How ‘woke’ hierarchy created an upper-class underclass

It was an uprising of “retards.” That’s what they called themselves, anyway. When followers of the Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets organized en masse to buy shares of the video-game chain store GameStop, they did so in the self-deprecating spirit of very online weirdos. Since digital downloads had taken over the gaming market, billionaire hedge funders had “shorted” GameStop, meaning they’d bet on its brick-and-mortar model to fail. The company’s sudden windfall caused such panic among the good and the great that the ensuing furor ended in a congressional hearing. Impressive for a bunch of dorks who gleefully referred to themselves in meme-laden pep talks as “apes” and “autists.”

In January 2021 this was a marquee event. It generated breathless headlines in real time, a flurry of documentaries a year later and a minor feature film featuring Pete Davidson the year after that. By now, though, if anything at all about the episode sticks in the memory, it’s those labels. “Ape.” “Autist.” “Retard.” They’re pointedly crass, of course. But more importantly, they contradict one another. Can an “autist” also be a “retard?” The latter is a slur for someone cognitively stunted. He might be charming, but not the sort of person you’d want managing your portfolio: think Pete Davidson. An “autist,” though, is exactly the sort of person you’d want managing your portfolio. As a slang term rather than a professional diagnosis, “autist” means someone who thinks in spreadsheets. He might have trouble making eye contact but he’s not dumb by any stretch. He’s certainly not an “ape” or, worse, Pete Davidson.

Sometimes these terms were applied separately to different coalitions within the GameStop alliance. But just as often they were combined to signal an overall group identity, a kind of collective self-perception (you can even get “retarded autist” T-shirts). These were people who deftly processed reams of complex data in real time, made an end-run around the world’s best-pedigreed analysts and nevertheless portrayed themselves as lumbering brutes eating chicken nuggets in mom’s basement. They thought of themselves as the masses, but they were really kind of elite. And that put them in a very distinct category, one that has steadily gained importance in recent years. Today, a significant number of people with exceptional skills nevertheless feel in some profound sense like unwashed outcasts. In an election year that follows more than a decade of rising populist dissatisfaction, high-skill but low-status rejects are coming to look like a formidable social class.

The GameStop story served as an allegory for a general feeling that our most sought-after posts, and our most celebrated roles, are occupied by impostors and mediocrities. To some extent, this is a perennial American gripe. As de Tocqueville observed, “Democratic institutions awaken and foster a passion for equality which they can never entirely satisfy,” so that even legitimate differences in skill can be a source of grievance. But ultimately Americans can handle meritocratic distinctions if they appear, well, merited. Increasingly, they don’t. The condition is particularly acute in academia. That’s one reason why the public humiliation of Harvard president Claudine Gay early this year drove home the same message as the GameStop case, but with greater force.

The inciting incident for Gay’s resignation was her testimony before Congress following the October 7 attacks against Israel, in which she refused to plainly say that the university’s protections against genocidal rhetoric applied to Jews. But the more telling revelation, from the standpoint of her position as a representative of the ivory tower, was that she had lifted large chunks of other people’s work and air-dropped them into her own papers without attribution. When an authority figure at a once-respected university exposed herself not only as a feckless quisling but a serial plagiarist to boot, it seemed to confirm a generalized impression that positions of high academic rank have become little more than fancy drapery for midwits and frauds. All the more offensive since, as the historian Paul Fussell wrote in 1983’s Class, “In this country, just about all that’s available as a font of honor is the institution of the higher learning.” Combine this with the salary advantages that attach to a college degree, and it starts to look like career advancement is conditioned on submission to people and ideas with no right to claim anyone’s fealty.

The class that philosopher James Burnham called the “managerial elite” has become ever more managerial, and ever less elite. Diversity, equity and inclusion, a set of operating principles whose express raison d’être is to create the illusion that underperformers are overachievers, has ensured that many accolades and advantages do in fact accrue to unimpressive functionaries. That is how you end up with a world in which race huckster Ibram X. Kendi wins a MacArthur “genius” grant, gets appointed to lead an entire Boston University department, then bellyflops when asked to satisfy even the mildest research requirements. The emperor is not just naked; he is ugly, too.

As disgust with courtly decadence boiled over in eighteenth-century France, Edmund Burke conceded that the noblemen of Europe were not without their “mental blotches and running sores,” like the rest of us. But Burke maintained that English peers and royals, at least, still served their countrymen by embodying an elevated sense of the nation’s majestic past. Can the same be said of our modern courtiers, the DEI eminences who command the heights of public honor? Rather the opposite. Our chattering classes are devoted almost as an article of faith to the proposition that “anti-black racism runs in the very DNA of this country,” as journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones put it in her introduction to the feverishly publicized 1619 Project. In 2021, President Biden remarked in a speech that “the soul of this nation” is afflicted by “systemic racism.” When that is what the people in charge think of the country and its origins, upper-class arrogance ceases to be offset by aspirational glamor or Burkean noblesse oblige. All we’re left with is the mental blotches and the running sores.

It doesn’t help that contempt for America’s history and ideals has itself become a marker of class prestige. So argues Rob Henderson, a social psychologist who made his way from dirt-poor origins to the halls of Yale by way of military service rather than affirmative action. Henderson, the upwardly mobile son of a drug-addicted Korean mother, was perplexed to find himself accused of “white privilege” by silver-spoon Ivy Leaguers when he dissented from the prevailing view that racism accounts for all inequity. In his new memoir, Troubled, Henderson argues that this vogue for associating wrong-think with “whiteness” is one of the “luxury beliefs” the well-bred use to demarcate their ranks from the hoi-polloi. Patriotism, religious faith and family values are by their nature gauche — even the terms sound hackneyed and uncouth — because they represent the upper classes’ idea of what the lower classes think. Henderson could trudge all the way up from foster care to the Ivy Leagues. But he would remain an outcast in the halls of power unless he learned to affirm the chic theories that “confer status on the upper class at little cost, while often inflicting costs on the lower classes.”

This is the class divide that now cuts America most deeply. It separates the new gentry — who may or may not be competent or even accomplished, but must display facility with abstruse terms like “cisheterosexism” — from the new masses — whose competence, however exceptional, will not be formally recognized until they speak the language of Human Resources. When what was supposed to be an egalitarian arrangement morphs into an old-fashioned caste system with all the absurdity and self-regard of the ancien régime, but none of its charms, you have the makings of a protracted and embittered social conflict.

Which is what we have been living through. In 2016, when Donald Trump divided families and erstwhile political allies, the subsequent realignment emphasized and hardened long-standing class divisions. This is part of what people mean when they say that Trump is a “populist” leader — that he attracts not just the working classes but also, critically, those aspirants to the upper classes who feel they are not getting the recognition they deserve. In Second Class, a book-length survey of people who feel shut out from American prosperity, Newsweek’s Batya Ungar-Sargon encounters more than a few people who feel keenly that downward social pressure has kept them from realizing their natural gifts. “Cyrus feels cheated out of who he was supposed to be,” Ungar-Sargon writes of one Medicare bureaucrat in Arizona who “would have made a good lawyer.” This kind of counterfactual longing is commonplace in cultures with stark class distinctions: “Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid / Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,” wrote the English poet Thomas Gray, looking out in the eighteenth century over a humble country graveyard.

Americans have never been comfortable accepting the injustice Gray took for granted: that “full many a flower is born to blush unseen / And waste its sweetness on the desert air.” There is no getting rid of this unfairness altogether. But the ranks of our dispossessed have swollen to include more and more people who would naturally make their way to the top, were it not for the arbitrary purity tests and racial dogmas pressing down on them from above. Increasingly, it’s not just obscure farmers or overtaxed truckers who feel cheated out of the respect they’ve earned: it’s also debt-ridden college kids, heterodox tech magnates and blacklisted intellectuals. It’s manual laborers whose wages get depressed by inflation and illegal immigration, but it’s also artists whose projects get passed over to make room for yet another adaptation of The Color Purple. This helps explain why Trump has mobilized young people, blue-collar workers, white evangelicals, law-abiding Hispanics and black business owners, all in unexpected numbers: those are people who feel, in one way or another, despised without cause.

Thomas Jefferson once insisted to John Adams that by rendering the law insensitive to hereditary titles, America could allow its “natural aristocracy” to scale the heights of power and authority. There is always an extent to which this ideal must remain imperfectly realized. Recently, the founding generation’s own time-bound failings have been taken as license to indict their whole project as a sham. Defending a successful motion to have Jefferson’s statue removed from New York’s City Hall, one Democratic assemblywoman referred to him as “a slaveholding pedophile.” Economic Marxism, the kind that sought to organize a revolt of downtrodden workers, failed to carry water in the US for lack of a sufficiently disaffected proletariat. This century, though, new legions of cultural revolutionaries have achieved alarming success by putting their fingers on a national sore spot. The very longing that the founders instilled in us for perfect fairness can be used to shame them for hypocrisy.

But the bitter irony is that in trying to outdo the founders’ virtue, we have created an unnatural aristocracy far more hide-bound and unworthy than the old-world royalty they fled. Our self-styled betters have neither raised us up toward a more perfect meritocracy nor led us triumphantly into a classless paradise. They have simply replaced an imperfect class system with a grotesque and nonsensical one. They promised to cater to throngs of frustrated pariahs; instead, they created more of them, adding to their number daily from the exiles of the natural aristocracy. Whether or not it is desirable that the resulting coalition should once again find itself represented by Donald Trump — a profoundly suboptimal champion — it was inevitable. This presidential contest is shaping up into a face-off between the incompetent elect and the excellent outcasts. It may not be the most exhilarating choice to have to face. But it’s not a particularly difficult one, either.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s May 2024 World edition.