Basic Trope: A middle-or-upper-class person who leans to the left politically.
- Straight: Alice lives in a nice house in Suburbia. She also gives generously to her local PBS station and Planned Parenthood, attends yoga classes several times weekly, buys her vegetables at the local farmer's market, buys from local artisans and Mom-and-Pop stores (especially if they're owned by a woman and/or a minority), votes in favor of civil rights, women's rights, and LGBTQ+ rights, and attends a protest almost every week.
- Exaggerated:
- Alice does all the above, plus she eats a vegan diet (and may be a member of an Animal Wrongs Group), doesn't shave or wear a bra, and much prefers essential oils over modern medicine.
- Alice quits her job and sells her house. She buys a tiny home, sets up what she needs to live "off the grid," and earns a living selling crystals and essential oils.
- Alice is a fully-fledged communist and far-left activist, and constantly preaches left-wing values and anti-capitalist rhetoric, despite being the most powerful and richest person ever to live.
- Downplayed:
- Alice gives birth at home, assisted by a midwife, rather than at a hospital, assisted by an obstetrician.
- Rule-Abiding Rebel
- Alice is a rich liberal centrist.
- Justified:
- Alice wants to use her higher status to offer a hand up to people less fortunate than herself, at least that's her intentions.
- Alice had left-wing thoughts when she was a moderately poor youth, and even though she is now a member of the 1% that she openly despised when she was young, irony is lost on her.
- Alice doesn't want to be viewed as one of the usual corporate types, and has slowly molded into the values she adopted.
- Alice is a Rich Kid Turned Social Activist
- Inverted:
- Alice is left-leaning, but isn’t rich (or vice versa).
- Alice is a poor manual worker who is openly right-wing. She loves eating meat, shooting guns, praising God, saluting the flag, and votes against more left-leaning issues like taxation and "social justice".
- Subverted: Alice tries to convince bohemian types that despite her money she is "one of them", but behind their backs she laughs at how easily fooled they are.
- Double Subverted: It's the rich people that Alice rubs elbows with that she is deceiving.
- Parodied:
- New-Age Retro Hippie
- Alice consistently whines about how marginalized she is, and laments about the horrors of war, starving children in Africa, discrimination and intolerance, the poor plight of child sweatshop workers, and global warming caused by man-made pollution, while enjoying a nice fancy dinner on a private jet wearing an expensive silk dress made in a sweatshop by children... that she afforded by selling munitions to third-world dictators engaging in genocide against ethnic minorites. When she is called out for her immoral deeds, she proceeds to play the victim, as she is both a POC and a member of the LGBT community, and is thus exempt from all criticism.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Alice comes across as a Straw Feminist in her first scene, but she misspoke. She supports her gay brother Charlie unconditionally when he comes out. She's a white person with genuinely good relationships with black and Indigenous people, but only if they're middle-class or higher like her. Her attitude towards poor people writ large can be summed up as Condescending Compassion (at best) and the same attitude underlies her vegetarianism.
- Alice's husband Bob is a member of a prominent hate group. When Alice found out, she got in a heated argument with Bob over his decision, but Bob managed to convince her that he's a 'progressive' member of this hate group and that they have advocated for 'reforms', and Alice reluctantly admitted that the group does draw a lot of support from the poor and disadvantaged demographics that she claims to support. At the same time, she makes it clear that she doesn't have to (and, in practice, emphatically does not) like the hate group, or anyone who participates in its unsavoury activities, Bob included. For the sake of the marriage and kids, Alice and Bob agree never to talk about the subject ever again.
- Alice works at her high-powered corporate job, making tireless pleas and efforts to stop her company to despoil the environment that fall on deaf ears, until she decides "Screw the Money, I Have Rules!", and moves into a tiny off-the-grid house with an organic farm. But she gets homesick, can't run a smaller household, and tries to go back to her previous life, but she's not welcomed back at her former employer. Then she realizes she could have made her experiment work had she prepared a little more, and she does so.
- Averted:
- Alice is upper-middle-class but apolitical, or at least never discusses/shows personal politics.
- Alice is progressive/left-leaning, but her wealth is never discussed/shown.
- Enforced: Writer on Board
- Lampshaded:Bob: You're a progressive, Alice? Don't you think that's against your economic self-interest?Alice: You may not care about The Needs of the Many, Bob, but I do.
- Implied: Alice is seen to be rich but scoffs and rolls her eyes whenever the leading conservative political party is mentioned.
- Invoked: Alice is suggestible and is a friend of Carol, who's had this personality most of her life.
- Exploited: A politician or corporation caters to such people by selling rich communist-themed merchandise.
- Defied:
- Alice's chief political belief is "Screw you, I've got mine!"
- Alice donates most of her wealth away to charities to avoid hypocrisy accusations.
- Discussed: "What am I going to do now?" "Is annoying me by virtue-signalling something you're going to do actively?"
- Conversed: "I don't like these self-righteous upper-class 'liberal socialists' in TV shows."
- Deconstructed: While other rich people see Alice as a traitor and a hypocrite for holding left-leaning viewpoints, poor people and minorites see/assume Alice's campaigns and charities as nothing more than a stunt. This makes her despised by all.
- Alice's rich, sheltered life makes her completely unaware of the actual plight of the peoples she's trying to support, and thus in her attempt to help the lower classes, she inadvertedly harms them.
- Reconstructed: While Alice may still be seen as a person with Condescending Compassion by some people from the lower class, it is also true that Alice's generous donations — of her own money — to charities and community groups made a genuine difference to the lives she supported. It also helps that she is willing to change herself and learn from others.
Back to Bourgeois Bohemian
