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Sometimes an insult is just too effective to pass up. People with more money than me, but less agency than the ultra rich? Tempting targets.
It’s definitely been picked up by the right opposition. I suspect that “bourgeoisie” has already been watered down enough to make it less useful for socialists. That leaves conservatives putting a label to their outgroup.
That's the opposite of what the term is about. HR has lots of agency, but they don't get paid terribly much where I'm from.
But so what? I get that we have cooties, but I can't imagine dropping an idea I formulated because people I don't like picked it up. Though as Bartender_Venator explains this is more of a case of "always has been", but that still makes it a weird example of "Eww, a rightoid said it? Gotta drop it!", which I find incredibly childish.
It may not be central to the term, but it’s the main reason that term caught on.
Marxists wanted to expand their class struggle from “labor vs. capital” to “labor vs. capital and capital accessories.” Reactionaries wanted to assert a class struggle between their audience and some sort of cultural bourgeoisie. They converged on similar groups of targets because ambiguously well-off, ambiguously powerful professionals are a really hateable outgroup. More potential believers have encountered a blank face bureaucrat or a petty tyrant of a manager than have interacted with a classic bourgeois.
I would guess that the Marxists got their wish. Today, the layman assumes socialists have it out for anyone above the median income. The perceived class divide has moved past PMCs.
That tide has yet to come in for reactionaries. They’re more likely to keep using the term because they’re still convincing the public.
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