Doug, Carrol, et al.:
I am nonplussed. Far from being "embarassing excpetions", they are a modern version of the "noble savage" myth disseminated by the cultural commodity industry. For the well off suburbanites, romanticized underclass image is the antidote for the frustrations of their everyday life. For the not so well off, it is a downwardly mobile cultural identity that kills their aspirations and keeps them in "their place."
In the good old days, the progressive thing was to make "high culture" and lifestyle open to the working class, instead of being a bourgeois privilege. Workers (an ex-slaves too) aspired to high culture and bourgeois life styles. There was nothing noble in poverty and "rural idiocy" as Marx aptly described it. The main goal was to abolish it.
Today, poverty and underclass have become cultural identities that are the opium for the downwardly mobile and the countercultural commodity for those who can afford it, especially bleeding-heart intellectuals. And this debased identity politics passes for progressive discourse nowadays.
wojtek