while the right is a coalition of the lower-middle class and the rich.  This is very over-simplified, but it captures something:  The left has technocrats and the people they focus their efforts on, the right has plutocrats and the people that the technocrats look down on but don't give largess to.

4) She also talks about how the right critiqued liberal social policy as "permissiveness" while business needs a consumer culture that is all about avoiding self-restraint.  She references Daniel Bell's Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism here.

She also notes that the right blamed the government for "permissiveness" because they couldn't bring themselves to blame consumer culture and its enablers in the advertising industry.