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This kind of mindset is so foreign to me that I genuinely can't understand it. What causes this kind of mindset?
In America, people who start out poor and then become so rich that they end up going to the same parties as Presidents and old money families are usually celebrated. The average person here doesn't think less highly of, say, Jay-Z just because he does not come from nobility or family wealth yet lives the same sort of lifestyle as people who do and does not give noble families any visible sort of deference.
Or am I misunderstanding the English conception of class and social climbing?
Remember Trump and "ugh, he eats his steak over-done and with ketchup, so low-class"? There's class structure and class resentment in America as well, it's just not as formalised or set out in a hierarchy like "the royalty, the nobility, the gentry, the middle classes, the working class, the lower class". Think of the Gilded Age snobbery, the Boston Brahmins, there are still the old-money, old-established (for the USA) families and the new, often made their money in tech, billionaires. Bezos may be fantastically rich and perceived as upper-class but that's because he's the West coast elite, and he's still not got quite the cachet of the Gettys, for instance. Bezos is a lot richer than the remaining fortune of Gordon Getty, but it was the Getty grand-daughter who was able to reserve City Hall for her own personal use for her wedding, officated over by Nancy Pelosi, and with Governor Newsom in attendance as a close family friend.
Meanwhile, if I'm being unkind, Bezos' new inamorata is considered somewhat trashy. "Mob wife aesthetic"? Really?
I agree, but it’s different. In America, class is a two-tiered (arguably three-tiered, including the underclass) system. There’s the salt of the earth working class, and there’s the college-educated PMC. There are a few remaining “we’re 1640s, not 1880s darling” elderly WASPs in a handful of New England clubs, but they (and their Southern equivalents) are irrelevant. I grew up wealthy in NYC and I rarely encountered them, as almost all have intermarried with new money of the bourgeois PMC sort. People like Barack Obama and Bill Ackman are the American upper class. There is nobody above them socially. There is no hidden elite tier. Again, there are certainly people who think themselves above them, but they’re not in any real sense.
In America, there’s a clear delineation between old money and new. But that distinction is essentially one generation of wealth. Charles Kushner was a construction worker, son of immigrants. Jared Kushner is a member of the American upper class, his father paid his dues to Harvard, his son speaks and acts in the right way (his association with Trump aside). It is what it is. Trump is unique because Fred Trump only became super rich when Trump was already an adult or certainly a teenager, and because New York real estate in the outer boroughs was and arguably is a uniquely trashy and plebeian business dominated by people with minimal class status. So Trump could be the son of a rich man and go to Wharton and, perhaps almost uniquely, remain kind of a pleb.
But in general, that’s not how American society operates. Emerald Fennell, had she been born an American, would be a clear member of the American upper class. That she isn’t in Britain is the source of her angst, and perhaps of Saltburn.
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People have a lot of respect for at least some self-made people here, especially the working class. The host of the British version of The Apprentice started off as a market seller and became a billionaire or something like that, and he was even made an actual Baron, but he’s still ‘working class’ in a way. Class and wealth don’t mean the same thing, even if they’re still correlated. So you can aspire to be rich and invited to dinners at Buckingham Palace for entrepreneurs or philanthropists or something, but you must never aspire to be the social class above yourself; it’s the latter, not the former, that’s a subject of great mockery - not primarily by people arguably ‘above’ you (although that happens, as in this case), but by your own class, who will mock you for your pretensions.
Of course, it still happens, and today’s snobs are as ever the arrivistes of a century ago.
For example, his crest is a reference to the football club he supports, and some wordplay with his very unaristocratic second name (Sugar). That's probably the way of having heraldry that would get you least mockery in a Cockney pub.
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There’s also the fact that visibly aspiring to be a different class requires you to adopt the mannerisms and life history of the class you’re aping. This almost always looks fake and is inherently kind of nasty because you’re implicitly throwing your family and original social milieu under the bus.
It should be noted that people pretending to be lower class also come in for mockery (see @2rafa’s comments*, anyone with a mockney accent, and all the communist aristos who smoked pipes and pretended to be working class). It’s not just protecting privilege.
*I.e. the bit about Ollie's betrayal being his pretence of working-classness. I don't mean her comments in general.
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