The Revolt of the Elites

...nears its apotheosis

Contempt is a positional good.

To understand Joe Biden’s insane speech about his patience growing thin for Americans who won’t do what he says, understand the Uneeda Biscuit boy.

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The antebellum United States was a nation of (in the historian Robert Wiebe’s famous term) “island communities” in which elite status didn’t equal separation. An unusually successful farmer or merchant was embedded in community, surrounded by – and routinely engaged with – other farmers and merchants. Success and status were still usually local. Wealthy people lived in a bigger house among neighbors who lived in smaller houses, and had more of the things that their neighbors had. But the post-Civil War completion of a national railroad system, the Second Industrial Revolution, and the rapid growth of major cities changed the country in extraordinarily significant ways.

As Wiebe described it, the historical pattern begun in the late-nineteenth century was characterized by “the mechanization of production and its distribution; the impersonality of social relations, including large bureaucratic organizations and centralized power; the development of mass communication with increasing uniformity of attitudes; and the secularization of popular thought, accompanied by a greater discipline to the clock and calendar and by a rising faith in scientific solution to human problems.”

Among the most famous changes of the postwar period was the standardization of time zones, eliminating locally established time; until 1883, every community in the country “assumed responsibility for setting its own time by tested methods of solar reading.” In the process the historian Alan Trachtenberg called “the incorporation of America,” a country of community and small social worlds became a nation of giant organizations and institutional standardization.

Fat is the most colorful example. In a brilliant book about the history of American garbage, the historian Susan Strasser describes the postwar change in the way people treated their cooking waste, scraping it into cans and buckets to be stored for, among other things, the local production of soap. In 1857, Strasser writes, the United States had “more than six hundred” local soap factories, fed surplus cooking fat by cartmen who traveled neighborhoods buying from housewives. In a word, Chicago changed soap; national rail lines poured cattle and hogs into a city of slaughterhouses, producing mountains of butchered fat, which fed the creation of giant soap factories and national brands. Procter & Gamble’s Ivory Soap became so clean and pure that “it floats” in 1891, assuring consumers that a product produced hundreds or thousands of miles away was safe to use at home.

In the same decade, the National Biscuit Company – Na/bis/co – began selling a cracker product, Uneeda Biscuit, producing nationally a product that had only been made locally. The Uneeda Biscuit boy became a symbol that made a standardized corporate product, packaged for stable shelf life, feel familiar and comfortable. It was baked six weeks ago in a factory a thousand miles away, stored in a warehouse, and shipped across the country on a train, but it reminds you of home.

With the creation of giant organizations and national brands came the creation of an institutional managerial and technical class; the corporations of the Gilded Age birthed a technocratic managerial elite that became increasingly separate and cosmopolitan, pulled out of local community and elevated to a new and distinct status.

The separation in is how we get to 2021 – the stratification and deracination of self-aware elites. The late Christopher Lasch, a socialist historian with what are now regarded as conservative cultural instincts, spent a long career describing the social history of this newly made American gentry class. The self-consciously created status group of people separated from the common mass of Americans, he wrote, “include not only corporate managers but all those professions that produce and manipulate information – the lifeblood of the global market.” (Robert Reich calls them “symbolic analysts.”)

The key to elite status in the cultural aristocracy that emerged from the Gilded Age, Lasch argued, was that they defined themselves against their unfashionable countrymen: “The new elites are in revolt against ‘Middle America,’ as they imagine it: a nation technologically backward, politically reactionary, repressive in its sexual morality, middlebrow in its tastes, smug and complacent, dull and dowdy. Those who covet membership in the new aristocracy of brains tend to congregate on the coasts, turning their back on the heartland and cultivating ties with the international market in fast-moving money, glamour, fashion, and popular culture. It is a question whether they think of themselves as American at all.”

They are what they signal against. A national elite, assigning itself that status through the performance of cultural signals and social gestures, is what it is not. It’s not Joe the Plumber, that idiot. It’s not the Trumpster cousin-fuckers in their trailer parks in flyover country, driving their stupid pickup trucks and shopping at, God help me, some disgusting Walmart Supercenter over in central Shitsville, can you imagine?

They need this performance; without it, they don’t exist as a group, as an identity. They sink into the common muck. The story about people overdosing on horse paste in rural Oklahoma wasn’t meant as a factual description of an event; it was meant as a cultural product that allowed its consumers to assume a higher social status than rural people in Oklahoma. What the crisis in COVID-19 rhetoric suggests is that positional contempt is subject to inflation: over time, the same quantity of signaled status costs more contempt to maintain.

Inescapably, the rhetoric around COVID-19 is not a discourse that’s meant to convince. Arnold Schwarzenegger ordering the poors to wear their masks in public with the language, “Fuck your freedom” isn’t meant to convince the poors to wear their masks. It’s meant to degrade, to mark people of a lower status with their assigned place and role. It’s meant as an insult, for the sake of the insult – for the sake of showing who can deliver the insult and who has to take it.

This language is metastasizing. It appears daily in newspaper editorials and on social media – and in presidential speeches. It’s the language of social degradation, and it has no public health purpose. It exists to signal status, full stop.

The problem is that a status built on endlessly opening your bowels on the people who share your country and your community eventually leads them to return the favor. A nation socially and culturally structured by the aggressive performance of public contempt is unsustainable.