Meeting the aspirational needs of its readers for luxury was not a job that The Wall Street Journal was doing. It had too long left the field of combat to the opposition champion of liberal orthodoxy, the Sunday Edition supplements to the New York Times.
Among the suddenly affluent, a hunger to manifest success through Veblian conspicuous consumption, to broadcast to the old neighborhood that you have amounted to something is a powerful social imperative. But that hunger is easily gratified through an easy menu of wheels, McMansions and bling.
At the next level is where guidance is needed. How does one signal to the new neighbors that you have arrived, just happened to move into the neighborhood, and should be treated as a social equal? The answer is through display of inconspicuous taste, taste that takes for granted the means to indulge it.
Depending on the neighborhood, of course, this may backfire. The old money may actually be concerned to avoid the impression of wealth by offsetting the (well worn) Tuxedo with the shabby chic of the button down shirt from prep school days, long ago.
That model is, however, both too subtle to illustrate and too unprofitable to support the ink, let alone the paper.
Instead, the model should be the nothing-but-the-best crowd, the Beautiful People, the old Jet Set, the current super-celebs, the attractors of paparazzi.
How well this resonates with Wasilla, Alaska, small-town America, decent, ordinary folk, who work hard, pay their taxes, donate their fair share to support their local church, volunteer to make their schools better through the PTA, support children’s sports, try to do better to make ends meet with enough left over to save for college and who resent, with reason, the elite liberal Establishment media and whose patriotic, fiscally conservative, and culturally life-affirming politics that the WSJ’s editorial pages exist to articulate in the language of elite discourse, how it plays in New Peoria, is another question.
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