My wife is from India, and she mentioned that high-caste people can be kicked out of Hinduism if a Dalit (untouchable) touches them or prepares their food. A similar question might be why don't Dalit's organize en masse in a conspiracy to touch and degrade every high caste person in India?
I'll 100% admit to neither reading Nixonland nor being an expert in 60s/70s American politics, but I think Nixon's wizardry might be a bit overstated?
The RFK assassination + the New Deal coalition collapsing in the face of civil rights for brown people + George Wallace probably did as much for Nixon in 68 as he did for himself.
If anyone here knows that I'm wrong about this please let me know!
I am not sure what to make of this. It seems to entail a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation. I shudder to think of anyone seeing Nixon's application of his insights as being in any way laudable.
"Cool kids" who are exclusive are by definition extremely vulnerable to displacement, because they make a lot of enemies. Popularity by definition requires you to be popular.
Frankly, I've never understood the stereotypical cool kid dynamic. At my high school, there wasn't really a clade of cool kids. The geeky people were often the most popular and would win popularity contests because they were nice and affable. Trying to be cool would have been... well, not cool. One of the more popular students made a weird comedy movie.
It has always seemed to me like the idea of "cool kids" who were jerks doesn't make a lot of sense, and sometimes I wonder if it is because a lot of those stories were written by people who didn't really understand social dynamics very well. Overwhelmingly, popular people I've known personally were friendly and affable, because that's how you make a lot of friends.
FWIW, I can't recommend Nixonland highly enough. If you like audiobooks, the reading by Stephen Thorne is excellent. I have listened to all 36 hours multiple times, I bought the physical book to follow along and read the references, and my Word file of notes on it is 20 pages long. It created in me an abiding fascination with both the period and, as Perlstein puts it, "the strange, tortured man" at the book's center.
Nixonland is a terrific book. As someone who moved to the US as an adult with only basic knowledge of the Nixon era it really opened up that period of US history. Only downside, it's very long and almost too detailed to sustain interest through 400-or-so pages for all but the nerdiest of political junkies.
On a related {resident, Lyndon Johnson was really unpopular among most of his peers during his life, but he sucked up to people who had a lot of power, and liked him. He was a notorious liar, whose nickname was "Bull" in college for being a bullshitter. But he sucked up to the Dean, and got the privilege of managing campus jobs. In the 1920's Texas, having a campus job could be the difference between being able to stay in college or drop out for work. He started giving jobs to people who sucked up to him, and took them away from anyone who crossed him. He also manipulated campus elections: he formed a conspiracy called the "black stars" to oppose the cool students known as "white stars". He never put himself forward as a candidate, but convinced people to vote tactically, and stuffed the ballot box to overcome the white star's popularity.
This pattern would continue throughout his personal and political life: political peers hated him, but he was well-loved by powerful mentors in the senate. He would do absolutely anything to win an election, including cheating. And once he gained power from these men, he used it ruthlessly against his cooler peers.
I got this mostly from The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
The description of Nixon "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" doesn't sound like the actions of a socially inept or introverted person. It sounds like the actions of someone who was very good at organizing and cheerleading people. It's important not to conflate social status and actual social skills.
I wonder if a similar strategy would work in other environments. For example, academic fields often have a set of "cool kids" that everybody is trying to impress and a huge "silent majority" that perhaps is not entirely happy with that arrangement.
I attempted and deleted an answer involving an analogy to the purchasing power of fiat currency, but that just complicated things more. The reason why this hypothetical about uncool kids unionizing doesn't work is because "cool" isn't actually all that subjective: what makes a person socially desirable is objectively observable, which makes sense since most of the traits in question are connected to hardwiring from our social ape background. In other words, what makes a chimpanzee "cool" to other chimps and what makes a human "cool" to other humans is incredibly similar, big picture.
So in the "uncool kids union" hypothetical, sure, it'll work, until the objective desirability of being socially close to some people rather than others begins to assert itself. In my last comment, I observed that one of the first and most major break points is going to be "whither the hot chicks". If the cool and uncool kids each host a party on Friday night, and all of the girls who make a straight boy's heart go "bang bang bang" show up to the cool kids' party, the uncool union is going to bust right on the spot.
But it's not the only break point. The cool kids, in general, are cool because they've got better dress sense, better physical hygiene, because they're more witty and are better at carrying a conversation, because they're wealthier, in better shape, etc. If they're not *much* cooler in terms of that sort of trait, sure, you'll get a pretty horizontal structure with lots of little groups in parity. If there are significant differences, though, than the uncool kids with the most opportunity to change their status, i.e. the ones who only need to fix a couple things, are going to break from the uncool union hard. Sort of like pressurization of various chambers affecting movement between them, but there I go metaphorizing again.
The book sounded interesting when it came out, but I remember seeing an interview with the author where he was really petulant, smug, and condescending, and it made me want to not read it or anything else he might write.
My father's view was that, of the presidents and candidates he had known, Nixon had the highest IQ. My interpretation of him was that he was not, like Trump, Obama, or Reagan, a natural demagogue, so had to use intelligence to make up for a lack of natural talent.
I don't think the uncool kids can redefine cool any more than chimpanzees can just redefine their social position. It's about the web of social relationship between every individual. You could form two coalitions, but if you could do that, you would have just risen in the existing one. Uncool kids have few, or poorer, relationships. If they didn't, they wouldn't be "uncool". They might be deemed smart, or a nerd, but uncool is specifically about social capital, and it often correlates with how well rounded your (social, physical, mental) skills are. My prom king was nerdy, but also athletic and charming. Cool kids are usually cool because they're good or decent at everything, rather than experts at a few things, which means they fit in everywhere, which means they have lots of friends, which makes them cool.
One way things sometimes work out is that, when someone is being bullied, the absolute most popular students are among the least likely to be doing the bullying. They're secure in their position, so they can be nice to anyone they want without worrying much about how it looks. It's the people in the middle with insecure social positions that strike at people below them in an effort to keep from becoming a target themselves.
So why don't the uncool people team up and overthrow the cool kids? Sometimes, it's because the "cool" kids stay that way by being nice people that people actually like instead of resent.
I'm going to officially state on the record that Nixonland is a very good book about an entire country being terrible people in the way that Dunkirk was a very good movie about terrible ways to die.
And as a palette-cleanser, you should absolutely read Invisible Bridge, a book that is much better because the main character is Ronnie Reagan, a man who naturally tells cheerful stories about the world and America and therefore makes the book very cheerful in between the stories of strippers in church.
This is a bit different than what Wikipedia says on the same subject.
>>> Nixon played for the basketball team; he also tried out for football but lacked the size to play. He remained on the team as a substitute and was noted for his enthusiasm. Instead of fraternities and sororities, Whittier had literary societies. Nixon was snubbed by the only one for men, the Franklins; many of the Franklins were from prominent families, but Nixon was not. He responded by helping to found a new society, the Orthogonian Society. In addition to the society, schoolwork, and work at the store, Nixon found time for a large number of extracurricular activities, becoming a champion debater and gaining a reputation as a hard worker.
There's no way I could convince my seventeen year old self that this didn't equated to anything but total social failure.
And that is one of the reasons it's hard to just arbitrarily define yourself as the cool group (unless you're as talented a manipulator as Nixon). Physical attractiveness will always increase social status, all else being equal. If you and your friends aren't physically desirable, you start at a big disadvantage.
Calvin Coolidge is a pretty good example of a President who wasn't very popular as a college student - he couldn't get into a fraternity at Amherst his first few years. However, he probably worked harder than anyone else. He also became a formidable debater, like Nixon. He was consistently underrated throughout his career but proved his skeptics wrong time and time again. A very impressive man.
Nixonland is a good read. Perlstein is a knee-jerk liberal and there's much to disagree with - but it's worth reading.
To me it sounds like the group that Nixon organised at college was less analogous to the lower classes (or the deeply uncool kids) and more analogous to the middle class.
Which, if you believe the sandwich model where the Republicans represent the middle class and the Democrats represent the upper and lower classes, is perfect preparation for his later career.
Do later chapters in the book talk about Nixon’s crushing insecurity and rising paranoia? Nixon sort of changed my life because my high school government teacher told us how Nixon always felt inadequate around all the Harvard and Yale men who surrounded him throughout his political career. Whatever he accomplished at school or after, he worried that everyone he worked with saw him as this sort of bumpkin from Whittier College that they could fool all they wanted. This was supposedly why he started recording everything and his life went all Greek tragedy. As an insecure 15-year-old, I thought “My God, I need to go the most prestigious college I can get into, or I’ll turn into Richard Nixon.” Which is some weird, quasi-irrational reasoning, but it did work in the sense that I got into a top college.
My parents probably think it was all the values they instilled that motivated me to do well and get into a selective school. I’m pretty sure “my teenage daughter is terrified of turning into Richard Nixon” never crossed their minds.
This is about the quote from yourself rather than Nixon. Two anecdotes from my life, from the 90s in Houston:
At my middle school, my grade had fewer than 70 students. That was few enough that we all knew each other. There was certainly a clique of kids who exemplified stereotypical interests of popular/cool kids, were attractive, whose families had money, etc. But since there were several cliques of four or more kids, there was no real hierarchy. No one envied the kids who embodied the stereotypes or treated them deferentially; people didn't want friends who didn't share their interests and were fine with their own friend group. And honestly, with only a few notable exceptions, the "cool" group was pretty normal and friendly and didn't treat anyone outside the group as lesser than them.
However, there was some weird status anxiety and cattiness within that group; it was like they had absorbed ideas from society about how people with their traits should interact, and it only held sway within the group because no one outside the group bought in to anything like that. The other cliques didn't seem to have that sort of in-group anxiety.
Then I went to a high school that had over 3000 students. There was no "cool" group, period. Our sports teams weren't noteworthy so no one got attention for that. We had cheerleaders but if anything they got mildly teased for being cheerleaders; they had no athletic ability to impress anyone, so it just seemed like a sad archaic thing to pad a college application. The exception was a male cheerleader who was a good gymnast; people liked him, but he didn't have any special sway or anything. The few cheerleaders who were well-liked had other achievements going for them and unique personalities.
The smart kids got attention for big achievements, and if anyone was "popular" in terms of being well known and somewhat respected, it was them. But they were just confident self-effacing nerds and didn't consider themselves rockstar cool people, and no one felt like they had to go out of their way to impress them. The only competition amongst them was nothing serious.
There were some individual students who were well-liked for rational reasons, like being funny or creative, and they tended to transcend cliques; it's always the case that people will have their closest friends, but there was lots of intermingling.
There were some kids whose families had money and no one cared. Some of them were even disliked, not out of resentment for their wealth, but just because their personalities had nothing to offer when you can turn around and talk to someone interesting or talented.
Both these schools were "magnet" schools, so you had to earn a spot at the schools. The high school had some portion who were zoned there, but the zoning area was so large that it included genuinely poor people who received government assistance and free lunch and all that, then all levels of middle class, and rich people. And literally every race or ethnic background was represented, with tons of multiracial people as well, so that didn't factor in either. The cliques themselves were often diverse both racially and economically. In short, all sorts of people were represented; there wasn't any geographically cloistered group of families paranoid of appearances or keeping up with anyone else, so no neurotic hierarchy could take hold.
Weird hierarchies really do require a lot of people to buy into them. When you have a bunch of people with wildly different backgrounds and ideas about what's valuable, nothing sticks and people sort into varied and fluid groups.
As an adult, I just find it wild that anyone socially values those from the "upper class" who haven't actually accomplished anything. On the other hand, I completely understand valuing new money folks who have impressive talents and achievements and vision, because they can have personalities that can be worth experiencing and interacting with. But it absolutely blows my mind that anyone cares about impressing the hereditary upper class or emulating anything about them. They're literally just some people with money and stunted psychology who exist somewhere else; the ones who are more than that find their way to other social circles. All the "upper class" as described by that book have to offer is opulence, and you can get that from people who aren't weird and boring.
The very idea that any new money people think about the "upper class" as anything other than nobodies (outside of contexts where they'll fund one's projects, anyway) is something I struggle to understand as a middle class person who has had more wealthy friends (new money). I worked in politics for a time and encountered upper class people. People who earn their money are, on the whole, more dynamic people than those who don't. If I accomplished something that earned me a few million dollars and knew plenty of other people who had done the same, the last thing I would want to do is tone myself down to hang out with bland, directionless weirdos. Even when I had to interact with them in politics, I never yearned for their approval in any personal sense. I never daydreamed about hanging out with them, much less *being* one of them and acting like them. I've had fleeting interactions with cashiers who were more inspiring.
I really thought the only people who considered the "upper class" cool nowadays were the upper class itself. There are certainly some people who are drawn to the affect and emptiness, but I imagine they're on the decline as more exciting ways to be wealthy are visible. It's not exciting to care about rhododendrons, it's tiresome! If the status-insecure amongst the new money want to quit buying into the warped and ossified world of the upper class and consider themselves the cool people, then that will be that. In all likelihood they'd just be catching up with everyone else.
About cool and uncool kids - maybe it is driven by attractiveness to opposite sex ? However, I was not really attracted to predators in my classrooms, so not sure.
I'm aware it's a little irrational, but I feel kind of baited by clicking on an ACX post and then it's essentially a guest post. I do read and enjoy the "highlights from the comments" posts and I suppose this is a special case of one of those. Perhaps I'm just annoyed that the title didn't contain any clues.
Thanks for another interesting read. The irony of social change is that the dominant group tightens up as soon as they gain power, next, it excludes an ever expanding circle of 'outcasts' and thus foments a future rebellion. 1950's America was the incubation chamber for the 1960's
Wow, such a super uncoolness that it sort of becomes a cool thing. Reminds me about "Derangement Syndrome", which was TDS under Trump, but BDS under Bush, when Krauhammer coined it. But there was Reagan Derangement Syndrome under Ronnie, and now I claim there was Nixon Derangement Syndrome under Tricky Dick.
I call it Democrat Derangement Syndrome, and I'm sure the Dems will include near hysterical hate against whichever Rep is the next Rep Pres. candidate - there's already targeting against some. Perhaps especially Cruz.
The cool kids almost always hate any uncool outsiders acting cool or even equal to cool. See old 1979 movie Breaking Away. Great little side story of Italian bikers cheating to stop the uncool talent from winning. Also he does go on to college - still the JD Vance path away from uncool small town adult life. (Nothing but the dead and dying in My Little Town).
I am surprised no has mentioned this before, but the idea that the uncool people can unite to restructure what is considered valuable is essentially idea that Nietzsche had about slave revolt in morality and the origin of modern Christian values, i.e., about the origin of good/evil vs. the earlier good/bad concepts. Whatever one thinks of the plausibility of this story, the resonance with the ideas discussed here should be clear. Let me quote at length from the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Nietzsche:
"[According to Nietzsche] [p]eople who suffered from oppression at the hands of the noble, excellent, (but uninhibited) people valorized by good/bad morality—and who were denied any effective recourse against them by relative powerlessness—developed a persistent, corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies, which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. That emotion motivated the development of the new moral concept <evil>, purpose-designed for the moralistic condemnation of those enemies. (How conscious or unconscious—how “strategic” or not—this process is supposed to have been is one matter of scholarly controversy.) Afterward, via negation of the concept of evil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruistic concern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions. Moralistic condemnation using these new values does little by itself to satisfy the motivating desire for revenge, but if the new way of thinking could spread, gaining more adherents and eventually influencing the evaluations even of the nobility, then the revenge might be impressive—indeed, “the most spiritual” form of revenge (GM I, 7; see also GM I, 10–11). For in that case, the revolt would accomplish a “radical revaluation” (GM I, 7) that would corrupt the very values that gave the noble way of life its character and made it seem admirable in the first place.
"For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort to poison the happiness of the fortunate (GM III, 14), instead of a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern for others. This can seem hard to accept, both as an account of how the valuation of altruistic concern originated and even more as a psychological explanation of the basis of altruism in modern moral subjects, who are far removed from the social conditions that figure in Nietzsche’s story. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands of evidence sufficient to give pause to an open minded reader. In the Christian context, he points to the surprising prevalence of what one might call the “brimstone, hellfire, and damnation diatribe” in Christian letters and sermons: Nietzsche cites at length a striking example from Tertullian (GM I, 15), but that example is the tip of a very large iceberg, and it is a troubling puzzle what this genre of “vengeful outbursts” (GM I, 16) is even doing within (what is supposed to be) a religion of love and forgiveness. Second, Nietzsche observes with confidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralistic condemnation itself, whether arising in serious criminal or public matters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itself from any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into a free-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some (real or imagined) perpetrator. The spirit of such condemnations is disturbingly often more in line with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of altruism than it is with our conventional (but possibly self-satisfied) moral self-understanding.
"The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants of a noble morality might be at all moved by such condemnations, generating a question about how the moral revaluation could have succeeded. Nothing internal to the nobles’ value system gives them any grounds for general altruistic concern or any reason to pay heed to the complaints of those whom they have already dismissed as contemptible. The Second Treatise, about guilt and bad conscience, offers some materials toward an answer to this puzzle.
"Nietzsche begins from the insight that guilt bears a close conceptual connection to the notion of debt. Just as a debtor’s failure to repay gives the creditor the right to seek alternative compensation (whether via some remedy spelled out in a contract, or less formally, through general social or legal sanctions), so a guilty party owes the victim some form of response to the violation, which serves as a kind of compensation for whatever harm was suffered. Nietzsche’s conjectural history of the “moralized” (GM II, 21) notion of guilt suggests that it developed through a transfer of this structure—which pairs each loss to some (punishment-involving) compensation—from the domain of material debt to a wider class of actions that violate some socially accepted norm. The really important conceptual transformation, however, is not the transfer itself, but an accompanying purification and internalization of the feeling of indebtedness, which connect the demand for compensation to a source of wrongful action that is supposed to be entirely within the agent’s control, and thereby attach a negative assessment to the guilty person’s basic sense of personal worth."
This more or less happened in my high school. But rather than ending in enmity, the two cool-pretender groups (roughly the jock/socialite axis and the clown/academic axis) decided that they actually found each other entertaining and could reach new level of hijinks by joining in common cause.
The modern diversity & inclusion movement could also be seen through this lens--as an attempt to make previously uncool characteristics (being gay, female, nonwhite, etc.) into cool characteristics.
> 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?
It seems conceivable to me that they don't do it because it doesn't actually work, and it doesn't work because there _really is_ something different about the "cool" kids, and efforts to undermine that are resisted by a mechanism that just isn't obvious. One straight-forward version of this is something like physical attractiveness. You can imagine the majority declaring "No, we're the hot ones", but it's always going to be an uphill battle if the "cool" kids are just hotter than most people. Maybe there are other, less straight-forward versions of this lurking below the surface?
The Nixon example notwithstanding, I think that this 'uncool kids reframing themselves as cool' scenario rarely happens because the 'uncool group' cannot credibly maintain their newly-proclaimed cool posture.
The average member in that group would probably defect to the 'cool group' if given the chance, revealing that the original cool-uncool division is still in play despite the supposed rebranding.
Of course, this requires the 'cool group' to offer at least a remotely plausible sounding way of admission for current members of the 'uncool group'.
OK, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the cool and the uncool, as you did. In my observation, the cool kids were obviously the largest coherent group. Sure there were more of the rest, but they were in lots of smaller groups that had no interest in each other.
The group I ran about in, the unobjectionable, unnoticed, non-controversial kids were the closest next larger group, but there was no chance of them ever seeing themselves as truly cool. They didn't drink or party enough.
They didn't have nearly as attractive people. They weren't great with clothes.
I'm just surprised you didn't see it as i did. I suppose it might have been different at your school, but I sort of have a feeling it wasn't: it was just a numbers game.
A caveat: I think a lot of people think of the cool kids as "the very coolest." This is crucially wrong. There's a couple more levels below them that, while much less elite, still get invited to all the parties. they play crucial buffer role with the lumpen and provide a sort of phalanx of social capital that enables the very cool to hold sway.
But yeah to me this was always the irony: the supposed "elite" were just the largest group in which group loyalty remained coherent.
I realize I'm late to the party here, but I did this in high school (and, less explicitly, in university). It was great, there was literally no downside. I did it through a non-judgmental open-door policy and active listening.
In conclusion, the poor should just eat the rich (and I say this as someone who is currently in the top 1%, albeit coming from the bottom quartile).
You can read them in any way you like, but I would still recommend starting off with Before the Storm. Mostly because reviews of Nixonland from more conservative people really dislike that Perlstein obviously thinks Nixon was a pos, but if you read Before the Storm he kind of likes Goldwater, and thinks LBJ was a fraud, and in The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland it's clear he dislikes Carter. He also thinks Reagan is terrible though.
I read them all during quarantaine and recommend them totally.
My wife is from India, and she mentioned that high-caste people can be kicked out of Hinduism if a Dalit (untouchable) touches them or prepares their food. A similar question might be why don't Dalit's organize en masse in a conspiracy to touch and degrade every high caste person in India?
Reminds me of the character Widmerpool in Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time"
I'll 100% admit to neither reading Nixonland nor being an expert in 60s/70s American politics, but I think Nixon's wizardry might be a bit overstated?
The RFK assassination + the New Deal coalition collapsing in the face of civil rights for brown people + George Wallace probably did as much for Nixon in 68 as he did for himself.
If anyone here knows that I'm wrong about this please let me know!
I am not sure what to make of this. It seems to entail a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation. I shudder to think of anyone seeing Nixon's application of his insights as being in any way laudable.
This insight seems obvious to me.
"Cool kids" who are exclusive are by definition extremely vulnerable to displacement, because they make a lot of enemies. Popularity by definition requires you to be popular.
Frankly, I've never understood the stereotypical cool kid dynamic. At my high school, there wasn't really a clade of cool kids. The geeky people were often the most popular and would win popularity contests because they were nice and affable. Trying to be cool would have been... well, not cool. One of the more popular students made a weird comedy movie.
It has always seemed to me like the idea of "cool kids" who were jerks doesn't make a lot of sense, and sometimes I wonder if it is because a lot of those stories were written by people who didn't really understand social dynamics very well. Overwhelmingly, popular people I've known personally were friendly and affable, because that's how you make a lot of friends.
FWIW, I can't recommend Nixonland highly enough. If you like audiobooks, the reading by Stephen Thorne is excellent. I have listened to all 36 hours multiple times, I bought the physical book to follow along and read the references, and my Word file of notes on it is 20 pages long. It created in me an abiding fascination with both the period and, as Perlstein puts it, "the strange, tortured man" at the book's center.
Nixonland is a terrific book. As someone who moved to the US as an adult with only basic knowledge of the Nixon era it really opened up that period of US history. Only downside, it's very long and almost too detailed to sustain interest through 400-or-so pages for all but the nerdiest of political junkies.
On a related {resident, Lyndon Johnson was really unpopular among most of his peers during his life, but he sucked up to people who had a lot of power, and liked him. He was a notorious liar, whose nickname was "Bull" in college for being a bullshitter. But he sucked up to the Dean, and got the privilege of managing campus jobs. In the 1920's Texas, having a campus job could be the difference between being able to stay in college or drop out for work. He started giving jobs to people who sucked up to him, and took them away from anyone who crossed him. He also manipulated campus elections: he formed a conspiracy called the "black stars" to oppose the cool students known as "white stars". He never put himself forward as a candidate, but convinced people to vote tactically, and stuffed the ballot box to overcome the white star's popularity.
This pattern would continue throughout his personal and political life: political peers hated him, but he was well-loved by powerful mentors in the senate. He would do absolutely anything to win an election, including cheating. And once he gained power from these men, he used it ruthlessly against his cooler peers.
I got this mostly from The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
The description of Nixon "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" doesn't sound like the actions of a socially inept or introverted person. It sounds like the actions of someone who was very good at organizing and cheerleading people. It's important not to conflate social status and actual social skills.
I wonder if a similar strategy would work in other environments. For example, academic fields often have a set of "cool kids" that everybody is trying to impress and a huge "silent majority" that perhaps is not entirely happy with that arrangement.
I attempted and deleted an answer involving an analogy to the purchasing power of fiat currency, but that just complicated things more. The reason why this hypothetical about uncool kids unionizing doesn't work is because "cool" isn't actually all that subjective: what makes a person socially desirable is objectively observable, which makes sense since most of the traits in question are connected to hardwiring from our social ape background. In other words, what makes a chimpanzee "cool" to other chimps and what makes a human "cool" to other humans is incredibly similar, big picture.
So in the "uncool kids union" hypothetical, sure, it'll work, until the objective desirability of being socially close to some people rather than others begins to assert itself. In my last comment, I observed that one of the first and most major break points is going to be "whither the hot chicks". If the cool and uncool kids each host a party on Friday night, and all of the girls who make a straight boy's heart go "bang bang bang" show up to the cool kids' party, the uncool union is going to bust right on the spot.
But it's not the only break point. The cool kids, in general, are cool because they've got better dress sense, better physical hygiene, because they're more witty and are better at carrying a conversation, because they're wealthier, in better shape, etc. If they're not *much* cooler in terms of that sort of trait, sure, you'll get a pretty horizontal structure with lots of little groups in parity. If there are significant differences, though, than the uncool kids with the most opportunity to change their status, i.e. the ones who only need to fix a couple things, are going to break from the uncool union hard. Sort of like pressurization of various chambers affecting movement between them, but there I go metaphorizing again.
The book sounded interesting when it came out, but I remember seeing an interview with the author where he was really petulant, smug, and condescending, and it made me want to not read it or anything else he might write.
In Nixonland, the author described Planet of the Apes as "when the blacks take over". At which point I quit reading the book.
Son: What is a traitor?
Lady Macduff: Why, one that swears and lies.
Son: And be all traitors that do so?
Lady Macduff: Everyone that does so is a traitor, and must be hanged.
Son: Who must hang them?
Lady Macduff Why, the honest men.
Son: Then the liars and swearers are fools; for there are liars and swearers enow to beat the honest men, and hang up them.
My father's view was that, of the presidents and candidates he had known, Nixon had the highest IQ. My interpretation of him was that he was not, like Trump, Obama, or Reagan, a natural demagogue, so had to use intelligence to make up for a lack of natural talent.
Richard Nixon... Nerd icon?
I don't think the uncool kids can redefine cool any more than chimpanzees can just redefine their social position. It's about the web of social relationship between every individual. You could form two coalitions, but if you could do that, you would have just risen in the existing one. Uncool kids have few, or poorer, relationships. If they didn't, they wouldn't be "uncool". They might be deemed smart, or a nerd, but uncool is specifically about social capital, and it often correlates with how well rounded your (social, physical, mental) skills are. My prom king was nerdy, but also athletic and charming. Cool kids are usually cool because they're good or decent at everything, rather than experts at a few things, which means they fit in everywhere, which means they have lots of friends, which makes them cool.
A few words on high school dynamics.
One way things sometimes work out is that, when someone is being bullied, the absolute most popular students are among the least likely to be doing the bullying. They're secure in their position, so they can be nice to anyone they want without worrying much about how it looks. It's the people in the middle with insecure social positions that strike at people below them in an effort to keep from becoming a target themselves.
So why don't the uncool people team up and overthrow the cool kids? Sometimes, it's because the "cool" kids stay that way by being nice people that people actually like instead of resent.
I'm going to officially state on the record that Nixonland is a very good book about an entire country being terrible people in the way that Dunkirk was a very good movie about terrible ways to die.
And as a palette-cleanser, you should absolutely read Invisible Bridge, a book that is much better because the main character is Ronnie Reagan, a man who naturally tells cheerful stories about the world and America and therefore makes the book very cheerful in between the stories of strippers in church.
This is a bit different than what Wikipedia says on the same subject.
>>> Nixon played for the basketball team; he also tried out for football but lacked the size to play. He remained on the team as a substitute and was noted for his enthusiasm. Instead of fraternities and sororities, Whittier had literary societies. Nixon was snubbed by the only one for men, the Franklins; many of the Franklins were from prominent families, but Nixon was not. He responded by helping to found a new society, the Orthogonian Society. In addition to the society, schoolwork, and work at the store, Nixon found time for a large number of extracurricular activities, becoming a champion debater and gaining a reputation as a hard worker.
I can't speak to the truth of either.
So Nixon was already a decent piano player before Uriel's intervention?
"who couldn't even win a girlfriend"
There's no way I could convince my seventeen year old self that this didn't equated to anything but total social failure.
And that is one of the reasons it's hard to just arbitrarily define yourself as the cool group (unless you're as talented a manipulator as Nixon). Physical attractiveness will always increase social status, all else being equal. If you and your friends aren't physically desirable, you start at a big disadvantage.
Calvin Coolidge is a pretty good example of a President who wasn't very popular as a college student - he couldn't get into a fraternity at Amherst his first few years. However, he probably worked harder than anyone else. He also became a formidable debater, like Nixon. He was consistently underrated throughout his career but proved his skeptics wrong time and time again. A very impressive man.
Nixonland is a good read. Perlstein is a knee-jerk liberal and there's much to disagree with - but it's worth reading.
this is described briefly in the old PBS documentary on Nixon, starting at ~12:00 in: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x6rlntv
other three parts:
2) https://dailymotion.com/video/x6t7rk3
3) https://dailymotion.com/video/x6rlnv4
4) https://dailymotion.com/video/x6rq754
Most obvious/reductive point of the comments section - isn’t that kind of what the activist class is doing to the rest of us right now?
You won’t regret it!
(a) If you can, do the whole quartet. There’s so much interesting stuff in all four.
(b) They’re really good as audiobooks. Grab them from Audible, Hoopla, or wherever, and listen while you drive, exercise, and run errands.
To me it sounds like the group that Nixon organised at college was less analogous to the lower classes (or the deeply uncool kids) and more analogous to the middle class.
Which, if you believe the sandwich model where the Republicans represent the middle class and the Democrats represent the upper and lower classes, is perfect preparation for his later career.
Do later chapters in the book talk about Nixon’s crushing insecurity and rising paranoia? Nixon sort of changed my life because my high school government teacher told us how Nixon always felt inadequate around all the Harvard and Yale men who surrounded him throughout his political career. Whatever he accomplished at school or after, he worried that everyone he worked with saw him as this sort of bumpkin from Whittier College that they could fool all they wanted. This was supposedly why he started recording everything and his life went all Greek tragedy. As an insecure 15-year-old, I thought “My God, I need to go the most prestigious college I can get into, or I’ll turn into Richard Nixon.” Which is some weird, quasi-irrational reasoning, but it did work in the sense that I got into a top college.
My parents probably think it was all the values they instilled that motivated me to do well and get into a selective school. I’m pretty sure “my teenage daughter is terrified of turning into Richard Nixon” never crossed their minds.
"Why does Ross, the largest friend, not simply eat the other friends?"
This is about the quote from yourself rather than Nixon. Two anecdotes from my life, from the 90s in Houston:
At my middle school, my grade had fewer than 70 students. That was few enough that we all knew each other. There was certainly a clique of kids who exemplified stereotypical interests of popular/cool kids, were attractive, whose families had money, etc. But since there were several cliques of four or more kids, there was no real hierarchy. No one envied the kids who embodied the stereotypes or treated them deferentially; people didn't want friends who didn't share their interests and were fine with their own friend group. And honestly, with only a few notable exceptions, the "cool" group was pretty normal and friendly and didn't treat anyone outside the group as lesser than them.
However, there was some weird status anxiety and cattiness within that group; it was like they had absorbed ideas from society about how people with their traits should interact, and it only held sway within the group because no one outside the group bought in to anything like that. The other cliques didn't seem to have that sort of in-group anxiety.
Then I went to a high school that had over 3000 students. There was no "cool" group, period. Our sports teams weren't noteworthy so no one got attention for that. We had cheerleaders but if anything they got mildly teased for being cheerleaders; they had no athletic ability to impress anyone, so it just seemed like a sad archaic thing to pad a college application. The exception was a male cheerleader who was a good gymnast; people liked him, but he didn't have any special sway or anything. The few cheerleaders who were well-liked had other achievements going for them and unique personalities.
The smart kids got attention for big achievements, and if anyone was "popular" in terms of being well known and somewhat respected, it was them. But they were just confident self-effacing nerds and didn't consider themselves rockstar cool people, and no one felt like they had to go out of their way to impress them. The only competition amongst them was nothing serious.
There were some individual students who were well-liked for rational reasons, like being funny or creative, and they tended to transcend cliques; it's always the case that people will have their closest friends, but there was lots of intermingling.
There were some kids whose families had money and no one cared. Some of them were even disliked, not out of resentment for their wealth, but just because their personalities had nothing to offer when you can turn around and talk to someone interesting or talented.
Both these schools were "magnet" schools, so you had to earn a spot at the schools. The high school had some portion who were zoned there, but the zoning area was so large that it included genuinely poor people who received government assistance and free lunch and all that, then all levels of middle class, and rich people. And literally every race or ethnic background was represented, with tons of multiracial people as well, so that didn't factor in either. The cliques themselves were often diverse both racially and economically. In short, all sorts of people were represented; there wasn't any geographically cloistered group of families paranoid of appearances or keeping up with anyone else, so no neurotic hierarchy could take hold.
Weird hierarchies really do require a lot of people to buy into them. When you have a bunch of people with wildly different backgrounds and ideas about what's valuable, nothing sticks and people sort into varied and fluid groups.
As an adult, I just find it wild that anyone socially values those from the "upper class" who haven't actually accomplished anything. On the other hand, I completely understand valuing new money folks who have impressive talents and achievements and vision, because they can have personalities that can be worth experiencing and interacting with. But it absolutely blows my mind that anyone cares about impressing the hereditary upper class or emulating anything about them. They're literally just some people with money and stunted psychology who exist somewhere else; the ones who are more than that find their way to other social circles. All the "upper class" as described by that book have to offer is opulence, and you can get that from people who aren't weird and boring.
The very idea that any new money people think about the "upper class" as anything other than nobodies (outside of contexts where they'll fund one's projects, anyway) is something I struggle to understand as a middle class person who has had more wealthy friends (new money). I worked in politics for a time and encountered upper class people. People who earn their money are, on the whole, more dynamic people than those who don't. If I accomplished something that earned me a few million dollars and knew plenty of other people who had done the same, the last thing I would want to do is tone myself down to hang out with bland, directionless weirdos. Even when I had to interact with them in politics, I never yearned for their approval in any personal sense. I never daydreamed about hanging out with them, much less *being* one of them and acting like them. I've had fleeting interactions with cashiers who were more inspiring.
I really thought the only people who considered the "upper class" cool nowadays were the upper class itself. There are certainly some people who are drawn to the affect and emptiness, but I imagine they're on the decline as more exciting ways to be wealthy are visible. It's not exciting to care about rhododendrons, it's tiresome! If the status-insecure amongst the new money want to quit buying into the warped and ossified world of the upper class and consider themselves the cool people, then that will be that. In all likelihood they'd just be catching up with everyone else.
"He told them *orthogonian*—basically, 'at right angles'—meant 'upright,' 'straight shooter.'"
So they were squares, is what you're saying?
About cool and uncool kids - maybe it is driven by attractiveness to opposite sex ? However, I was not really attracted to predators in my classrooms, so not sure.
I'm aware it's a little irrational, but I feel kind of baited by clicking on an ACX post and then it's essentially a guest post. I do read and enjoy the "highlights from the comments" posts and I suppose this is a special case of one of those. Perhaps I'm just annoyed that the title didn't contain any clues.
Thanks for another interesting read. The irony of social change is that the dominant group tightens up as soon as they gain power, next, it excludes an ever expanding circle of 'outcasts' and thus foments a future rebellion. 1950's America was the incubation chamber for the 1960's
Wow, such a super uncoolness that it sort of becomes a cool thing. Reminds me about "Derangement Syndrome", which was TDS under Trump, but BDS under Bush, when Krauhammer coined it. But there was Reagan Derangement Syndrome under Ronnie, and now I claim there was Nixon Derangement Syndrome under Tricky Dick.
I call it Democrat Derangement Syndrome, and I'm sure the Dems will include near hysterical hate against whichever Rep is the next Rep Pres. candidate - there's already targeting against some. Perhaps especially Cruz.
The cool kids almost always hate any uncool outsiders acting cool or even equal to cool. See old 1979 movie Breaking Away. Great little side story of Italian bikers cheating to stop the uncool talent from winning. Also he does go on to college - still the JD Vance path away from uncool small town adult life. (Nothing but the dead and dying in My Little Town).
So in Nixon's time, the 'nerds' were on the football team, just not the stars? Not sure how well that tracks to today.
I am surprised no has mentioned this before, but the idea that the uncool people can unite to restructure what is considered valuable is essentially idea that Nietzsche had about slave revolt in morality and the origin of modern Christian values, i.e., about the origin of good/evil vs. the earlier good/bad concepts. Whatever one thinks of the plausibility of this story, the resonance with the ideas discussed here should be clear. Let me quote at length from the Stanford Encyclopedia article on Nietzsche:
"[According to Nietzsche] [p]eople who suffered from oppression at the hands of the noble, excellent, (but uninhibited) people valorized by good/bad morality—and who were denied any effective recourse against them by relative powerlessness—developed a persistent, corrosive emotional pattern of resentful hatred against their enemies, which Nietzsche calls ressentiment. That emotion motivated the development of the new moral concept <evil>, purpose-designed for the moralistic condemnation of those enemies. (How conscious or unconscious—how “strategic” or not—this process is supposed to have been is one matter of scholarly controversy.) Afterward, via negation of the concept of evil, the new concept of goodness emerges, rooted in altruistic concern of a sort that would inhibit evil actions. Moralistic condemnation using these new values does little by itself to satisfy the motivating desire for revenge, but if the new way of thinking could spread, gaining more adherents and eventually influencing the evaluations even of the nobility, then the revenge might be impressive—indeed, “the most spiritual” form of revenge (GM I, 7; see also GM I, 10–11). For in that case, the revolt would accomplish a “radical revaluation” (GM I, 7) that would corrupt the very values that gave the noble way of life its character and made it seem admirable in the first place.
"For Nietzsche, then, our morality amounts to a vindictive effort to poison the happiness of the fortunate (GM III, 14), instead of a high-minded, dispassionate, and strictly rational concern for others. This can seem hard to accept, both as an account of how the valuation of altruistic concern originated and even more as a psychological explanation of the basis of altruism in modern moral subjects, who are far removed from the social conditions that figure in Nietzsche’s story. That said, Nietzsche offers two strands of evidence sufficient to give pause to an open minded reader. In the Christian context, he points to the surprising prevalence of what one might call the “brimstone, hellfire, and damnation diatribe” in Christian letters and sermons: Nietzsche cites at length a striking example from Tertullian (GM I, 15), but that example is the tip of a very large iceberg, and it is a troubling puzzle what this genre of “vengeful outbursts” (GM I, 16) is even doing within (what is supposed to be) a religion of love and forgiveness. Second, Nietzsche observes with confidence-shaking perspicacity how frequently indignant moralistic condemnation itself, whether arising in serious criminal or public matters or from more private personal interactions, can detach itself from any measured assessment of the wrong and devolve into a free-floating expression of vengeful resentment against some (real or imagined) perpetrator. The spirit of such condemnations is disturbingly often more in line with Nietzsche’s diagnosis of altruism than it is with our conventional (but possibly self-satisfied) moral self-understanding.
"The First Treatise does little, however, to suggest why inhabitants of a noble morality might be at all moved by such condemnations, generating a question about how the moral revaluation could have succeeded. Nothing internal to the nobles’ value system gives them any grounds for general altruistic concern or any reason to pay heed to the complaints of those whom they have already dismissed as contemptible. The Second Treatise, about guilt and bad conscience, offers some materials toward an answer to this puzzle.
"Nietzsche begins from the insight that guilt bears a close conceptual connection to the notion of debt. Just as a debtor’s failure to repay gives the creditor the right to seek alternative compensation (whether via some remedy spelled out in a contract, or less formally, through general social or legal sanctions), so a guilty party owes the victim some form of response to the violation, which serves as a kind of compensation for whatever harm was suffered. Nietzsche’s conjectural history of the “moralized” (GM II, 21) notion of guilt suggests that it developed through a transfer of this structure—which pairs each loss to some (punishment-involving) compensation—from the domain of material debt to a wider class of actions that violate some socially accepted norm. The really important conceptual transformation, however, is not the transfer itself, but an accompanying purification and internalization of the feeling of indebtedness, which connect the demand for compensation to a source of wrongful action that is supposed to be entirely within the agent’s control, and thereby attach a negative assessment to the guilty person’s basic sense of personal worth."
Star Belly Sneetches
https://youtu.be/hzMhmk2sWzU
This more or less happened in my high school. But rather than ending in enmity, the two cool-pretender groups (roughly the jock/socialite axis and the clown/academic axis) decided that they actually found each other entertaining and could reach new level of hijinks by joining in common cause.
The modern diversity & inclusion movement could also be seen through this lens--as an attempt to make previously uncool characteristics (being gay, female, nonwhite, etc.) into cool characteristics.
> 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?
It seems conceivable to me that they don't do it because it doesn't actually work, and it doesn't work because there _really is_ something different about the "cool" kids, and efforts to undermine that are resisted by a mechanism that just isn't obvious. One straight-forward version of this is something like physical attractiveness. You can imagine the majority declaring "No, we're the hot ones", but it's always going to be an uphill battle if the "cool" kids are just hotter than most people. Maybe there are other, less straight-forward versions of this lurking below the surface?
The Nixon example notwithstanding, I think that this 'uncool kids reframing themselves as cool' scenario rarely happens because the 'uncool group' cannot credibly maintain their newly-proclaimed cool posture.
The average member in that group would probably defect to the 'cool group' if given the chance, revealing that the original cool-uncool division is still in play despite the supposed rebranding.
Of course, this requires the 'cool group' to offer at least a remotely plausible sounding way of admission for current members of the 'uncool group'.
Nixonland provides a handy lens to view current divisions in American society. I read it back in 2016, and it colored my perception of the presidential race (I even wrote it up here: https://narrativeleaps.wordpress.com/2016/10/05/nixonland-and-a-hot-take-on-the-vp-debate/).
There's an essay on these parallels from the author of Nixonland himself (https://thebaffler.com/salvos/time-bandits-perlstein)
OK, so I spent a lot of time thinking about the cool and the uncool, as you did. In my observation, the cool kids were obviously the largest coherent group. Sure there were more of the rest, but they were in lots of smaller groups that had no interest in each other.
The group I ran about in, the unobjectionable, unnoticed, non-controversial kids were the closest next larger group, but there was no chance of them ever seeing themselves as truly cool. They didn't drink or party enough.
They didn't have nearly as attractive people. They weren't great with clothes.
I'm just surprised you didn't see it as i did. I suppose it might have been different at your school, but I sort of have a feeling it wasn't: it was just a numbers game.
A caveat: I think a lot of people think of the cool kids as "the very coolest." This is crucially wrong. There's a couple more levels below them that, while much less elite, still get invited to all the parties. they play crucial buffer role with the lumpen and provide a sort of phalanx of social capital that enables the very cool to hold sway.
But yeah to me this was always the irony: the supposed "elite" were just the largest group in which group loyalty remained coherent.
I realize I'm late to the party here, but I did this in high school (and, less explicitly, in university). It was great, there was literally no downside. I did it through a non-judgmental open-door policy and active listening.
In conclusion, the poor should just eat the rich (and I say this as someone who is currently in the top 1%, albeit coming from the bottom quartile).
You can read them in any way you like, but I would still recommend starting off with Before the Storm. Mostly because reviews of Nixonland from more conservative people really dislike that Perlstein obviously thinks Nixon was a pos, but if you read Before the Storm he kind of likes Goldwater, and thinks LBJ was a fraud, and in The Invisible Bridge and Reaganland it's clear he dislikes Carter. He also thinks Reagan is terrible though.
I read them all during quarantaine and recommend them totally.