During primary season, we hear a lot about the candidates’ humble backgrounds. Some on the Left hate that kind of personal talk, but it’s not complete bullshit. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, having grown up in struggling families, have a better visceral understanding of the struggles of working-class people than someone like Beto O’Rourke, who was reared in upper middle class privilege and eventually became quite wealthy. Our society will be better when many more of our leaders come from the working class. But it’s even more important to ask what a candidate’s class affinities are today.

A candidate’s class location matters because class shapes our social world, and we are continually reshaped by the people around us. While actual conflicts of interests are important — see: every minute of the Trump administration — the media’s fixation on grifters and parasites tends to miss the way close relationships influence a person’s ideas. So it’s worth asking, who does the candidate associate with? Whose conversation is informing their view of the world?

Elizabeth Warren’s daughter, Amelia Tyagi, with whom she has coauthored two best-selling books, has come a long way from her mom’s humble Oklahoma origins. Tyagi is now a founder and CEO of a consultancy called the Business Talent Group. Like Mayor Pete (BOOTEdgeEdge), she’s also worked as a consultant for McKinsey, a secretive consulting firm that has been rightly blamed for some of the worst miseries of working life at many major corporations. Journalist Duff McDonald, who wrote a book about the company, said McKinsey might be “the single greatest legitimizer of mass layoffs.” While the capitalist class already approved of layoffs in tough economic times, McDonald told Time magazine in a 2013 interview, McKinsey helped get them comfortable with the idea of layoffs in prosperous times “simply to juice profits.” Even the respectable Time interviewer couldn’t help observing that this sounded “evil.”