Alina Habba, White House counselor to President Donald Trump, said a lot without saying much when she leveled a classist jab at Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.).
During an appearance on Fox News show “Hannity” last week, Habba and host Sean Hannity were mockingly discussing the intellect of Democratic members of Congress — namely Rep. Jasmine Crockett (Texas) and Ocasio-Cortez — and the various TikTok trends and videos they’ve participated in.
Hannity then sarcastically referred to the congresswomen as the “intellectual side” of the Democratic Party, before adding: “I love when AOC lectures Elon Musk about not being intelligent, I’m like, ‘Oh, she’s such a genius. I’m inspired by her every word.’”
“You were in a bar. You were in a bar, AOC, calm down — and not to have a drink, to serve one,” Habba scoffed, referencing the congresswoman’s past work as a bartender and waitress in New York City.
Habba’s remarks did not sit well with many online. People on X, formerly Twitter, called her out for being classist and for mocking working-class people.
“What’s wrong with working class people?” one X user wrote.
“This is cruel. Just [because Ocasio-Cortez] was a bartender does not mean she is not intellectual,” another wrote, adding that the congresswoman has “dual degrees from Boston University, which is no small feat.”
Others called out the hypocrisy in Habba’s statement, considering Trump had campaigned on the idea that he’d fight for the working class as president.
“The party of ‘pull yourself up by your bootstraps’ and it’s professional puppets like @seanhannity sure loves mocking people who actually did exactly that,” one X user wrote.
On Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez responded to Habba’s jab at a rally in Las Vegas, Nevada, saying: “The president’s own lawyer cannot even conceive of a working-class person being intelligent simply because of the job that they have.”
The representative then argued that Habba’s comments underscore a “disdain” the Trump administration has toward working people, considering the administration’s proposed major cuts in government, layoffs at the Department of Veteran Affairs and proposed future cuts, among other things.
And attitudes and remarks like Habba’s about working-class people, people associated with lower socioeconomic status and the service industry overall run rampant — and it’s a problem.
Stereotypes associated with socioeconomic class can cause harm.
Research shows that people associated with a lower socioeconomic status category — a measure used to describe someone’s resources as it relates to education, income and type of job — are more likely to face negative stereotypes.
A study published in the National Library of Medicine in 2017 revealed that people with lower socioeconomic status in the U.S. were more likely to be stereotyped as lazy and substance abusers, compared to people with high socioeconomic status, who were associated with “well-being, health and intelligence.”
Those stereotypes were even more pronounced when race was factored in. The NLM research showed that people were more likely to associate laziness with Black welfare recipients than white recipients.
The study also showed that class stereotypes can affect outcomes for children in school, as teachers “appear to be biased by attributing more academic failure” to students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, regardless of the actual results of student achievements.
Furthermore, teachers tend to associate students from high socioeconomic backgrounds as having “above average achievement,” the study stated.
Conservatives have a history of attacking AOC’s bartending experience — and it says a lot.
Despite the fact that studies have shown that most American workers are employed in the service sector overall — with 16 million of them working in leisure and hospitality — conservatives have long mocked Ocasio-Cortez for her past work as a bartender and waitress.
Michael Varnum, an assistant professor of psychology at Arizona State University, told Business Insider in 2019 that the backlash toward Ocasio-Cortez for her past bartending job likely had to do with the overall negative stereotypes about skill levels people associate with working-class people and blue-collar work.
“It makes some sense that folks might view a low SES (socioeconomic status) background as implying that a person might not be desirable as a leader,“ he said, adding: ”Given the pervasive stereotypes about class and the tendency of high SES folks to believe they are superior to others.”
And as Ocasio-Cortez pointed out in a post on X in 2019, dismissing someone’s capabilities or intelligence because they work as waiter or bartender is not only classist — it’s baseless.
Restaurant workers need to have a multitude of skills, including communication skills, customer-service skills and being detail-oriented — not to mention oftentimes the work is demanding and physically challenging.
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Speaking about Habba’s dig on Thursday, Ocasio-Cortez said: “This woman could not even recognize the American dream if it was fed to her on a silver spoon.”