"But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?"
Speaking only for myself: because being unable to play-act socially in this way is exactly (or at least part of) what makes uncool kids uncool.
I read Fussell when it first came out and have reread it at least once a decade since. You could have done more with his "high prole" group, e.g., Trump. Prole taste + $$$ = ??
As to the question of "why can't the uncool kids just declare themselves to be cool", it's because there are certain objective realities behind coolness that can't be wished away. Here's the most obvious, from a male-centric perspective: the affection of attractive women/girls (anticipating a certain response, while there is some room for subjectivity regarding what constitutes an attractive woman, there's a pretty sizeable area of agreement in practice).
No matter how much a group of high school nerds work to believe that they are cool, if the hottest girls in that grade are nonetheless all dating the jocks or the rich kids and steering very widely around the pizza-faced shut-ins playing Battletech in the halls, the nerds' self-belief will wreck upon the rocks of reality.
Which is not to say a nerd can't become cool, or isn't already cool - just that self-belief isn't what makes it so. There's a degree of social desirability that can absolutely be objectively tracked. It usually involves decent hygiene, some physical attractiveness, a lot of self-confidence, and skill at something more primally desirable to human society than a compendious knowledge of Pokémon stats.
I feel like the Democratic coalition is already breaking and/or re-aligning over wokeness, in fact. I don't have time right now to delve into the specifics, but there appears to be an increasing consensus (among 'mainstream' [among regular people] but 'contrarian' [on Twitter] people like Matt Yglesias) that the Democratic party's embrace of wokeness and/or failure to message well on it (and specifically defund the police) is what led to some suggestive-of-a-possible-realignment (I wanted to say unprecedented, but I don't think that's right) swings to the GOP among black and hispanic voters. There's a lot of other stuff going on on the margins, like differential turnouts (turnout up among already-GOP hispanic voters, down among dem hispanic voters) and probably other causes.
I have some disagreements with your analysis of the Democratic coalition -- and in particular about your model of it as keeping poor minorities in the coalition with cultural concessions. The demographic that is farthest to the left on cultural issues is very highly educated people -- and among Democrats, white people are substantially more culturally progressive than racial minorities. David Shor (whom I trust more than anyone with analyzing these things) thinks that Democrats' erosion in support among black and (especially) Hispanic voters in the 2020 election was in large part due to them adopting more culturally left positions, and those positions gaining salience. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html for a great interview.
This leaves open the question: why does the Democratic party take positions that are well to the left of most Americans? I think the answer -- which Julia Galef discusses with David Shor here: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor.html -- is that Democratic party campaigns are driven primarily be ideologues. That is, the people who get into running campaigns are people who are really excited to make a difference by promoting policies that they support, and those people tend to have mode ideologically coherent and extreme positions. The result is that Democratic campaigns end up reflecting the opinions of Democrats who are in politics rather than Democrats as a whole, and I think this ends up being to Democrats' electoral detriment.
> When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?
Because if a bunch of middle-schoolers were socially adept enough to pull that off, they'd be cool enough already that they wouldn't need to try it.
>>This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
>>But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
I'll go a step further - this is obvious enough that the rhetorical package absent clarifying policy is pretty good evidence of either *bad* faith or political naivete. If "Republicans would be better if they spoke more like Hawley" is compelling, you either don't mind the incoherence or are unaware it exists.
In 2019 the FTC reached a $5b settlement with Facebook for violating privacy commitments it had made as part of a *previous* settlement in 2012. While they touted the topline number as setting a new record for a cash settlement, it was widely panned as a slap on the wrist given that Facebook had already told investors they expected to pay about that much, and the rest of the settlement was a cave-in (Facebook was not required to change any of its behavior, only to keep better records, and its corporate officers were granted unusally sweeping immunity which included the original 2012 conduct, the new violation, and also undisclosed violations not discussed in the complaint that we can only guess at).
This settlement was approved on a party-line vote by three Trump appointees, with the two Democrats dissenting. Senators (including Hawley) made some angry tweets about it. But FTC commissioners are all Senate-confirmed! Hawley also touted a bill that would "reform" the FTC by placing it under DOJ jurisdiction. But the DOJ approves settlements (and indeed approved this one) too!
As another example, conservative legal scholars have spent the last few decades gouging away at anti-trust law (see, e.g., Ohio v. American Express in which the Roberts majority massively raised the burden of proof to prove harm in "two-sided markets" such as payment processors, a decision with obvious benefits for Amazon should they decide to start throwing their weight around against sellers). Senators can make as many tweets as they want, but if they actually tried to break up Facebook it would get dunked on in court by the same FedSoc alums they just spent four years stacking the courts with.
What I'm gesturing at here is that Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
There are, of course, ways around this. One is that anti-trust laws are simply statutes, and they can be amended. Another is that you could start holding these people's feet to the fire in confirmation hearings. But as long as the party coalitions are in transition, amending the law and spiking nominees would require cooperating with Democrats. I don't think that's in the cards. Hawley certainly doesn't seem interested. He was for $2,000 checks when Trump's name would've been on them and against them once Biden's name would've been on them (while Democrats enthusiastically voted for CARES even though the checks and superdole likely played a large role in Trump's electoral overperformance).
Maybe this will go beyond posting eventually. I have my doubts.
If cultural "class" is just what we buy in the marketplace then it's not really a very good indicator of class at all. A capitalist can buy the exact same goods in the marketplace as I. The only difference is that they can buy more than I can buy. A capitalist could buy a 50 million low-class items (let's says Affliction T-shirts), whereas I could only buy 50. Does this make the capitalist low-class? A capitalist can buy a Rolls Royce, and I can't, but maybe I can if I pool my money with 364 of my friends I could buy a Rolls Royce, then we can share it between us and each get it one day per year. Does this make us all high class?
The marketplace tends to flatten class distinctions in this manner. That's why Marx talks about class in the workplace, where ownership of the means of productions gives us a clear distinction in roles.
Hi Scott, thanks for posting my anecdote (this is snav if my account info gets messed up)! I was hoping you could remove it, though, because the person in question occasionally reads this blog---my intent was to keep it buried in the comments section, hehe.
The reason why the Democrats probably need their own essay is that their coalition is about as stable is nitroglycerine, and within a couple of elections, they're going to need a new script. Trump provided the forcing function that sculped the current coalition. His presence demanded this endless cramming strange bedfellows into the Democratic clown-car just to get rid of him. You will notice that the Democratic party has now lost all coherence and all sense of internal alignment. Everybody who currently supports the Democrats for election does so glumly and with great internal conflict.
You are, of course, exactly right that it seems downright weird how the Democrats have managed to somehow capture the rich, the middle class, the poor, and the ideological Left all at once. (Or, to be precise: to somehow capture slightly more than half of the people in those groups that vote.) But the Left and the rich are not a stable coalition, and the wokes and the middle class are not a stable coalition, all these people kind of hate each other, and something is bound to give.
Things might shift explosively, and result in a fruitful party realignment where the Republicans capture some important parts of the coalition. We would need to change our conceptions of what these parties are at a deep level. I kind of hope that happens, if only because it would be fun. Things could also undergo a controlled demolition, somehow only ejecting the powerless and useless parts of the coalition. So if I were going to write a 10,000 word essay of advice for Democrats, it would aim at getting the ball rolling on the controlled demolition process sooner rather than later, so they don't just end up with whatever coalition is left hanging together after the chaos ends.
"Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one."
I think this has a lot to do with attractiveness. High school is where the early mating hierarchy is sorted out. Status confers attractiveness to some degree, but there are also some (innately or at least relatively immutably) attractive/unattractive features that go a long way toward determining status. If the uncool kids refused to acknowledge their 'inferiority', good for them, but a) this wouldn't magically make them attractive, they would still disproportionately be the relatively ugly/uncharismatic group; and b) because of a), at some level they probably wouldn't fully believe their own collective self-assessment.
While having the billionaires and the poor masses is one way to get both dollars and votes, you can also do it by just getting the people from the 70th to the 99th percentile of income. In the highest turnout election in a century, we only had 2/3 of people vote, and turnout tends to be highly correlated with income. So if you can get the 70th to 99th percentile of income on your side, then you may well have a majority of voters in any election, and you also have a majority of the wealth (it looks like 90th to 99th percentile have a bit over a third of wealth, and so do 50th to 90th, so 70th to 99th must be somewhat over half).
"and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
Do they really want that? I get the impression that they would be happy with actual math, and the anti-racist math is really there because Democratic activists want it. The actual opinions of the poor minorities are treated as being of no importance at all. This is how the Democrats drove the poor whites to the Republicans in the first place. I would not be especially surprised if the poor minorities followed them.
Your description of the Democratic coalition seems wrong to me. First, support for the Democrats negatively correlates with income, although the magnitude of the income-party correlation is admittedly small (they win a lot of rich areas because they win cities and cities tend to be richer, but they win cities because they win black voters and cities have a lot of black people, not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites). Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities - among other things, black Democrats are usually more religious and socially conservative than white Democrats. Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes.
The traditional 'Republicans are the party of rural whites, Democrats are the party of urban voters and minorities' explanation seems to do a much better job describing the coalitions than the class-based approach. If anything, wokeness is about getting college graduates (who are in general upper/upper-middle class) to support policies that are against their class interests for social reasons.
Another strike against the class-based explanation is that in general we expect members of one class to aspire to being members of the class above them (that's why it makes sense to talk about 'upper' 'middle' and 'lower' classes - there's a hierarchy, and everyone in that hierarchy agrees that it's better to be at the top of the hierarchy than the bottom), but we don't see Republicans aspiring to become Democrats or Democrats aspiring to become Republicans; instead, both parties think they're the good party and the other party's the bad party (really, this is my general objection to the idea of cultural class as a distinct thing from economic class; economic class forms a hierarchy and people at the same place in that hierarchy plausibly have shared political interests, while cultural class doesn't form a hierarchy and members of a shared cultural class only have shared political interests insofar as culture is a proxy for something else).
It should be unsurprising that conflict theory does a bad job explaining electoral coalitions; since voting is a total waste of time from a self-interested perspective, anyone who votes must have some level of altruistic motivation for doing so. You can maybe explain political platforms and donations in conflict terms since coordination on those is at least in principle possible, but it's a poor fit for the voters themselves.
I grew up rich and live mostly on family money. That post made me think of a small, crystallizing, pre-COVID interaction. Out to dinner with leftist 20-somethings who don't know each other that well, someone volunteered to put the check on his card, so we all started the cash pile/venmo dance, but he stopped us.
Card-holder said "guys, I know this is awkward to say, but... I have money," and explained he was coming off a highly lucrative job and it really wasn't a big deal for them to pick up a pricey dinner for his friends. (Sounds dickish in writing, but he meant it self-effacingly, maybe because of the leftist part.)
This struck me as a big social class vs. economic class divide. I can't even tell you how many times I've covered dinner or the taxi or whatever and agreed to send the other parties a venmo request and just never followed up. I was taught to do this and almost nobody calls me on it. Why would they? Card-holder felt compelled to sheepishly explain and apologize for his newfound riches. How could he know The First Rule Of Wealth Club as it pertains to Talking About Wealth Club?
Re why don't the uncool kids declare themselves cool, thereby breaking the middle-school class system:
One way you can test if this worked is for you and your new-cool friends to throw a party on the same night as an old-cool party. Which party would more people prefer to go to (assuming they were invited to both)? I'm guessing they'll prefer the old-cool party because of a mix of
-- fundamental reasons: the old-cool kids will have more alcohol, prettier girls, etc.
-- common-knowedge-type reasons: people wants to pick the same party that everyone else will pick, and it seems like this will resolve to them all picking the old-cool party.
(Not sure why, but this puzzle tickles the same part of my brain as the question "Why do stocks change price even though there's always an equal number of buyers and sellers?")
Something occurred to me while reading this on the subject of "what is upper class, actually, if it's not money or power or whatever?" / "Why would Bezos care to be in the club at all?" / "Why would they maybe not want Bezos in the club?"
In a word: History. In more words:
Imagine a $3mm+ Bugatti supercar that only someone rich could afford. It's a hand made super car, must be super classy, right? Wrong! It's a neat gadget and all, but you know what would be actually cool? The hand-made Bugatti supercar that King Aelfred the Great drove into battle against the Danes! This very car!
The one word "history" doesn't fully capture it, as demonstrated by a different example, which is that a very expensive house isn't cool until it's designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and clothing isn't cool no matter what it's made out of, unless it's designed personally for you by <someone world class famous>, and only then really if it pushes the envelope on what is possible for that kind of clothing, and not in a gauche way, but in a “now the world of this clothing item is forever different, and it all started with this particular… <smock>.”
It seems to sort of be about exclusivity, which is a word I hear in the space a lot, but it seems to me that it's really about whether something is "historical," ie. pivotally embedded in the structure of the world we know. The exclusivity seems like more a side effect compared to that. Details obfuscated for privacy, but I had a friend who owned a mansion near downtown <famous city> that had been a famous church in the past, but had been redesigned as a mansion by <world famous architect>--the coolness of it was a sort of trifecta of historic significance and cultural cache. It was a little overt for the upper uppers I think, but they have similar shit quietly going on all the time.
Anyway, taking the thesis, it's not hard for me to imagine that the decedents of JJ Astor or John Rockefeller are *themselves*, a little bit historically pivotal "artifacts." The actual sword of Napoleon, the actual heir of <your favorite robber baron>.
So for old money, there's a kind of rarefied air intrinsic to them. What of Bezos then?
Well being rich ain't it, but Bezos is historic now. He's not the rich tech CEO of bullshit app LCC, he's the historically pivotal founder of Amazon, which changed the world, and the world will be different now. Sure he’s crazy rich which doesn’t hurt, but the real thing is that in 100 years Bezos will be a name with cache, like Carnegie or something. You can tell that right now, even though he’s not yet “history,” he's obviously "historically important." So he, like the heir of a robber baron, has a rarefied air that's intrinsic to him, and so can be upper class.
The model is a little too crisp to be fully right, and I didn't talk about how something or someone falls from grace, but I think the gist is right.
As for the question of why the uncool kids can't just decide that they're the cool ones - in Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
>As a schoolboy he hadn't a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church's bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. ("I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said 'hello,'" a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, "seemed resigned to its exclusion." So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians worse shirtsleeves. "Beans, brains, and brawn" was their motto. He told them *orthogonian*—basically, "at right angles"—meant "upright," "straight shooter." Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
>The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
>Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called "a rather quiet chap about campus," dour and brooding, who couldn't even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to succeed in politics." They hadn't learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
I grew up not exactly poor, because the wolf was never at the door, but we sure didn't have any extra money, either. But in a million years we wouldn't have called attention to something we owned. That would have been unthinkably vulgar. These days I'm not what you would call spectacularly wealthy, but we're quite comfortable, and we still wouldn't dream of crowing about an expensive possession. Somehow we absorbed the lesson that you always keep a straight face and assume that any financial competence or luxury is completely normal, not worth comment. What's more, there's scarcely anything more vulgar than exhibiting anxiety over loss or damage to something fine, like a spill on a good carpet or knocking over a goblet. Wherever that comes from, it's not from ancestors in the Social Register.
The Siege engine thing is from Mitch Benn - I think it was on a live Edinburgh festival recording called "The Unnecessary Mitch Benn", which unfortunately does not appear to exist to buy any more - although anyone who finds it would have my gratitude!
In his version, he makes it sound more martial by sounding out the syllables - Rho - Do - Den - Dron!
Yeah, the democrats are on solid ground. It would have taken more vote switching to make HRC president in 2016 than Trump in 2020, after he botched literally everything about a pandemic. And now with an old white guy president they can't just scapegoat any criticism as racist, like when Obama intentionally maximised the number of foreclosures on poor people or refused to prosecute his Wall Street campaign donors for blowing up the economy. There is decidedly much less room for their usual dog and pony show. And I'm sure $2k right away that turned into $1400 for less people in 4 months and not even pretending to fight for $15min wage will really do wonders for base turn out. There has never been a ruling class more deserving of guillotines than ours.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. ... So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
They don't do it because truly "cool" people have something ineffable called charisma. Charisma is totally real, and freaking amazing. I don't know quite how common it is; in my (upper class-ish) high school of about 400 boys I'd say there was one who was charismatic enough that solitary anti-social me noticed.
So I don't think the totality of cool kids at school are charismatic. But there will be one or two (the "genuinely cool") that are, and I suspect the rest get there by good looks, money and charisma's poor relative, confidence. Confidence ain't much in the real, adult, world, but it's rare enough in school that it will likely do in a pinch.
I raise these points because I suspect at least part of what counts as upper class is penumbrae around confidence and charisma. I suspect this also decays with generations. The founder of the dynasty generally has something special, some combination of extreme confidence, charisma, competence, and ruthlessness. Though he (usually he, let's get real) may be a lousy father, he still instills some sort of confidence plus above averageness in the kids. Throw in money, good tutors, good exemplars, and you have a generation that at least project confidence ala knowing how to dress, carry themselves, and talk to adults as adults. With decent wives along the way, this may even last through the grandkids.
But (generally by the grandkids, rare to even last to the 4th generation) the discipline and competence of the founder are no longer visible and we no longer see aristocracy as "the best among us", rather we see eurotrash. They have the money, they often have the undeserved confidence, they absolutely lack the charisma (or even charm), or the competence.
So I suspect the "uppermost class" is always one that is divided in two.
There's the sinking 3rd generation and later, the best of which just want to be left alone, the worst of which are constantly ranting about blood and breeding when they aren't snorting heroin.
Meanwhile there's the rising second generation or the founders (maybe considered nouveau richer, but too wealthy too ignore), people in whom there is a lot to genuinely admire, even if not the whole package.
As a single group, uncool kids don't have much in common with each other, so they can't make their own status ladder. But, as I recall, there were some groups that looked down upon each other and considered the others uncool.
There is no real lower class constituency for "anti racist math"
This sort of policy is for signalling among college educated people. It's a ratchet where the in group personal costs for being against it are much higher than the outgroup political costs for being for it.
This is David shors whole thesis. The Democratic party was captured by college educated white people. College educated white people are very different from most other groups.
He writes about how when he was working for a Democratic ad company and whenever his company had an ad that the people inside just loved... They would get the actual test results back and it would be shown to slightly increase trump support. That's because the people staffing the campaigns are idealistic college educated 20 somethings while the average voter is 51 with no college degree.
Ibram kendi doesn't speak for all black people. Heck, the implications of white fragility for Democratic strategy are entirely ignored.
"White fragility" says that when white people are reminded of their own role within/ benefits from systemic racism, they tend to react sangrily and defensively. For college educated white people, thats great. "We're going to go upset the oppressors and wake up the masses and right the injustice" They happily castigate and point out injustices and collect plaudits from fellow people in their own group.
Remember, it was black voters in South Carolina that out Biden over the top in the primary.
For actual minorities in the Democratic coalition, making white people angry and increasing the share of them voting based on racial grievance isn't a costless endeavour. They don't want to lose body cameras debates because people are turned off by "defund yhe police" They would really like the woke class to tone it down. They were the ones who said, "You know what? We will choose the boring white guy, because the 2 or 3% penalty we get from choosing someone who activates white animus isn't something that we can afford to lose.
I've seen two perspectives in the comments here about De Novo Coolgenesis in Homo Nerdicus - Either something very theoretical, or just because, well, if they were that socially adept, they wouldn't need to decide they were cool. I agree with the latter, so here's my attempt to flesh it out a little bit.
Social interaction is a dance. You can be genuine and not bother about the status games! But the "cool" people are defined as those that choose to play the status games, and do well at them.
But you can learn how to salsa. You can learn how to dance. So here's how to dance. Go up to a group of "cool" kids (Read: Kids whose majors are not especially intellectually taxing, if you're not in university) and introduce yourself. Be agreeable, don't look for reasons to start arguments. Observe the injokes and social mores of the group. Don't try to use them yourself, just make note of them. Inevitably, you will be asked a question, or somehow prompted to share about yourself. You have joined the dance, and now they are seeing if you can dance with them. Be careful about what you say. Reply with an agreeable answer, but don't make it seem like you're avoiding answering - it's fine to share your honest opinion, but present it well. Do not go out of your way to share some sort of unpopular opinion. Mind your body language - be confident, but don't force your way in. You have no social cachet with these people right now, and you're only really there because nobody has a particular reason to want you to leave.
Keep up the dance. Engage when prompted. Don't try to change the dynamic. Slip in. Have a good time. You know what? You won't get kicked out or ostracized. Hell, it'll probably work - these people will think you're a pretty nice person - by that, I mean Normal, and not Weird. Note that Normal and Weird are genuinely terms used to describe frat memberships, which should tell you about how blatant these social games get!
So what's the purpose of me telling you this? Well, it's tiring. If you don't do it often, it's real tiring. You have to be on a low level of alert for the steps and the moves of the dance, while picking up what your partners are doing. Personally, my studies wear me out enough - I simply don't have the energy, nor inclination or time, to engage in it. It surely gets easier, but social skills are a muscle, like anything else. It's tiring if you know the blueprint to follow. If you don't, and you try to dance with the cool kids? You'll trip over yourself. In this way, a feedback cycle is created. If, early on, you encounter social success and stay with the social arms race as it develops through the grades, you're a Cool Kid. If you fall behind early and don't get back on the truck in time, you're not.
If the Uncool Kids tried to decide they were cool, they would be using the label without the criteria, because coolness is defined as the ability to dance the dance. And if they were socially adept enough to see the relativity of those terms, they would already be able to dance the dance. That's how you get stuff being defined as "Cringe." It's not because people are passionate about stuff. It's because they're not dancing the dance when they express it.
> This also sparked a discussion about whether Donald Trump was “upper class”, with one person arguing in support that he owns gold toilets, and someone else responding that gold toilets are the least classy thing imaginable. Good summation of the difference between economic vs. cultural models of class!
The way I frame it is that Donald Trump appeals to some of the cultural lower class because he acts the way a cultural-lower-class person might (approvingly!) imagine themselves acting if they became a billionaire: solid gold toilets, still eating McDonalds, making big explicit fuck-yous to anyone in their way. Staying real instead of acting all hoity-toity.
I think the analysis Scott makes of the Democratic coalition is a bit off. Imo, David Shor has the correct take.
Basically, the Democratic coalition consists of two groups: (mostly?) affluent (always) educated whites that vote overwhelmingly for the left because they are genuinely left wing, at least in abstract terms, in both economic and cultural matters, and minorities that vote overwhelmingly D for historical reasons (or misconceptions, I guess, if you are a proud Republican). The minorities are usually poorer and more conservative in cultural matters, although even in economic ones they are less radical. The only way the coalition can remain competitive is if racial polarization remains very high. When minorities stop voting D overwhelmingly (when the 60s Civil Rights coalition inertia runs its course, as it seems to be happening since the last election) the game is up and they will have to become 25% less woke, maybe even slightly less wing economically, although not much because populism just polls well in general.
Corollary: anti racist math is really to please the elites in the Democratic party, it’s not a concession. The elites can afford such off-putting stuff because, as I wrote, 90% of blacks and hispanics will vote for them anyways. The Scott Hypothesis only works with the Republican party, which genuinely does culture war stuff to please its more prole base while pushing tax cuts nobody but the Kochs like.
"rhododendrons" - I too loved this joke, but yes. Why does it work? I'm not an etymologist or anything but let's play. Total off the cuff guess work. 'Rhodo'.... Robot. Roto. Movement. Technical, moving toward you. / 'Den' or 'Dendron'... Dragon most obviously, (i think that gets at the siege mideavl Knight feel the best) and death (dragon den) also dead and end, dead end. / 'Drons' or 'Dron' this again suggests movement in some way. perhaps just with On or ONs - on the move, on march, On you. great word.
“But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other.”
What happens if this is attempted? You get this blog!
>I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds, but it does seem to be a winning strategy (I think 25% less wokeness would be an even more winning strategy, but I think the general direction is working).
This is a pretty meaningless statement, since "woke" has a million contradictory definitions.
I guess it kinda functions as a political signal, since it's likely to alarm and anger anyone who identifies with some form of "wokeness" (likely to be left-wing) and impress the more easily-impressed people who identify against some form of "wokeness" (likely to be right-wing.) But this seems like a dumb signal to try and send for anyone not aiming to be, like, a boring Conservative pundit.
(As someone who isn't super attached to any definition of wokeness, and who assumes as a matter of course that you disagree with the same ones I do, this just makes me feel worried that you mean one of the good & positive definitions of woke, and/or are trying to pivot the blog to attract low-quality right-wing commenters and have taken a serious right-wing turn altogether with the whole "this is my preferred Republican platform but haha maybe I'm joking" thing.)
I assume (hope?) you actually just meant to condemn something specific, but I dunno what that was so I can't really comment. Except for the one example you gave...
>But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.
I don't get the impression there's huge support for "anti-racist math" or anything adjacent among poor minorities. Popular among the sort of "poor" "minorities" who are on Clubhouse, maybe.
I guess one could argue that endorsing anti-racist math serves as some sort of costly signal of *intent* to be nice to minorities, if not in very practical or well-aimed ways. But of course no Democrat politician would actually endorse "anti-racist math".
The actual real-world Democrat strategy on race seems to mostly consist of "don't be the Republican party" and "keep hammering on the point that the Republican Party is racist" with a little "have policies slightly nicer to immigrants" mixed in. Which, sure, is a fine strategy as long as Republicans do a terrible job of not looking racist.
Isn't all this ... kind of the main point of your "Modest Proposal", and of the Republican messaging against those darn ivory tower elite out-of-touch Democrats you're drawing on it?
The grandchildren of the landlords dispossessed by Mao are faring well above average in contemporary China. I am inclined to think of Class as whatever the hell made that happen.
The financial and taste angles we're struggling to reconcile here are both merely that, angles. They point to a deeper thing.
"I found this hilarious, but why does it work? Maybe it has something to do with “rhododendron” being a maximally-Greek-sounding word?"
Maybe phonetic? I lack the proper terminology to speak about this, but the word itself alternates a lot between vowels and consonants in a way that somehow accents that and makes it sound like little booms and bangs. I think one term in phonetics is "plosive", which would make a lot of sense if it were applicable here, but IDK if it were.
" I doubt this is true for literal Jeff Bezos - he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to care too much about that kind of thing - but maybe it’s true for enough people that it matters?"
"Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life."
Another take on the "why don't the uncool people simply declare themselves cool?" question. I think this is already happening to some extend with the classes. The lower class thinks of the middle class as low T wussies and the middle class thinks of the upper class as perverted degenerates.
The reason the middle class still obviously to all classes outranks the lower class is roughly that the middle class runs the media and so gets to use it to coordinate and easily outplay the lower class. The Internet doesn't change this since using twitter and having a substack is also a middle class thing to do.
I'm more fuzzy on why the upper class still obviously outranks the middle class having scarcely any visibility into this culture but I have a hunch it got something to do with being able to casually think thoughts the middle class cannot think and acknowledging realities the middle class must not acknowledge allowing them to make moves which are incomprehensible to the middle class easily outplaying them.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
This is what happens in every communist revolution and it is indeed very cool.
In the recent David Shor interview (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html) he presents a good case that the Democratic coalition described in this post is more fragile than Scott seems to think here, and already fracturing. This seems to be because the antiracist math, and Defund The Police, and whatnot, which Scott here mentions as the bit of the Democratic platform that is meant to appeal to minority voters, isn’t actually that popular among minority voters! It isn’t like they universally hate it or anything, but the main audience for that is educated white voters. The more Democrats lean on their culture war messaging, the worse they do with minority voters, particularly Hispanic voters!
I get the feeling Dems need to work that out, and work that out fast, or the demographic shifts that were bringing a lot of Southern states back into play for the first time in decades might not do much good for them going forward.
There's a big gap in the former Eastern Europe between post-WWII acquisitions (including the Baltics) and the older Soviet core (Eastern Slavs, Transcaucasus and Central Asia). The older core has completely purged its pre-USSR elites. A diaspora member coming back to Russia and running for president is something no one can entertain seriously the thought of. I'd enumerate the modern Russian classes like this:
- The fed. These are the people that derive their wealth from controlling access to government resources. They include bureaucrats of medium-to-large calibre, scions of Soviet dynasties and other "in-system liberals"
- The privateers. These are the people who derive their wealth from privatized enterprises and financial deals in the 90's. They are not allowed to wield any power at the federal level, but at the regional level they are still important players
- The remoras. These educated workers derive their wealth from working for the fed or the privateers, directly or indirectly. They are paid, they don't skim off their wealth. The craftiest ones can join the ranks of the fed, if they play their cards right
- The forlorn. That's everyone else, surviving day by day
Yes, there's very little culture involved, but that's how it still works in places that tried to apply the ideas of Marx. You see people who were graduated from school 57 and the MSU rubbing shoulders with ex-cons at luxury parties.
What about actual entrepreneurs deriving their wealth from ingenuity, elbow grease, bootstraps and other cliches? They are not allowed to join the ranks of federal privateers (this class can only shrink when traitorous privateers are stripped of their assets), so it's only a matter of time before the biggest ones are pressured to sell their business to one of the privateers or the fed or the state itself. At the regional level the safest route is going into politics. Unlike real privateers, who send their proteges, these businesspeople have to become MPs themselves, or they will remain curiously rich forlorn, whose fortunes can be stripped from them at a whim.
One thing I was surprised to see unmentioned in the Fussell/Class discussion was the army. Fussell was an officer the 103rd Infantry Division during WW2; was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. His most famous book (at least in UK academia; it may be different in the States) is his study of World War One poets, "The Great War and Modern Memory". Mightn't it be argued that his experiences shaped his sense of how class operates; and that the centrality of the army to US society and culture does something similar on a larger scale? The distinction between officers and men in the army is, historically, very precisely a different between upper and lower social class. I suppose an enthusiast for the US military might argue: nowadays the army provides careers open to the talents, that you get promoted on your ability rather than your class background, but I wonder how far that is really true, across the board. Arguably modern day armies still very much structurally embody the class divisions of the societies out of which they are recruited. By this I don't mean that officers get paid more than regular soldiers, although I suppose they do, if not that much more (not in the way company CEOs get paid more than office drones). I mean in the ways in which the distinction between officers and men is much more pronounced than is the case in other ways. Most officers are from high class backgrounds, most grunts from lower.
It interests me because I once wrote a book about a hypothetical "democratic" army, one in which there are no officers, all the serving troops are equal and all vote on strategic and battelfield decisions in real-time. My take was that such an army would be more effective than the traditional kind, but of course I could be wrong. Still I'm puzzled that such a structure has never been tried in real life.
Then again, I can't say I entirely understand how "the army" figures in US society more broadly. In some ways it is the paradigm for important social ideas like service, heroism and so on, such that there is a sense in which the army is the ideal to which society ought to cleave. In other ways there is real resistance (or so it seems to me) to applying the logic of the army to larger society: soldiers get free healthcare while serving, why not do the same for all American citizens? But if the US Army is still regarded as some kind of paradigmatic organisation for the USA as a nation, then the strictly enforced heirarchy of human interaction is conceivably also paradigmatic.
On the rhododendron note: gastraphetes, polybolos, petrobolos, and helepolis are all siege weapons, so even if he couldn't bring them to mind at the time, the "maxmimally Greek sounding" explanation does hold some water.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the heritability of class - when I read the original review I was surprised by how cleanly my parents and I embodied completely different stereotypes, with no explanation I can come up with.
Darn it. I don't like commenting but since you highlighted it I kind of think i need to.
The Simpsons is actually quite accurate for people who work at a Nuclear power plant. I'm an instructor, I teach people how to operate the plant. I make very good money and I've never stepped foot in a college. I got my high school diploma and enlisted in the US Navy and completed the nuclear power program, eventually retired and got hired by the utility. This is normal. Most of the operators got there the same way. About 20% went to engineering schools and started as engineers before switching to operations. That's actually a hard transition for them to make.
Also, the sleeping is not true, but sitting and doing nothing is the norm for operating a nuclear power plant. The industry standard is what they call a breaker to breaker run meaning you close the generator breaker after the refueling outage and don't open it until the start of the next refueling outage a year and a half later. The operators make a lot of money to know what to do if anything goes wrong, but it rarely does so they sit and try to stay awake.
Obviously this is slightly exaggerating, every five weeks they have a training week and get tested both written and in a simulator on stuff going wrong, it's very challenging, which is why they get paid a lot. In the plant they periodically have to test the equipment, or prepare for the next refueling outage or participate in fire drills and stuff, but mostly they just sit and know stuff.
At one point I could have been the human Homer, I had three kids almost the same estimated age, but mine get older and his don't. Big house, but mine is rural so I have two cars and a truck. Overall I really have nothing to complain about except credentialed people who assume people running the reactors are engineers. Operating is similar to driving, not much calculations, we have a separate engineering department and we don't let them touch the controls!
To the point about if Democrats were a little less woke it would be better for them: yes, their effort to "give a little to the powerless" through wokeness has surpassed where those "powerless" are. Rich, white liberals tend to be so much more woke and radical, while people like African Americans in the Democratic coalition are the most conservative, which is why Joe Biden is president. I wonder how long before it actually hurts the Democrats.
I don't think high school "coolness" is a good analogy for the class system in society at large. If you have a school with a bimodal distribution along class lines (or racial lines), the social divisions in high school are going to mirror society at large. But within the rich group or the poor group or the black group or the hispanic group, there will still be cool kids and uncool kids.
Cool kids are cool because, by definition, people want to hang out with them. Some people just have a magnetism that makes them enjoyable to be around. Usually that's due to a combination of good looks and good social IQ. These things appeal to humans' lizard brains. If you had a choice of who to hang out with, you would choose the cool kids. The cool kids do have a choice, and so they gravitate to each other, but they don't view themselves as a particular class. They invite Nick to the party because they like being around Nick, and so does everyone else. They don't invite Kevin to the party because they don't like being around Kevin, and neither does anyone else. There's nothing malicious about it. They don't punish the outgroup; bullying is not a road that leads to status; the most popular kids are the ones who get along with *everybody*. Which makes perfect sense when you think about the definition of the word "popular".
Scott wondering why the uncool kids don't "unionize" to create their own social group and social norms likely demonstrates that social status was completely off his radar in high school. The uncool kids are stuck with each other and don't particularly like each other. They smell weird and can't read the room.
Cliques are a somewhat different animal. Cliques form around mutual interests and activities. They are smaller and very, very tight-knit. They quickly generate very strict within-group normative cues and behaviors, not because they want to differentiate themselves from the outgroup, but because they need to maintain hierarchical ambiguity within the group. It's that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to join any club that wants him to join. Any group with a readily-readable social hierarchy won't form into a clique, because everyone will want to drop those on the bottom and those on the top will want to drop the group itself. The only groups that evolve into cliques are those where everyone can perceive that they are roughly of equal status with everyone else, and that happens when language and fashion and habits all coalesce within a pretty narrow range. And of course once you're in the clique, especially for those cliques whose members aren't among the cool kids, your enforcement of those group norms on others and yourself gets very strict, lest you lose access to that group's social capital.
Nothing in there is really a super new idea from Glenn, he's said similar stuff in the past, but it's the most clearly he's called out those ideas as "class warfare" that I can recall. He definitely reads (and his often linked to) Scott, so I doubt it's a coincidence.
“Class is really weird. Somebody should write a book about it.”
Bourdieu’s “Distinction” is fresh as ever. Maybe it isn’t getting the fame it should be because 1) its French, 2) Bourdieu might be lumped in with the Derrida, Foucault crew. Still, most of the research is compelling even now.
It is very strange to me to hear Americans talk about cool kids. I went to a unisex Catholic school outside the US, and there was no real concept of cool or uncool kids. There were specific kids who were well liked because they were positive and friendly. But there were mostly just parallel but overlapping social circles - mostly organized around which educational track you were in (we didn’t get to choose specific classes, you either took natural science, earth science, humanities or business/economics).
On the point that Democrats couldn't do better, Democrats are doing great in raw numbers, but of they actually want to pass policy, they need to think of a way to win more Senate seats. In the most urban states, they are doing amazing, but if they cannot think of a message for rural voters, they'll likely never get more than the barest majority in the Senate. In the past, their coalition included farmers and union workers, which gave them enough rural votes. I'm not sure what rural votes they should go after now, but of the goal is to pass policy, they need to add some to their coalition, even at the expense of losing some urban votes.
To risk being viewed as too “woke”, I think any analysis of class in America that doesn’t include race is inevitably incomplete. For, what I hope is a not-too-charged example, consider Fussell’s point about the proll-to-upper class culture pipeline and Scott’s point about rap. I think this is actually the Black-to-upper class white culture pipeline. The Harvard Crimson may rave about Hamilton, but when was the last time they wrote anything about country music? Going way further back, Jazz followed a similar trajectory from dangerous music to a “quintessential American art form”.
I haven’t read enough to unpack this, but Black Americans functioning as the “absolute other” has always been foundational to our conception as a “classless society”. And the need for lower and middle class whites to maintain a strict color line versus the freedom of upper middle class and upper class whites to worry less is certainly part of that dynamic.
Unfortunately, I feel like Hawley has learned from Marco Rubio's mistakes, and has over compensated. Rubio tried to be moderate Republican by sponsering bi-partisan legislation on immigration, Family leave, and a few other Family values legislations. He talked up at least two of his bills, and used all of his political capital as a junior senator to try to pass them. He failed horriblly, sabotaged primarily by his own party. He tries running for president, but he can't show off any accomplishment, because they all failed.
I think Hawley saw Rubio's failures, and decided to avoid that trap by not fighting for any actually controversial legislation. He tweets strong signals, but the only thing he stands for, is being more Anti-Trump than most of his party. And that might be enough to keep him ahead, while Rubio is already preparing to be primarried by Ivanka.
RE your point that “one nicely symmetrical option would be for the Republicans to run on being the party defending the cultural lower class” Ramesh Ponnuru (on the recent Ezra Klein podcast) had an interesting potential counterpositioning for Republicans:
“There’s been a lot of discussion over the last several years about the Republicans being a Workers’ Party. There’s something to be said for that compared to being a business owners party. It certainly makes more political sense. But I think being a parent’s party is in some ways more attractive than either of those because that’s something that includes material dimension, but it’s not just replacing one materialist vision with another.“
The parallels between between this and your analysis of aligning powerful and powerless people struck me. Namely the importance of a Party positioning on nonmaterial dimensions that don't irreconcilably misalign powerless and powerful people.
"poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
I suppose this is sarcasm, but I've always wondered, do they actually want that? I've never seen any protests for anti-racist math. This type of stuff looks like the fevered dreams of activists with a little too much free time.
There was a recent story in Baltimore where a person in high school with 0.3 GPA was 60th in a class of 122. He had passed 3 classes in 4 years. I ask myself of this pervasive failure, does the community actually want this? And the answer is I don't know for sure anymore. Obviously they don't want those results but they sure put up with it in large numbers. Put that school's performance in many places in the US and the parents would burn the school to the ground before they would let that continue.
I think there is an increasing divergence between what a lot of activists think and what a down trodden community actually wants. Are the house parties talking about the scandal of Dr. Seuss? This is just preposterous in my view. Crime ridden communities want less policing? That is fine with me if that is what they want, but I'd much rather see a community voter referendum on that instead of interviews with Ivy league activists and graduate level op-eds in venerable magazines.
There is no end of high brow opinion of what the lower classes need in the elite media (ha ha), I'm increasingly confused on what it is they want.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other."
This reminds me of the sort of power paradox David Graeber was interested in: powerful people are powerful because everyone does what they say, but those other people *give* them power by choosing to do what they say. I view books like Debt (and really, almost all his books) as primarily a meditation on this subject. I wouldn't say he "solves" it or anything, but if you're interested in this dynamic, he certainly has a lot to say!
"The "prole" flowers are all annuals - exotic tropical flowers that have to be replanted every year in most of the US because they can't survive freezing temperatures."
I find that interesting because over here, for example, rhododendrons were exotic imports for the big houses:
"Rhododendron (Rhododendron ponticum) is a non-native, invasive species in Ireland, first introduced in the 18th century. At that time it was planted in and around ‘The Big Houses” of the gentry and upper classes. Prized for its flamboyant and vibrant blooms it was planted as an ornament and to provide cover for game birds, namely pheasant (also an introduction originating from Asia)."
It escaped and thrived in the local landscape to the point of taking over boglands etc. but I can't say that it's particularly a garden flower, like hydrangeas (which everyone had in their garden) or fuchscias (ditto). Perhaps this decline in class is another example of something which was exclusive to the wealthy/hard to get and then 'trickled down' the ladder as it became more available and people wanted to copy their 'betters' so it became a plant of the lower classes?
Middle and upper-middle class people adopting an exaggerated lower-class accent and affect for various reasons, including 'street cred' - the names in the Wikipedia article were those I was thinking of (part of the Britpop Wars between Blur and Oasis were that Damon Albarn was Mockney while the Gallagher brothers genuinely were that class). Some are "professional Cockneys" like Lily Allen's father Keith (whose Wikipedia article tells me that he's actually Welsh by birth and Hampshire by upbringing) or the cast of the soap opera "Eastenders". The most egregious are probably Nigel Kennedy and Jamie Oliver.
Even politicians played at it, like Tony Blair and David "call me Dave" Cameron, the most evident moment of fakery on this probably being the one where Cameron forgot which football team he ostensibly supported (is it Villa or the Hammers? both wear claret and blue):
There are times that I'm reminded that while Scott is a subject matter expert on having intelligent discussions on the internet he doesn't seem to follow politics all that closely (like when he was surprised about the D & R divide over mail-in voting). The following take on the democratic coalition seems exactly like what someone who paid attention to online discourse but not to policymaking would write:
"But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better."
One, anti-racist math in school, abolishing the police, and other fringe woke causes are unpopular with low education/older/poorer voters of all races. Two, Dems just voted to expand EITC, give a child tax credit, increase foodstamp, increase UI, and would have raised the minimum wage to $15 if not for Manchin and Sinema. Three, an alliance of highly educated people, poor minority urbanites, and the young is really suboptimal for winning elections where older people are more likely to vote and rural people are systematically overrepresented. Well-educated cosmopolitans speaking on behalf of poor minority youth is a great formula for dominating cultural institutions but basically guarantees you will lose the senate.
I was listening to David Shor on Rationally Speaking and he made a great point about how polarization, vetocracy & near zero interest rates permit expressive voting. In the veto point heavy American political system the slim majorities possible in a polarized system can do very little, and what they can do is usually funded by borrowing not by raising taxes or cutting the safety net. Republicans could not repeal the ACA, but they could give a giant deficit funded tax cut. Democrats won't be able to do a tax-funded Medicaid for all, but they will be able to borrow to do a giant stimulus. If you're a poor white Republican you can vote for the party that says it will strip your healthcare and they won't actually be able to. If you're a culturally liberal millionaire you can vote for the party that says they want to tax you to enact Medicaid and rest assured that they won't be able to do that either.
This synthesizes really well with Klein. We can't fight against cultural polarization, so you have to reduce the salience of cultural issues to politics and raise the salience of economic ones. You do this by enabling bare majorities to enact their agenda (killing the filibuster) and making the system more representative (end gerrymandering, let Puerto Rico become the 30th most populous state) so the public can experience the result and respond appropriately. Critics think this will lead to back and forth whiplash, but if parties are able to actually do what they say it seems likely they will cut cheap talk and focus on more popular things.
> sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
If anyone suffers from the problem of having too little financial drive, I could volunteer to take the extra money from you. ;)
Jokes aside, I suspect that the problem is not being too high on the economical ladder per se, but rather being unable to get any higher... so your highest ambition is that things stay as they are, for as long as possible.
A person like me, who knows, maybe if I tried a bit harder, I could double my wealth in a few years. A person who got insanely rich using their skills, who knows, they might double their wealth soon just by keeping doing what they already do. A person who inherited tons of money and have no extraordinary skills themselves... it won't get any better (well, maybe unless they invest all that money in passively managed index funds).
Your comment about the cool kids reminds me of Daniel Dennett's comment "those who are chic are all and only those who can get themselves considered chic by others who consider themselves chic." You could easily substitute "cool" for "chic". His comment was in the context of trying to understand personhood -- to some extent, persons are all and only those who can get themselves considered persons by others who consider themselves persons.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
To me, this is the most interesting question about class. What are the actual reasons for one class coming to dominate, or at least enjoying greater prestige, over another? In Scott’s example of HS, I think the answer is pretty simple, speaking as a former high school “cool kid”. The main thing is understanding that there are significant and real differences between the capacities and desires of most “cool” and “uncool” kids. Me and my friends were half normal friend group, and half rag tag party planning committee. A great deal of our time and energy was spent in finding venues for parties, (these usually being the basements of clueless or enabling parents) as well as means of procurement of drugs and alcohol. Nights where we merely hung out as a small group with parental supervision were basically considered failures. We always intended to gather the largest possible group of people in the most unsupervised space we could. This was only possible because of our 1:1 relationships, usually formed by membership on sports teams, clubs, etc.
Without reasonably strong 1:1 friendships with a group of 8-10 people, and then a much larger group of friendly acquaintanceships, every other part of being a “cool kid” is impossible. Because of this need for a huge amount of friendly acquaintanceships in order to populate social events, basically all of my “cool kid” friends were extroverted jocks not because that immediately conferred status(because the highly skilled, “quiet” jocks were not “cool” in the way I think Scott is talking about) but because it provided an easy avenue to form lots and lots of decently strong 1:1 friendships.
I can’t stress enough how important mere attendance of these large social events was: I remember returning after a study abroad trip, and finding my status had noticeably fallen. If any machiavellian rule can be said to rule high schools(at least ones like mine, where there was basically no real bullying) it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’. And social media only compounds this.
TLDR: Most of the “uncool” kids lacked the necessary number of 1:1 relationships to organize or be invited to the large social events that are the main source of high school social prestige.
As far as I was ever aware, my secondary school had no distinct 'cool kids' grouping. There were different sets of kids - the geeky kids who played computer games, say, or the ones who played football - and there were intra-group hierarchies, but I never had any sense of an inter-group hierarchy. Possibly relevant is that the fact that it was an academically selective school, so on some level we were all the nerds - the football kids were just as likely to do well on classroom tests as anybody else.
Fussell's book got passed around the Marine Officer's Basic School when I was there in 1986. Most of the officers were first generation college grads, had lower or lower middle class upbringings, and were surprisingly comfortable with conversations about class (as Fussell, a Marine himself, would have predicted). We all took the test at the end of the book and most scores were relatively low. Mine, however, was higher due to things like the 200 hundred year old family portraits on the walls of our Main Line house, summers on MDI, a string of classic wooden sailboats, the right boarding school, etc. When one of my fellow lieutenants saw my score he asked loudly, "Who are you, Little Lord Fucking Fauntleroy?" It remains one of the funniest moments of my often entertaining stint in the Marines.
How does one be happy as a middle class person? It seems like being middle class is mostly about constant status anxiety and a dream to be upper class that can never come true, which sounds pretty miserable. What distinguishes happy middle class people from unhappy ones?
Thank you for recommending this book, I will buy it. Failed upper middle class older gentleman here. Class is something you don't notice as much when you are successful, but when you 're a failure, you notice it a lot. I have a prole's income but an upper middle class tastes. There is truly no worse hell on earth. No matter so many Americans are killing themselves with opiates and other drugs. Being told you will be upper middle class, then becoming resigned to prole income and neighborhoods is a fate worse than death. Downward mobility is America's problem. Our addiction to increasing the national (and state... and local) debt to buy elections (for either party, not singling out any one party for this) is decreasing the ability of young people to succeed in business and in life.
Tom Wolfe wrote at great length and great insight about class. People don't think of him as an intellectual, but he was actually Dr. Thomas Wolfe, Ph.D. from Yale in American Studies, so he knew all the 1950s theoretical frameworks for thinking about class, as well as all his subsequent reportorial research. According to Pinker, Wolfe's conceptual innovation was to move beyond Marx's idea of class to a broader, more subtle concept of status.
By the way, Tom Stoppard is the mirror image: everybody thinks of him as some kind of Oxford philosopher, but he never went to university, immediately becoming a reporter.
> I have less good advice for the Democrats because they seem less confused. [...] the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.
Democrats have a simple and obvious way to build a better coalition: by adding more people to it, to get more votes. Like, what if instead of talking so much about black people facing tough times because "systemic racism", they instead talk about the plight of the (economic!) lower class — including oppressed African Americans, of course — and lifting barriers to living the American Dream in America? How about instead of saying "let's get more minorities in college via affirmative action," they say "let's get more poor people and minorities in college by making it more affordable for them." Oh and for God's sake, can we not burden poor people with huge zombie student loans that survive bankrupcy? I understand Joe Biden had something to do with this...
Granted, they do have this in their Platform: "Democrats will fight to create a federal funding program for higher education, modeled on Title I funding for K-12 schools, that would direct funds to public and nonprofit colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions based on the proportion of low-income students those schools enroll and graduate."
But Democrats have a more of a reputation for supporting "minorities" and NOT "the working class" or "the poor". They earned this reputation and they can change it if they choose.
> But the powerless people are going to want things from the powerful people, the powerful people aren’t going want to give those things up, and then your coalition frays and breaks.
I'm not persuaded of that. First of all, what the lower (economic!) classes want most of all is economic prosperity and security. To assume that this requires "taking things away from powerful people" is a level of zero-sum thinking that is unbecoming of a Bay-Area professional.
If inflation caused by unbalanced government spending becomes a problem then yes, the government might have to raise taxes on the powerful, or cut gravy trains such as military spending (to which some would loudly object). But then again, a lot of powerful people have consistently backed Republicans regardless of Democratic tax policy, and many of those who aren't Republicans would support higher taxes on the rich anyway. Case in point, a majority of voters making over $100,000 per year tend to back Republicans — McCain, Romney, even Trump! Why? Do you think they backed Trump for his honesty? Given the existing distribution of support from the rich and powerful, it's not at all clear to me that a little wealth redistribution would harm the Democrats very much.
But hold on. What causes problematic inflation in the first place, and how do we avoid it? I think it boils down to one thing: an imbalance between resources produced and money spent. Suppose people spend less money (probably because they have less money, but not necessarily), but production drops even faster. The result is inflation and a depression. Suppose people spend more money (probably because they have more, but not necessarily) and production increases proportionately. Then there is no inflation and everyone is, on average, a bit happier. Suppose people spend more money and production increases, but not as much. Now you have inflation but also economic success.
Therefore, the Democratic strategy should be to move beyond Republican-style zero-sum thinking ("Mexicans steal jobs" and all that), and work out how to raise domestic production and simultaneously raise demand for this production in a way that helps living standards among the bottom 50% of Americans.
On the demand side, they could introduce a small UBI. On the supply side, American businesses, especially smaller ones, are (I am told) frustrated with thickets of needless or just overgrown regulations. Why not take a page from the Republican playbook and promise to do something about that — and then actually do something intelligent about that — in order to win some support from business leaders? On the third side, they could increase the supply of public goods, by funding open engineering (e.g. open source software), non-crumbling infrastructure, and so forth.
I expect many Democratic elites and influencers would have some difficulty processing some of these ideas, as many of them aren't on board with basic "capitalist" economics. Still, their hearts are in the right place. Harness that.
If you, Scott Alexander, can figure out a set of plausible changes that would benefit the Republican party, it is shocking to me that you can't manage the same for the Democrats. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you can't think of anything that the Democratic party — the party of Occupy Wall Street's "99%", the party of those who want to make the world a better place through collective action, the party whose supporters still hunger for a health care plan better than "prop up the insurance companies and call it Affordable Care Act" — can do better?
Also, did you ask Substack for an Edit Button? No doubt I will want to tweak this post within minutes.
"The most famous example of doing this well was the Reagan coalition, where powerful business interests got to stay rich and powerful, and Moral Majority Christians got to have prayer in school or whatever. But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better."
Respectfully, the idea of the modern Democratic coalition doesn't make much sense. There's little evidence that poor minorities give a damn about "anti-racist" math or other woke ideology and in fact it is wealthy, well educated white liberals who are the biggest fans. The modern Democratic coalition, such as it is, depends heavily on liberal economic policies for the proles - bread rather than circuses for poor minorities. When Democrats cater to elites, it's on cultural issues.
Has anyone on the rationality sphere ever read Pierre Bourdieu? It seems a lot of society oriented writing by people like Scott ends up gesturing vaguely in the same direction as Bourdieu, but the connection never gets made. I'd expect at least some reference to Distinction, a book all about the social mechanisms of taste.
"But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?"
Speaking only for myself: because being unable to play-act socially in this way is exactly (or at least part of) what makes uncool kids uncool.
I read Fussell when it first came out and have reread it at least once a decade since. You could have done more with his "high prole" group, e.g., Trump. Prole taste + $$$ = ??
"I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds"
Is there some other post where this is explicitly spelled out?
As to the question of "why can't the uncool kids just declare themselves to be cool", it's because there are certain objective realities behind coolness that can't be wished away. Here's the most obvious, from a male-centric perspective: the affection of attractive women/girls (anticipating a certain response, while there is some room for subjectivity regarding what constitutes an attractive woman, there's a pretty sizeable area of agreement in practice).
No matter how much a group of high school nerds work to believe that they are cool, if the hottest girls in that grade are nonetheless all dating the jocks or the rich kids and steering very widely around the pizza-faced shut-ins playing Battletech in the halls, the nerds' self-belief will wreck upon the rocks of reality.
Which is not to say a nerd can't become cool, or isn't already cool - just that self-belief isn't what makes it so. There's a degree of social desirability that can absolutely be objectively tracked. It usually involves decent hygiene, some physical attractiveness, a lot of self-confidence, and skill at something more primally desirable to human society than a compendious knowledge of Pokémon stats.
"To me, Trump is not a rich man, Donald Trump is like what a hobo imagines a rich man to be." - John Mulaney- https://youtu.be/dBNBAgtjYV8?t=30
I feel like the Democratic coalition is already breaking and/or re-aligning over wokeness, in fact. I don't have time right now to delve into the specifics, but there appears to be an increasing consensus (among 'mainstream' [among regular people] but 'contrarian' [on Twitter] people like Matt Yglesias) that the Democratic party's embrace of wokeness and/or failure to message well on it (and specifically defund the police) is what led to some suggestive-of-a-possible-realignment (I wanted to say unprecedented, but I don't think that's right) swings to the GOP among black and hispanic voters. There's a lot of other stuff going on on the margins, like differential turnouts (turnout up among already-GOP hispanic voters, down among dem hispanic voters) and probably other causes.
I have some disagreements with your analysis of the Democratic coalition -- and in particular about your model of it as keeping poor minorities in the coalition with cultural concessions. The demographic that is farthest to the left on cultural issues is very highly educated people -- and among Democrats, white people are substantially more culturally progressive than racial minorities. David Shor (whom I trust more than anyone with analyzing these things) thinks that Democrats' erosion in support among black and (especially) Hispanic voters in the 2020 election was in large part due to them adopting more culturally left positions, and those positions gaining salience. See https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html for a great interview.
This leaves open the question: why does the Democratic party take positions that are well to the left of most Americans? I think the answer -- which Julia Galef discusses with David Shor here: http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/show/episode-248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor.html -- is that Democratic party campaigns are driven primarily be ideologues. That is, the people who get into running campaigns are people who are really excited to make a difference by promoting policies that they support, and those people tend to have mode ideologically coherent and extreme positions. The result is that Democratic campaigns end up reflecting the opinions of Democrats who are in politics rather than Democrats as a whole, and I think this ends up being to Democrats' electoral detriment.
Forgot to mention this on that post:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-birth-of-a-new-american-aristocracy/559130/
> When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that?
Because if a bunch of middle-schoolers were socially adept enough to pull that off, they'd be cool enough already that they wouldn't need to try it.
In terms of Greek-sounding siege engines, I offer you lithobolos (literally rock-thrower), palintonon, and gastraphetes.
>>This is a project that they have been *gesturing towards*, but I don't see any reason yet to take Hawley seriously in any sort of good faith when it comes to his policy goals.
>>But I honestly don't think Hawley is particularly interested in making this policy, he's just signaling his stance (and I'm honestly surprised that his aides didn't at least put more work into making that signaling a little more coherent).
I'll go a step further - this is obvious enough that the rhetorical package absent clarifying policy is pretty good evidence of either *bad* faith or political naivete. If "Republicans would be better if they spoke more like Hawley" is compelling, you either don't mind the incoherence or are unaware it exists.
In 2019 the FTC reached a $5b settlement with Facebook for violating privacy commitments it had made as part of a *previous* settlement in 2012. While they touted the topline number as setting a new record for a cash settlement, it was widely panned as a slap on the wrist given that Facebook had already told investors they expected to pay about that much, and the rest of the settlement was a cave-in (Facebook was not required to change any of its behavior, only to keep better records, and its corporate officers were granted unusally sweeping immunity which included the original 2012 conduct, the new violation, and also undisclosed violations not discussed in the complaint that we can only guess at).
This settlement was approved on a party-line vote by three Trump appointees, with the two Democrats dissenting. Senators (including Hawley) made some angry tweets about it. But FTC commissioners are all Senate-confirmed! Hawley also touted a bill that would "reform" the FTC by placing it under DOJ jurisdiction. But the DOJ approves settlements (and indeed approved this one) too!
As another example, conservative legal scholars have spent the last few decades gouging away at anti-trust law (see, e.g., Ohio v. American Express in which the Roberts majority massively raised the burden of proof to prove harm in "two-sided markets" such as payment processors, a decision with obvious benefits for Amazon should they decide to start throwing their weight around against sellers). Senators can make as many tweets as they want, but if they actually tried to break up Facebook it would get dunked on in court by the same FedSoc alums they just spent four years stacking the courts with.
What I'm gesturing at here is that Republicans are going to find it difficult to pivot against "Big Tech" beyond posting about it is their appointments are all still on auto-pilot from the Reagan era, and the bench of future appointees will probably stay that way for another few decades since that's the environment they all came up in and bureaucrats and judges aren't as sensitive to public sentiment as legislators.
There are, of course, ways around this. One is that anti-trust laws are simply statutes, and they can be amended. Another is that you could start holding these people's feet to the fire in confirmation hearings. But as long as the party coalitions are in transition, amending the law and spiking nominees would require cooperating with Democrats. I don't think that's in the cards. Hawley certainly doesn't seem interested. He was for $2,000 checks when Trump's name would've been on them and against them once Biden's name would've been on them (while Democrats enthusiastically voted for CARES even though the checks and superdole likely played a large role in Trump's electoral overperformance).
Maybe this will go beyond posting eventually. I have my doubts.
Regarding the cool vs uncool kids: The cool kids are getting laid, and it doesn't matter if the uncool kids change the definition of cool.
If cultural "class" is just what we buy in the marketplace then it's not really a very good indicator of class at all. A capitalist can buy the exact same goods in the marketplace as I. The only difference is that they can buy more than I can buy. A capitalist could buy a 50 million low-class items (let's says Affliction T-shirts), whereas I could only buy 50. Does this make the capitalist low-class? A capitalist can buy a Rolls Royce, and I can't, but maybe I can if I pool my money with 364 of my friends I could buy a Rolls Royce, then we can share it between us and each get it one day per year. Does this make us all high class?
The marketplace tends to flatten class distinctions in this manner. That's why Marx talks about class in the workplace, where ownership of the means of productions gives us a clear distinction in roles.
Hi Scott, thanks for posting my anecdote (this is snav if my account info gets messed up)! I was hoping you could remove it, though, because the person in question occasionally reads this blog---my intent was to keep it buried in the comments section, hehe.
Thanks!
The reason why the Democrats probably need their own essay is that their coalition is about as stable is nitroglycerine, and within a couple of elections, they're going to need a new script. Trump provided the forcing function that sculped the current coalition. His presence demanded this endless cramming strange bedfellows into the Democratic clown-car just to get rid of him. You will notice that the Democratic party has now lost all coherence and all sense of internal alignment. Everybody who currently supports the Democrats for election does so glumly and with great internal conflict.
You are, of course, exactly right that it seems downright weird how the Democrats have managed to somehow capture the rich, the middle class, the poor, and the ideological Left all at once. (Or, to be precise: to somehow capture slightly more than half of the people in those groups that vote.) But the Left and the rich are not a stable coalition, and the wokes and the middle class are not a stable coalition, all these people kind of hate each other, and something is bound to give.
Things might shift explosively, and result in a fruitful party realignment where the Republicans capture some important parts of the coalition. We would need to change our conceptions of what these parties are at a deep level. I kind of hope that happens, if only because it would be fun. Things could also undergo a controlled demolition, somehow only ejecting the powerless and useless parts of the coalition. So if I were going to write a 10,000 word essay of advice for Democrats, it would aim at getting the ball rolling on the controlled demolition process sooner rather than later, so they don't just end up with whatever coalition is left hanging together after the chaos ends.
In the British class system you can tell what class someone is by hearing them speak for 10 seconds. Is this not true in the US too?
"Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one."
I think this has a lot to do with attractiveness. High school is where the early mating hierarchy is sorted out. Status confers attractiveness to some degree, but there are also some (innately or at least relatively immutably) attractive/unattractive features that go a long way toward determining status. If the uncool kids refused to acknowledge their 'inferiority', good for them, but a) this wouldn't magically make them attractive, they would still disproportionately be the relatively ugly/uncharismatic group; and b) because of a), at some level they probably wouldn't fully believe their own collective self-assessment.
While having the billionaires and the poor masses is one way to get both dollars and votes, you can also do it by just getting the people from the 70th to the 99th percentile of income. In the highest turnout election in a century, we only had 2/3 of people vote, and turnout tends to be highly correlated with income. So if you can get the 70th to 99th percentile of income on your side, then you may well have a majority of voters in any election, and you also have a majority of the wealth (it looks like 90th to 99th percentile have a bit over a third of wealth, and so do 50th to 90th, so 70th to 99th must be somewhat over half).
"and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
Do they really want that? I get the impression that they would be happy with actual math, and the anti-racist math is really there because Democratic activists want it. The actual opinions of the poor minorities are treated as being of no importance at all. This is how the Democrats drove the poor whites to the Republicans in the first place. I would not be especially surprised if the poor minorities followed them.
Your description of the Democratic coalition seems wrong to me. First, support for the Democrats negatively correlates with income, although the magnitude of the income-party correlation is admittedly small (they win a lot of rich areas because they win cities and cities tend to be richer, but they win cities because they win black voters and cities have a lot of black people, not because they do particularly well among rich urbanites). Second, I don't think it makes sense to describe wokeness as being about symbolic concessions to minorities - among other things, black Democrats are usually more religious and socially conservative than white Democrats. Third, Democrats actually do push more redistributive policies than Republicans, which is the opposite of what you'd see if they were the party of powerful class interests + symbolic concessions to the lower classes.
The traditional 'Republicans are the party of rural whites, Democrats are the party of urban voters and minorities' explanation seems to do a much better job describing the coalitions than the class-based approach. If anything, wokeness is about getting college graduates (who are in general upper/upper-middle class) to support policies that are against their class interests for social reasons.
Another strike against the class-based explanation is that in general we expect members of one class to aspire to being members of the class above them (that's why it makes sense to talk about 'upper' 'middle' and 'lower' classes - there's a hierarchy, and everyone in that hierarchy agrees that it's better to be at the top of the hierarchy than the bottom), but we don't see Republicans aspiring to become Democrats or Democrats aspiring to become Republicans; instead, both parties think they're the good party and the other party's the bad party (really, this is my general objection to the idea of cultural class as a distinct thing from economic class; economic class forms a hierarchy and people at the same place in that hierarchy plausibly have shared political interests, while cultural class doesn't form a hierarchy and members of a shared cultural class only have shared political interests insofar as culture is a proxy for something else).
It should be unsurprising that conflict theory does a bad job explaining electoral coalitions; since voting is a total waste of time from a self-interested perspective, anyone who votes must have some level of altruistic motivation for doing so. You can maybe explain political platforms and donations in conflict terms since coordination on those is at least in principle possible, but it's a poor fit for the voters themselves.
"Taste" is always and everywhere the way old money defends itself against new money. Sure, the new money has more of it, but they're so _gauche_.
This goes back at least to the Early Modern period, and likely to ancient Rome as well.
I grew up rich and live mostly on family money. That post made me think of a small, crystallizing, pre-COVID interaction. Out to dinner with leftist 20-somethings who don't know each other that well, someone volunteered to put the check on his card, so we all started the cash pile/venmo dance, but he stopped us.
Card-holder said "guys, I know this is awkward to say, but... I have money," and explained he was coming off a highly lucrative job and it really wasn't a big deal for them to pick up a pricey dinner for his friends. (Sounds dickish in writing, but he meant it self-effacingly, maybe because of the leftist part.)
This struck me as a big social class vs. economic class divide. I can't even tell you how many times I've covered dinner or the taxi or whatever and agreed to send the other parties a venmo request and just never followed up. I was taught to do this and almost nobody calls me on it. Why would they? Card-holder felt compelled to sheepishly explain and apologize for his newfound riches. How could he know The First Rule Of Wealth Club as it pertains to Talking About Wealth Club?
Re why don't the uncool kids declare themselves cool, thereby breaking the middle-school class system:
One way you can test if this worked is for you and your new-cool friends to throw a party on the same night as an old-cool party. Which party would more people prefer to go to (assuming they were invited to both)? I'm guessing they'll prefer the old-cool party because of a mix of
-- fundamental reasons: the old-cool kids will have more alcohol, prettier girls, etc.
-- common-knowedge-type reasons: people wants to pick the same party that everyone else will pick, and it seems like this will resolve to them all picking the old-cool party.
(Not sure why, but this puzzle tickles the same part of my brain as the question "Why do stocks change price even though there's always an equal number of buyers and sellers?")
Something occurred to me while reading this on the subject of "what is upper class, actually, if it's not money or power or whatever?" / "Why would Bezos care to be in the club at all?" / "Why would they maybe not want Bezos in the club?"
In a word: History. In more words:
Imagine a $3mm+ Bugatti supercar that only someone rich could afford. It's a hand made super car, must be super classy, right? Wrong! It's a neat gadget and all, but you know what would be actually cool? The hand-made Bugatti supercar that King Aelfred the Great drove into battle against the Danes! This very car!
The one word "history" doesn't fully capture it, as demonstrated by a different example, which is that a very expensive house isn't cool until it's designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and clothing isn't cool no matter what it's made out of, unless it's designed personally for you by <someone world class famous>, and only then really if it pushes the envelope on what is possible for that kind of clothing, and not in a gauche way, but in a “now the world of this clothing item is forever different, and it all started with this particular… <smock>.”
It seems to sort of be about exclusivity, which is a word I hear in the space a lot, but it seems to me that it's really about whether something is "historical," ie. pivotally embedded in the structure of the world we know. The exclusivity seems like more a side effect compared to that. Details obfuscated for privacy, but I had a friend who owned a mansion near downtown <famous city> that had been a famous church in the past, but had been redesigned as a mansion by <world famous architect>--the coolness of it was a sort of trifecta of historic significance and cultural cache. It was a little overt for the upper uppers I think, but they have similar shit quietly going on all the time.
Anyway, taking the thesis, it's not hard for me to imagine that the decedents of JJ Astor or John Rockefeller are *themselves*, a little bit historically pivotal "artifacts." The actual sword of Napoleon, the actual heir of <your favorite robber baron>.
So for old money, there's a kind of rarefied air intrinsic to them. What of Bezos then?
Well being rich ain't it, but Bezos is historic now. He's not the rich tech CEO of bullshit app LCC, he's the historically pivotal founder of Amazon, which changed the world, and the world will be different now. Sure he’s crazy rich which doesn’t hurt, but the real thing is that in 100 years Bezos will be a name with cache, like Carnegie or something. You can tell that right now, even though he’s not yet “history,” he's obviously "historically important." So he, like the heir of a robber baron, has a rarefied air that's intrinsic to him, and so can be upper class.
The model is a little too crisp to be fully right, and I didn't talk about how something or someone falls from grace, but I think the gist is right.
As for the question of why the uncool kids can't just decide that they're the cool ones - in Rick Perlstein's excellent "Nixonland", he says that Richard Nixon had exactly this idea in college, and managed to make it work pretty well. He also ties this in to Nixon's future success at building a Republican "silent majority" coalition of anti-hippie reaction vs. the latte-sipping NYT-reading 70s liberal "consensus". If I may quote at length:
>As a schoolboy he hadn't a single close friend, preferring to cloister himself up in the former church's bell tower, reading, hating to ride the school bus because he thought the other children smelled bad. At Whittier, a fine Quaker college of regional reputation unknown anywhere else, he embarked upon what might have been his most humiliating job of all: learning to be a backslapping hail-fellow-well-met. ("I had the impression he would even practice his inflection when he said 'hello,'" a reporter later observed.) The seventeen-year-old blossomed when he realized himself no longer alone in his outsiderdom: the student body was run, socially, by a circle of swells who called themselves the Franklins, and the remainder of the student body, a historian noted, "seemed resigned to its exclusion." So this most unfraternal of youth organized the remnant into a fraternity of his own. Franklins were well-rounded, graceful, moved smoothly, talked slickly. Nixon's new club, the Orthogonians, was for the strivers, those not to the manner born, the commuter students like him. He persuaded his fellows that reveling in one's unpolish was a nobility of its own. Franklins were never photographed save in black tie. Orthogonians worse shirtsleeves. "Beans, brains, and brawn" was their motto. He told them *orthogonian*—basically, "at right angles"—meant "upright," "straight shooter." Also, their enemies might have added, all elbows.
>The Orthogonians' base was among Whittier's athletes. On the surface, jocks seem natural Franklins, the Big Men on Campus. But Nixon always had a gift for looking under social surfaces to see and exploit the subterranean truths that roiled underneath. It was an eminently Nixonian insight: that on every sports team there are only a couple of stars, and that if you want to win the loyalty of the team for yourself, the surest, if least glamorous, strategy is to concentrate on the nonspectacular—silent—majority. The ones who labor quietly, sometimes resentfully, in the quarterback's shadow: the linemen, the guards, the punter. Nixon himself was exemplarily nonspectacular: the 150-pounder was the team's tackle dummy, kept on squad by a loving, tough, and fatherly coach who appreciated Nixon's unceasing grit and team spirit—nursing hurt players, cheering on the listless, even organizing his own team dinners, entertaining the guests on the piano, perhaps favoring them with the Orthogonian theme song. It was his own composition.
>Nixon beat a Franklin for student body president. Looking back later, acquaintances marveled at the feat of this awkward, skinny kid the yearbook called "a rather quiet chap about campus," dour and brooding, who couldn't even win a girlfriend, who attracted enemies, who seemed, a schoolmate recalled, "the man least likely to succeed in politics." They hadn't learned what Nixon was learning. Being hated by the right people was no impediment to political success. The unpolished, after all, were everywhere in the majority.
I grew up not exactly poor, because the wolf was never at the door, but we sure didn't have any extra money, either. But in a million years we wouldn't have called attention to something we owned. That would have been unthinkably vulgar. These days I'm not what you would call spectacularly wealthy, but we're quite comfortable, and we still wouldn't dream of crowing about an expensive possession. Somehow we absorbed the lesson that you always keep a straight face and assume that any financial competence or luxury is completely normal, not worth comment. What's more, there's scarcely anything more vulgar than exhibiting anxiety over loss or damage to something fine, like a spill on a good carpet or knocking over a goblet. Wherever that comes from, it's not from ancestors in the Social Register.
The Siege engine thing is from Mitch Benn - I think it was on a live Edinburgh festival recording called "The Unnecessary Mitch Benn", which unfortunately does not appear to exist to buy any more - although anyone who finds it would have my gratitude!
In his version, he makes it sound more martial by sounding out the syllables - Rho - Do - Den - Dron!
Yeah, the democrats are on solid ground. It would have taken more vote switching to make HRC president in 2016 than Trump in 2020, after he botched literally everything about a pandemic. And now with an old white guy president they can't just scapegoat any criticism as racist, like when Obama intentionally maximised the number of foreclosures on poor people or refused to prosecute his Wall Street campaign donors for blowing up the economy. There is decidedly much less room for their usual dog and pony show. And I'm sure $2k right away that turned into $1400 for less people in 4 months and not even pretending to fight for $15min wage will really do wonders for base turn out. There has never been a ruling class more deserving of guillotines than ours.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. ... So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
They don't do it because truly "cool" people have something ineffable called charisma. Charisma is totally real, and freaking amazing. I don't know quite how common it is; in my (upper class-ish) high school of about 400 boys I'd say there was one who was charismatic enough that solitary anti-social me noticed.
So I don't think the totality of cool kids at school are charismatic. But there will be one or two (the "genuinely cool") that are, and I suspect the rest get there by good looks, money and charisma's poor relative, confidence. Confidence ain't much in the real, adult, world, but it's rare enough in school that it will likely do in a pinch.
I raise these points because I suspect at least part of what counts as upper class is penumbrae around confidence and charisma. I suspect this also decays with generations. The founder of the dynasty generally has something special, some combination of extreme confidence, charisma, competence, and ruthlessness. Though he (usually he, let's get real) may be a lousy father, he still instills some sort of confidence plus above averageness in the kids. Throw in money, good tutors, good exemplars, and you have a generation that at least project confidence ala knowing how to dress, carry themselves, and talk to adults as adults. With decent wives along the way, this may even last through the grandkids.
But (generally by the grandkids, rare to even last to the 4th generation) the discipline and competence of the founder are no longer visible and we no longer see aristocracy as "the best among us", rather we see eurotrash. They have the money, they often have the undeserved confidence, they absolutely lack the charisma (or even charm), or the competence.
So I suspect the "uppermost class" is always one that is divided in two.
There's the sinking 3rd generation and later, the best of which just want to be left alone, the worst of which are constantly ranting about blood and breeding when they aren't snorting heroin.
Meanwhile there's the rising second generation or the founders (maybe considered nouveau richer, but too wealthy too ignore), people in whom there is a lot to genuinely admire, even if not the whole package.
As a single group, uncool kids don't have much in common with each other, so they can't make their own status ladder. But, as I recall, there were some groups that looked down upon each other and considered the others uncool.
For someone as smart as Scott Alexander, I am genuinely surprised he doesn't read David shor. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html
There is no real lower class constituency for "anti racist math"
This sort of policy is for signalling among college educated people. It's a ratchet where the in group personal costs for being against it are much higher than the outgroup political costs for being for it.
This is David shors whole thesis. The Democratic party was captured by college educated white people. College educated white people are very different from most other groups.
He writes about how when he was working for a Democratic ad company and whenever his company had an ad that the people inside just loved... They would get the actual test results back and it would be shown to slightly increase trump support. That's because the people staffing the campaigns are idealistic college educated 20 somethings while the average voter is 51 with no college degree.
Ibram kendi doesn't speak for all black people. Heck, the implications of white fragility for Democratic strategy are entirely ignored.
"White fragility" says that when white people are reminded of their own role within/ benefits from systemic racism, they tend to react sangrily and defensively. For college educated white people, thats great. "We're going to go upset the oppressors and wake up the masses and right the injustice" They happily castigate and point out injustices and collect plaudits from fellow people in their own group.
Remember, it was black voters in South Carolina that out Biden over the top in the primary.
For actual minorities in the Democratic coalition, making white people angry and increasing the share of them voting based on racial grievance isn't a costless endeavour. They don't want to lose body cameras debates because people are turned off by "defund yhe police" They would really like the woke class to tone it down. They were the ones who said, "You know what? We will choose the boring white guy, because the 2 or 3% penalty we get from choosing someone who activates white animus isn't something that we can afford to lose.
I've seen two perspectives in the comments here about De Novo Coolgenesis in Homo Nerdicus - Either something very theoretical, or just because, well, if they were that socially adept, they wouldn't need to decide they were cool. I agree with the latter, so here's my attempt to flesh it out a little bit.
Social interaction is a dance. You can be genuine and not bother about the status games! But the "cool" people are defined as those that choose to play the status games, and do well at them.
But you can learn how to salsa. You can learn how to dance. So here's how to dance. Go up to a group of "cool" kids (Read: Kids whose majors are not especially intellectually taxing, if you're not in university) and introduce yourself. Be agreeable, don't look for reasons to start arguments. Observe the injokes and social mores of the group. Don't try to use them yourself, just make note of them. Inevitably, you will be asked a question, or somehow prompted to share about yourself. You have joined the dance, and now they are seeing if you can dance with them. Be careful about what you say. Reply with an agreeable answer, but don't make it seem like you're avoiding answering - it's fine to share your honest opinion, but present it well. Do not go out of your way to share some sort of unpopular opinion. Mind your body language - be confident, but don't force your way in. You have no social cachet with these people right now, and you're only really there because nobody has a particular reason to want you to leave.
Keep up the dance. Engage when prompted. Don't try to change the dynamic. Slip in. Have a good time. You know what? You won't get kicked out or ostracized. Hell, it'll probably work - these people will think you're a pretty nice person - by that, I mean Normal, and not Weird. Note that Normal and Weird are genuinely terms used to describe frat memberships, which should tell you about how blatant these social games get!
So what's the purpose of me telling you this? Well, it's tiring. If you don't do it often, it's real tiring. You have to be on a low level of alert for the steps and the moves of the dance, while picking up what your partners are doing. Personally, my studies wear me out enough - I simply don't have the energy, nor inclination or time, to engage in it. It surely gets easier, but social skills are a muscle, like anything else. It's tiring if you know the blueprint to follow. If you don't, and you try to dance with the cool kids? You'll trip over yourself. In this way, a feedback cycle is created. If, early on, you encounter social success and stay with the social arms race as it develops through the grades, you're a Cool Kid. If you fall behind early and don't get back on the truck in time, you're not.
If the Uncool Kids tried to decide they were cool, they would be using the label without the criteria, because coolness is defined as the ability to dance the dance. And if they were socially adept enough to see the relativity of those terms, they would already be able to dance the dance. That's how you get stuff being defined as "Cringe." It's not because people are passionate about stuff. It's because they're not dancing the dance when they express it.
> This also sparked a discussion about whether Donald Trump was “upper class”, with one person arguing in support that he owns gold toilets, and someone else responding that gold toilets are the least classy thing imaginable. Good summation of the difference between economic vs. cultural models of class!
The way I frame it is that Donald Trump appeals to some of the cultural lower class because he acts the way a cultural-lower-class person might (approvingly!) imagine themselves acting if they became a billionaire: solid gold toilets, still eating McDonalds, making big explicit fuck-yous to anyone in their way. Staying real instead of acting all hoity-toity.
I think the analysis Scott makes of the Democratic coalition is a bit off. Imo, David Shor has the correct take.
Basically, the Democratic coalition consists of two groups: (mostly?) affluent (always) educated whites that vote overwhelmingly for the left because they are genuinely left wing, at least in abstract terms, in both economic and cultural matters, and minorities that vote overwhelmingly D for historical reasons (or misconceptions, I guess, if you are a proud Republican). The minorities are usually poorer and more conservative in cultural matters, although even in economic ones they are less radical. The only way the coalition can remain competitive is if racial polarization remains very high. When minorities stop voting D overwhelmingly (when the 60s Civil Rights coalition inertia runs its course, as it seems to be happening since the last election) the game is up and they will have to become 25% less woke, maybe even slightly less wing economically, although not much because populism just polls well in general.
Corollary: anti racist math is really to please the elites in the Democratic party, it’s not a concession. The elites can afford such off-putting stuff because, as I wrote, 90% of blacks and hispanics will vote for them anyways. The Scott Hypothesis only works with the Republican party, which genuinely does culture war stuff to please its more prole base while pushing tax cuts nobody but the Kochs like.
"rhododendrons" - I too loved this joke, but yes. Why does it work? I'm not an etymologist or anything but let's play. Total off the cuff guess work. 'Rhodo'.... Robot. Roto. Movement. Technical, moving toward you. / 'Den' or 'Dendron'... Dragon most obviously, (i think that gets at the siege mideavl Knight feel the best) and death (dragon den) also dead and end, dead end. / 'Drons' or 'Dron' this again suggests movement in some way. perhaps just with On or ONs - on the move, on march, On you. great word.
“But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other.”
What happens if this is attempted? You get this blog!
>I am against wokeness on moral/epistemic grounds, but it does seem to be a winning strategy (I think 25% less wokeness would be an even more winning strategy, but I think the general direction is working).
This is a pretty meaningless statement, since "woke" has a million contradictory definitions.
I guess it kinda functions as a political signal, since it's likely to alarm and anger anyone who identifies with some form of "wokeness" (likely to be left-wing) and impress the more easily-impressed people who identify against some form of "wokeness" (likely to be right-wing.) But this seems like a dumb signal to try and send for anyone not aiming to be, like, a boring Conservative pundit.
(As someone who isn't super attached to any definition of wokeness, and who assumes as a matter of course that you disagree with the same ones I do, this just makes me feel worried that you mean one of the good & positive definitions of woke, and/or are trying to pivot the blog to attract low-quality right-wing commenters and have taken a serious right-wing turn altogether with the whole "this is my preferred Republican platform but haha maybe I'm joking" thing.)
I assume (hope?) you actually just meant to condemn something specific, but I dunno what that was so I can't really comment. Except for the one example you gave...
>But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.
I don't get the impression there's huge support for "anti-racist math" or anything adjacent among poor minorities. Popular among the sort of "poor" "minorities" who are on Clubhouse, maybe.
I guess one could argue that endorsing anti-racist math serves as some sort of costly signal of *intent* to be nice to minorities, if not in very practical or well-aimed ways. But of course no Democrat politician would actually endorse "anti-racist math".
The actual real-world Democrat strategy on race seems to mostly consist of "don't be the Republican party" and "keep hammering on the point that the Republican Party is racist" with a little "have policies slightly nicer to immigrants" mixed in. Which, sure, is a fine strategy as long as Republicans do a terrible job of not looking racist.
Isn't all this ... kind of the main point of your "Modest Proposal", and of the Republican messaging against those darn ivory tower elite out-of-touch Democrats you're drawing on it?
The grandchildren of the landlords dispossessed by Mao are faring well above average in contemporary China. I am inclined to think of Class as whatever the hell made that happen.
The financial and taste angles we're struggling to reconcile here are both merely that, angles. They point to a deeper thing.
https://www.economist.com/china/2020/09/17/the-families-of-chinas-pre-communist-elite-remain-privileged
"I found this hilarious, but why does it work? Maybe it has something to do with “rhododendron” being a maximally-Greek-sounding word?"
Maybe phonetic? I lack the proper terminology to speak about this, but the word itself alternates a lot between vowels and consonants in a way that somehow accents that and makes it sound like little booms and bangs. I think one term in phonetics is "plosive", which would make a lot of sense if it were applicable here, but IDK if it were.
" I doubt this is true for literal Jeff Bezos - he doesn’t seem like the kind of guy to care too much about that kind of thing - but maybe it’s true for enough people that it matters?"
Consider
https://logicmag.io/commons/inside-the-whale-an-interview-with-an-anonymous-amazonian/
"Prime Video, for one. Jeff loves Prime Video because it gives him access to the social scene in LA and New York. He’s newly divorced and the richest man in the world. Prime Video is a loss leader for Jeff’s sex life."
Another take on the "why don't the uncool people simply declare themselves cool?" question. I think this is already happening to some extend with the classes. The lower class thinks of the middle class as low T wussies and the middle class thinks of the upper class as perverted degenerates.
The reason the middle class still obviously to all classes outranks the lower class is roughly that the middle class runs the media and so gets to use it to coordinate and easily outplay the lower class. The Internet doesn't change this since using twitter and having a substack is also a middle class thing to do.
I'm more fuzzy on why the upper class still obviously outranks the middle class having scarcely any visibility into this culture but I have a hunch it got something to do with being able to casually think thoughts the middle class cannot think and acknowledging realities the middle class must not acknowledge allowing them to make moves which are incomprehensible to the middle class easily outplaying them.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
This is what happens in every communist revolution and it is indeed very cool.
In the recent David Shor interview (https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2021/03/david-shor-2020-democrats-autopsy-hispanic-vote-midterms-trump-gop.html) he presents a good case that the Democratic coalition described in this post is more fragile than Scott seems to think here, and already fracturing. This seems to be because the antiracist math, and Defund The Police, and whatnot, which Scott here mentions as the bit of the Democratic platform that is meant to appeal to minority voters, isn’t actually that popular among minority voters! It isn’t like they universally hate it or anything, but the main audience for that is educated white voters. The more Democrats lean on their culture war messaging, the worse they do with minority voters, particularly Hispanic voters!
I get the feeling Dems need to work that out, and work that out fast, or the demographic shifts that were bringing a lot of Southern states back into play for the first time in decades might not do much good for them going forward.
For those intrigued by "Muscle" but in need of a push, here's a long form interview with the author http://www.drmichaeljoyner.com/sam-fussell-an-interview-with-the-author-of-muscle/. The young Fussell is a fascinating guy.
There's a big gap in the former Eastern Europe between post-WWII acquisitions (including the Baltics) and the older Soviet core (Eastern Slavs, Transcaucasus and Central Asia). The older core has completely purged its pre-USSR elites. A diaspora member coming back to Russia and running for president is something no one can entertain seriously the thought of. I'd enumerate the modern Russian classes like this:
- The fed. These are the people that derive their wealth from controlling access to government resources. They include bureaucrats of medium-to-large calibre, scions of Soviet dynasties and other "in-system liberals"
- The privateers. These are the people who derive their wealth from privatized enterprises and financial deals in the 90's. They are not allowed to wield any power at the federal level, but at the regional level they are still important players
- The remoras. These educated workers derive their wealth from working for the fed or the privateers, directly or indirectly. They are paid, they don't skim off their wealth. The craftiest ones can join the ranks of the fed, if they play their cards right
- The forlorn. That's everyone else, surviving day by day
Yes, there's very little culture involved, but that's how it still works in places that tried to apply the ideas of Marx. You see people who were graduated from school 57 and the MSU rubbing shoulders with ex-cons at luxury parties.
What about actual entrepreneurs deriving their wealth from ingenuity, elbow grease, bootstraps and other cliches? They are not allowed to join the ranks of federal privateers (this class can only shrink when traitorous privateers are stripped of their assets), so it's only a matter of time before the biggest ones are pressured to sell their business to one of the privateers or the fed or the state itself. At the regional level the safest route is going into politics. Unlike real privateers, who send their proteges, these businesspeople have to become MPs themselves, or they will remain curiously rich forlorn, whose fortunes can be stripped from them at a whim.
"Rhododendron" sounds like an artillery barrage in the distance.
One thing I was surprised to see unmentioned in the Fussell/Class discussion was the army. Fussell was an officer the 103rd Infantry Division during WW2; was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart. His most famous book (at least in UK academia; it may be different in the States) is his study of World War One poets, "The Great War and Modern Memory". Mightn't it be argued that his experiences shaped his sense of how class operates; and that the centrality of the army to US society and culture does something similar on a larger scale? The distinction between officers and men in the army is, historically, very precisely a different between upper and lower social class. I suppose an enthusiast for the US military might argue: nowadays the army provides careers open to the talents, that you get promoted on your ability rather than your class background, but I wonder how far that is really true, across the board. Arguably modern day armies still very much structurally embody the class divisions of the societies out of which they are recruited. By this I don't mean that officers get paid more than regular soldiers, although I suppose they do, if not that much more (not in the way company CEOs get paid more than office drones). I mean in the ways in which the distinction between officers and men is much more pronounced than is the case in other ways. Most officers are from high class backgrounds, most grunts from lower.
It interests me because I once wrote a book about a hypothetical "democratic" army, one in which there are no officers, all the serving troops are equal and all vote on strategic and battelfield decisions in real-time. My take was that such an army would be more effective than the traditional kind, but of course I could be wrong. Still I'm puzzled that such a structure has never been tried in real life.
Then again, I can't say I entirely understand how "the army" figures in US society more broadly. In some ways it is the paradigm for important social ideas like service, heroism and so on, such that there is a sense in which the army is the ideal to which society ought to cleave. In other ways there is real resistance (or so it seems to me) to applying the logic of the army to larger society: soldiers get free healthcare while serving, why not do the same for all American citizens? But if the US Army is still regarded as some kind of paradigmatic organisation for the USA as a nation, then the strictly enforced heirarchy of human interaction is conceivably also paradigmatic.
On the rhododendron note: gastraphetes, polybolos, petrobolos, and helepolis are all siege weapons, so even if he couldn't bring them to mind at the time, the "maxmimally Greek sounding" explanation does hold some water.
I'd be interested in hearing more about the heritability of class - when I read the original review I was surprised by how cleanly my parents and I embodied completely different stereotypes, with no explanation I can come up with.
Darn it. I don't like commenting but since you highlighted it I kind of think i need to.
The Simpsons is actually quite accurate for people who work at a Nuclear power plant. I'm an instructor, I teach people how to operate the plant. I make very good money and I've never stepped foot in a college. I got my high school diploma and enlisted in the US Navy and completed the nuclear power program, eventually retired and got hired by the utility. This is normal. Most of the operators got there the same way. About 20% went to engineering schools and started as engineers before switching to operations. That's actually a hard transition for them to make.
Also, the sleeping is not true, but sitting and doing nothing is the norm for operating a nuclear power plant. The industry standard is what they call a breaker to breaker run meaning you close the generator breaker after the refueling outage and don't open it until the start of the next refueling outage a year and a half later. The operators make a lot of money to know what to do if anything goes wrong, but it rarely does so they sit and try to stay awake.
Obviously this is slightly exaggerating, every five weeks they have a training week and get tested both written and in a simulator on stuff going wrong, it's very challenging, which is why they get paid a lot. In the plant they periodically have to test the equipment, or prepare for the next refueling outage or participate in fire drills and stuff, but mostly they just sit and know stuff.
At one point I could have been the human Homer, I had three kids almost the same estimated age, but mine get older and his don't. Big house, but mine is rural so I have two cars and a truck. Overall I really have nothing to complain about except credentialed people who assume people running the reactors are engineers. Operating is similar to driving, not much calculations, we have a separate engineering department and we don't let them touch the controls!
To the point about if Democrats were a little less woke it would be better for them: yes, their effort to "give a little to the powerless" through wokeness has surpassed where those "powerless" are. Rich, white liberals tend to be so much more woke and radical, while people like African Americans in the Democratic coalition are the most conservative, which is why Joe Biden is president. I wonder how long before it actually hurts the Democrats.
I don't think high school "coolness" is a good analogy for the class system in society at large. If you have a school with a bimodal distribution along class lines (or racial lines), the social divisions in high school are going to mirror society at large. But within the rich group or the poor group or the black group or the hispanic group, there will still be cool kids and uncool kids.
Cool kids are cool because, by definition, people want to hang out with them. Some people just have a magnetism that makes them enjoyable to be around. Usually that's due to a combination of good looks and good social IQ. These things appeal to humans' lizard brains. If you had a choice of who to hang out with, you would choose the cool kids. The cool kids do have a choice, and so they gravitate to each other, but they don't view themselves as a particular class. They invite Nick to the party because they like being around Nick, and so does everyone else. They don't invite Kevin to the party because they don't like being around Kevin, and neither does anyone else. There's nothing malicious about it. They don't punish the outgroup; bullying is not a road that leads to status; the most popular kids are the ones who get along with *everybody*. Which makes perfect sense when you think about the definition of the word "popular".
Scott wondering why the uncool kids don't "unionize" to create their own social group and social norms likely demonstrates that social status was completely off his radar in high school. The uncool kids are stuck with each other and don't particularly like each other. They smell weird and can't read the room.
Cliques are a somewhat different animal. Cliques form around mutual interests and activities. They are smaller and very, very tight-knit. They quickly generate very strict within-group normative cues and behaviors, not because they want to differentiate themselves from the outgroup, but because they need to maintain hierarchical ambiguity within the group. It's that old Groucho Marx joke about not wanting to join any club that wants him to join. Any group with a readily-readable social hierarchy won't form into a clique, because everyone will want to drop those on the bottom and those on the top will want to drop the group itself. The only groups that evolve into cliques are those where everyone can perceive that they are roughly of equal status with everyone else, and that happens when language and fashion and habits all coalesce within a pretty narrow range. And of course once you're in the clique, especially for those cliques whose members aren't among the cool kids, your enforcement of those group norms on others and yourself gets very strict, lest you lose access to that group's social capital.
On the "Republicans should talk about class" front, Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit recently ran an op-ed in the NY Post kind of doing exactly that: https://nypost.com/2021/03/04/americas-elites-are-waging-class-war-on-workers-and-small-biz/
Nothing in there is really a super new idea from Glenn, he's said similar stuff in the past, but it's the most clearly he's called out those ideas as "class warfare" that I can recall. He definitely reads (and his often linked to) Scott, so I doubt it's a coincidence.
“Class is really weird. Somebody should write a book about it.”
Bourdieu’s “Distinction” is fresh as ever. Maybe it isn’t getting the fame it should be because 1) its French, 2) Bourdieu might be lumped in with the Derrida, Foucault crew. Still, most of the research is compelling even now.
It is very strange to me to hear Americans talk about cool kids. I went to a unisex Catholic school outside the US, and there was no real concept of cool or uncool kids. There were specific kids who were well liked because they were positive and friendly. But there were mostly just parallel but overlapping social circles - mostly organized around which educational track you were in (we didn’t get to choose specific classes, you either took natural science, earth science, humanities or business/economics).
On the point that Democrats couldn't do better, Democrats are doing great in raw numbers, but of they actually want to pass policy, they need to think of a way to win more Senate seats. In the most urban states, they are doing amazing, but if they cannot think of a message for rural voters, they'll likely never get more than the barest majority in the Senate. In the past, their coalition included farmers and union workers, which gave them enough rural votes. I'm not sure what rural votes they should go after now, but of the goal is to pass policy, they need to add some to their coalition, even at the expense of losing some urban votes.
To risk being viewed as too “woke”, I think any analysis of class in America that doesn’t include race is inevitably incomplete. For, what I hope is a not-too-charged example, consider Fussell’s point about the proll-to-upper class culture pipeline and Scott’s point about rap. I think this is actually the Black-to-upper class white culture pipeline. The Harvard Crimson may rave about Hamilton, but when was the last time they wrote anything about country music? Going way further back, Jazz followed a similar trajectory from dangerous music to a “quintessential American art form”.
I haven’t read enough to unpack this, but Black Americans functioning as the “absolute other” has always been foundational to our conception as a “classless society”. And the need for lower and middle class whites to maintain a strict color line versus the freedom of upper middle class and upper class whites to worry less is certainly part of that dynamic.
Unfortunately, I feel like Hawley has learned from Marco Rubio's mistakes, and has over compensated. Rubio tried to be moderate Republican by sponsering bi-partisan legislation on immigration, Family leave, and a few other Family values legislations. He talked up at least two of his bills, and used all of his political capital as a junior senator to try to pass them. He failed horriblly, sabotaged primarily by his own party. He tries running for president, but he can't show off any accomplishment, because they all failed.
I think Hawley saw Rubio's failures, and decided to avoid that trap by not fighting for any actually controversial legislation. He tweets strong signals, but the only thing he stands for, is being more Anti-Trump than most of his party. And that might be enough to keep him ahead, while Rubio is already preparing to be primarried by Ivanka.
RE your point that “one nicely symmetrical option would be for the Republicans to run on being the party defending the cultural lower class” Ramesh Ponnuru (on the recent Ezra Klein podcast) had an interesting potential counterpositioning for Republicans:
“There’s been a lot of discussion over the last several years about the Republicans being a Workers’ Party. There’s something to be said for that compared to being a business owners party. It certainly makes more political sense. But I think being a parent’s party is in some ways more attractive than either of those because that’s something that includes material dimension, but it’s not just replacing one materialist vision with another.“
The parallels between between this and your analysis of aligning powerful and powerless people struck me. Namely the importance of a Party positioning on nonmaterial dimensions that don't irreconcilably misalign powerless and powerful people.
"poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever"
I suppose this is sarcasm, but I've always wondered, do they actually want that? I've never seen any protests for anti-racist math. This type of stuff looks like the fevered dreams of activists with a little too much free time.
There was a recent story in Baltimore where a person in high school with 0.3 GPA was 60th in a class of 122. He had passed 3 classes in 4 years. I ask myself of this pervasive failure, does the community actually want this? And the answer is I don't know for sure anymore. Obviously they don't want those results but they sure put up with it in large numbers. Put that school's performance in many places in the US and the parents would burn the school to the ground before they would let that continue.
I think there is an increasing divergence between what a lot of activists think and what a down trodden community actually wants. Are the house parties talking about the scandal of Dr. Seuss? This is just preposterous in my view. Crime ridden communities want less policing? That is fine with me if that is what they want, but I'd much rather see a community voter referendum on that instead of interviews with Ivy league activists and graduate level op-eds in venerable magazines.
There is no end of high brow opinion of what the lower classes need in the elite media (ha ha), I'm increasingly confused on what it is they want.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other."
This reminds me of the sort of power paradox David Graeber was interested in: powerful people are powerful because everyone does what they say, but those other people *give* them power by choosing to do what they say. I view books like Debt (and really, almost all his books) as primarily a meditation on this subject. I wouldn't say he "solves" it or anything, but if you're interested in this dynamic, he certainly has a lot to say!
"The "prole" flowers are all annuals - exotic tropical flowers that have to be replanted every year in most of the US because they can't survive freezing temperatures."
I find that interesting because over here, for example, rhododendrons were exotic imports for the big houses:
"Rhododendron (Rhododendron ponticum) is a non-native, invasive species in Ireland, first introduced in the 18th century. At that time it was planted in and around ‘The Big Houses” of the gentry and upper classes. Prized for its flamboyant and vibrant blooms it was planted as an ornament and to provide cover for game birds, namely pheasant (also an introduction originating from Asia)."
It escaped and thrived in the local landscape to the point of taking over boglands etc. but I can't say that it's particularly a garden flower, like hydrangeas (which everyone had in their garden) or fuchscias (ditto). Perhaps this decline in class is another example of something which was exclusive to the wealthy/hard to get and then 'trickled down' the ladder as it became more available and people wanted to copy their 'betters' so it became a plant of the lower classes?
The Sam Fussell story reminds me of the Mockney types: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mockney (and also an overlap with Estuary English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Estuary_English).
Middle and upper-middle class people adopting an exaggerated lower-class accent and affect for various reasons, including 'street cred' - the names in the Wikipedia article were those I was thinking of (part of the Britpop Wars between Blur and Oasis were that Damon Albarn was Mockney while the Gallagher brothers genuinely were that class). Some are "professional Cockneys" like Lily Allen's father Keith (whose Wikipedia article tells me that he's actually Welsh by birth and Hampshire by upbringing) or the cast of the soap opera "Eastenders". The most egregious are probably Nigel Kennedy and Jamie Oliver.
Even politicians played at it, like Tony Blair and David "call me Dave" Cameron, the most evident moment of fakery on this probably being the one where Cameron forgot which football team he ostensibly supported (is it Villa or the Hammers? both wear claret and blue):
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2015/apr/25/david-cameron-blames-brain-fade-for-getting-his-football-team-wrong
There are times that I'm reminded that while Scott is a subject matter expert on having intelligent discussions on the internet he doesn't seem to follow politics all that closely (like when he was surprised about the D & R divide over mail-in voting). The following take on the democratic coalition seems exactly like what someone who paid attention to online discourse but not to policymaking would write:
"But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better."
One, anti-racist math in school, abolishing the police, and other fringe woke causes are unpopular with low education/older/poorer voters of all races. Two, Dems just voted to expand EITC, give a child tax credit, increase foodstamp, increase UI, and would have raised the minimum wage to $15 if not for Manchin and Sinema. Three, an alliance of highly educated people, poor minority urbanites, and the young is really suboptimal for winning elections where older people are more likely to vote and rural people are systematically overrepresented. Well-educated cosmopolitans speaking on behalf of poor minority youth is a great formula for dominating cultural institutions but basically guarantees you will lose the senate.
I was listening to David Shor on Rationally Speaking and he made a great point about how polarization, vetocracy & near zero interest rates permit expressive voting. In the veto point heavy American political system the slim majorities possible in a polarized system can do very little, and what they can do is usually funded by borrowing not by raising taxes or cutting the safety net. Republicans could not repeal the ACA, but they could give a giant deficit funded tax cut. Democrats won't be able to do a tax-funded Medicaid for all, but they will be able to borrow to do a giant stimulus. If you're a poor white Republican you can vote for the party that says it will strip your healthcare and they won't actually be able to. If you're a culturally liberal millionaire you can vote for the party that says they want to tax you to enact Medicaid and rest assured that they won't be able to do that either.
This synthesizes really well with Klein. We can't fight against cultural polarization, so you have to reduce the salience of cultural issues to politics and raise the salience of economic ones. You do this by enabling bare majorities to enact their agenda (killing the filibuster) and making the system more representative (end gerrymandering, let Puerto Rico become the 30th most populous state) so the public can experience the result and respond appropriately. Critics think this will lead to back and forth whiplash, but if parties are able to actually do what they say it seems likely they will cut cheap talk and focus on more popular things.
Oh, I dunno, what about Cryptytonomyncon, where Larry Waterhouse's possession's get divided up after the funeral?
> sky-high high rates of alcoholism and depression that I vaguely theorize stem from most people being poorly equipped to handle a completely vacuum of purpose or financial drive to succeed.
If anyone suffers from the problem of having too little financial drive, I could volunteer to take the extra money from you. ;)
Jokes aside, I suspect that the problem is not being too high on the economical ladder per se, but rather being unable to get any higher... so your highest ambition is that things stay as they are, for as long as possible.
A person like me, who knows, maybe if I tried a bit harder, I could double my wealth in a few years. A person who got insanely rich using their skills, who knows, they might double their wealth soon just by keeping doing what they already do. A person who inherited tons of money and have no extraordinary skills themselves... it won't get any better (well, maybe unless they invest all that money in passively managed index funds).
I think the "rhododendrons" joke works because it reminds us of "mastodons", which in turn seem like fancier war elephants, which were a real thing.
Your comment about the cool kids reminds me of Daniel Dennett's comment "those who are chic are all and only those who can get themselves considered chic by others who consider themselves chic." You could easily substitute "cool" for "chic". His comment was in the context of trying to understand personhood -- to some extent, persons are all and only those who can get themselves considered persons by others who consider themselves persons.
Rhododendron, from the greek róda, meaning wheel, and déndron, meaning tree.
Tree on wheels, which perfectly describes most siege weapons.
"When I was in middle school, I used to wonder - there are cool kids and uncool kids, right? But suppose all the uncool kids agreed to think of themselves as cool, and to make fun of the currently-cool kids. Then you would just have two groups of kids, each considering themselves superior and looking down on the other. And the currently-uncool-kid group would be bigger and probably win, insofar as it’s possible to win these things. So why don’t they do that? I have lots of partial answers, but still no satisfying one. I feel the same way about the upper class."
To me, this is the most interesting question about class. What are the actual reasons for one class coming to dominate, or at least enjoying greater prestige, over another? In Scott’s example of HS, I think the answer is pretty simple, speaking as a former high school “cool kid”. The main thing is understanding that there are significant and real differences between the capacities and desires of most “cool” and “uncool” kids. Me and my friends were half normal friend group, and half rag tag party planning committee. A great deal of our time and energy was spent in finding venues for parties, (these usually being the basements of clueless or enabling parents) as well as means of procurement of drugs and alcohol. Nights where we merely hung out as a small group with parental supervision were basically considered failures. We always intended to gather the largest possible group of people in the most unsupervised space we could. This was only possible because of our 1:1 relationships, usually formed by membership on sports teams, clubs, etc.
Without reasonably strong 1:1 friendships with a group of 8-10 people, and then a much larger group of friendly acquaintanceships, every other part of being a “cool kid” is impossible. Because of this need for a huge amount of friendly acquaintanceships in order to populate social events, basically all of my “cool kid” friends were extroverted jocks not because that immediately conferred status(because the highly skilled, “quiet” jocks were not “cool” in the way I think Scott is talking about) but because it provided an easy avenue to form lots and lots of decently strong 1:1 friendships.
I can’t stress enough how important mere attendance of these large social events was: I remember returning after a study abroad trip, and finding my status had noticeably fallen. If any machiavellian rule can be said to rule high schools(at least ones like mine, where there was basically no real bullying) it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’. And social media only compounds this.
TLDR: Most of the “uncool” kids lacked the necessary number of 1:1 relationships to organize or be invited to the large social events that are the main source of high school social prestige.
As far as I was ever aware, my secondary school had no distinct 'cool kids' grouping. There were different sets of kids - the geeky kids who played computer games, say, or the ones who played football - and there were intra-group hierarchies, but I never had any sense of an inter-group hierarchy. Possibly relevant is that the fact that it was an academically selective school, so on some level we were all the nerds - the football kids were just as likely to do well on classroom tests as anybody else.
Fussell's book got passed around the Marine Officer's Basic School when I was there in 1986. Most of the officers were first generation college grads, had lower or lower middle class upbringings, and were surprisingly comfortable with conversations about class (as Fussell, a Marine himself, would have predicted). We all took the test at the end of the book and most scores were relatively low. Mine, however, was higher due to things like the 200 hundred year old family portraits on the walls of our Main Line house, summers on MDI, a string of classic wooden sailboats, the right boarding school, etc. When one of my fellow lieutenants saw my score he asked loudly, "Who are you, Little Lord Fucking Fauntleroy?" It remains one of the funniest moments of my often entertaining stint in the Marines.
How does one be happy as a middle class person? It seems like being middle class is mostly about constant status anxiety and a dream to be upper class that can never come true, which sounds pretty miserable. What distinguishes happy middle class people from unhappy ones?
Thank you for recommending this book, I will buy it. Failed upper middle class older gentleman here. Class is something you don't notice as much when you are successful, but when you 're a failure, you notice it a lot. I have a prole's income but an upper middle class tastes. There is truly no worse hell on earth. No matter so many Americans are killing themselves with opiates and other drugs. Being told you will be upper middle class, then becoming resigned to prole income and neighborhoods is a fate worse than death. Downward mobility is America's problem. Our addiction to increasing the national (and state... and local) debt to buy elections (for either party, not singling out any one party for this) is decreasing the ability of young people to succeed in business and in life.
Tom Wolfe wrote at great length and great insight about class. People don't think of him as an intellectual, but he was actually Dr. Thomas Wolfe, Ph.D. from Yale in American Studies, so he knew all the 1950s theoretical frameworks for thinking about class, as well as all his subsequent reportorial research. According to Pinker, Wolfe's conceptual innovation was to move beyond Marx's idea of class to a broader, more subtle concept of status.
By the way, Tom Stoppard is the mirror image: everybody thinks of him as some kind of Oxford philosopher, but he never went to university, immediately becoming a reporter.
> I have less good advice for the Democrats because they seem less confused. [...] the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better.
Democrats have a simple and obvious way to build a better coalition: by adding more people to it, to get more votes. Like, what if instead of talking so much about black people facing tough times because "systemic racism", they instead talk about the plight of the (economic!) lower class — including oppressed African Americans, of course — and lifting barriers to living the American Dream in America? How about instead of saying "let's get more minorities in college via affirmative action," they say "let's get more poor people and minorities in college by making it more affordable for them." Oh and for God's sake, can we not burden poor people with huge zombie student loans that survive bankrupcy? I understand Joe Biden had something to do with this...
Granted, they do have this in their Platform: "Democrats will fight to create a federal funding program for higher education, modeled on Title I funding for K-12 schools, that would direct funds to public and nonprofit colleges and universities and minority-serving institutions based on the proportion of low-income students those schools enroll and graduate."
But Democrats have a more of a reputation for supporting "minorities" and NOT "the working class" or "the poor". They earned this reputation and they can change it if they choose.
> But the powerless people are going to want things from the powerful people, the powerful people aren’t going want to give those things up, and then your coalition frays and breaks.
I'm not persuaded of that. First of all, what the lower (economic!) classes want most of all is economic prosperity and security. To assume that this requires "taking things away from powerful people" is a level of zero-sum thinking that is unbecoming of a Bay-Area professional.
If inflation caused by unbalanced government spending becomes a problem then yes, the government might have to raise taxes on the powerful, or cut gravy trains such as military spending (to which some would loudly object). But then again, a lot of powerful people have consistently backed Republicans regardless of Democratic tax policy, and many of those who aren't Republicans would support higher taxes on the rich anyway. Case in point, a majority of voters making over $100,000 per year tend to back Republicans — McCain, Romney, even Trump! Why? Do you think they backed Trump for his honesty? Given the existing distribution of support from the rich and powerful, it's not at all clear to me that a little wealth redistribution would harm the Democrats very much.
But hold on. What causes problematic inflation in the first place, and how do we avoid it? I think it boils down to one thing: an imbalance between resources produced and money spent. Suppose people spend less money (probably because they have less money, but not necessarily), but production drops even faster. The result is inflation and a depression. Suppose people spend more money (probably because they have more, but not necessarily) and production increases proportionately. Then there is no inflation and everyone is, on average, a bit happier. Suppose people spend more money and production increases, but not as much. Now you have inflation but also economic success.
Therefore, the Democratic strategy should be to move beyond Republican-style zero-sum thinking ("Mexicans steal jobs" and all that), and work out how to raise domestic production and simultaneously raise demand for this production in a way that helps living standards among the bottom 50% of Americans.
On the demand side, they could introduce a small UBI. On the supply side, American businesses, especially smaller ones, are (I am told) frustrated with thickets of needless or just overgrown regulations. Why not take a page from the Republican playbook and promise to do something about that — and then actually do something intelligent about that — in order to win some support from business leaders? On the third side, they could increase the supply of public goods, by funding open engineering (e.g. open source software), non-crumbling infrastructure, and so forth.
I expect many Democratic elites and influencers would have some difficulty processing some of these ideas, as many of them aren't on board with basic "capitalist" economics. Still, their hearts are in the right place. Harness that.
If you, Scott Alexander, can figure out a set of plausible changes that would benefit the Republican party, it is shocking to me that you can't manage the same for the Democrats. Are you really going to sit there and tell me that you can't think of anything that the Democratic party — the party of Occupy Wall Street's "99%", the party of those who want to make the world a better place through collective action, the party whose supporters still hunger for a health care plan better than "prop up the insurance companies and call it Affordable Care Act" — can do better?
Also, did you ask Substack for an Edit Button? No doubt I will want to tweak this post within minutes.
"The most famous example of doing this well was the Reagan coalition, where powerful business interests got to stay rich and powerful, and Moral Majority Christians got to have prayer in school or whatever. But the modern Democratic coalition works too - powerful class interests get to stay rich and powerful, and poor minorities get to have anti-racist math in school or whatever. This honestly seems like a pretty good deal for the Democrats, coalition-building-wise, and I’m not sure they can do better."
Respectfully, the idea of the modern Democratic coalition doesn't make much sense. There's little evidence that poor minorities give a damn about "anti-racist" math or other woke ideology and in fact it is wealthy, well educated white liberals who are the biggest fans. The modern Democratic coalition, such as it is, depends heavily on liberal economic policies for the proles - bread rather than circuses for poor minorities. When Democrats cater to elites, it's on cultural issues.
Has anyone on the rationality sphere ever read Pierre Bourdieu? It seems a lot of society oriented writing by people like Scott ends up gesturing vaguely in the same direction as Bourdieu, but the connection never gets made. I'd expect at least some reference to Distinction, a book all about the social mechanisms of taste.