WASP Killers → Cash and Burn → Ski Bumfights

Hey Neighbor. As market volatility ramps going into Trump II, amateur investors will spend more time on their trading apps, watching their net worth fluctuate from one slightly inflated number to another.  The problem? Every financial app rounds up from .5 to the nearest whole number. Yes, this is what kids learn in middle school, but it’s goofball math. If we rounded .5 to the nearest even number, the systemic error would mitigate itself.

But that’s not really what we want. We’d prefer live in a world where 1 + 1.5 = 3. 

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→ Park City has fallen. Lift lines at the 7,300-acre Utah ski area have spiraled out of control with 200 members of Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association on strike to protest $21-an-hour wages. The problem: Skiers mostly have season tickets now, which means they can’t or won’t go elsewhere. Though it’s easy to dismiss the picketers as ski bums, not all ski bums are created equal (or given equal medical training). Reports suggest scab patrollers are way less responsive to skiers in distress. Elite Pass [1] holders may want to stick to the blues. (READ MORE)

→ The Times has a big report out on the rise of old-school “sporting” clubs suggesting that these clubs – with their crests, tis, and tis – are inspired by “Ivy League-coded preppiness” Yes and no. Whatever their founders claim, these places are far more inspired by brands like Sporty & Rich, which has been selling tons of merch for elite, but non-existent institutions like the “New York Health Club,” powerfully demonstrating a hole in the market. Does “Gleneagles Sporting Club” look like the Union Boat Club in Boston? No. It looks like the imagined New York Health Club. The actual Union Boat Club is a splintery shitshow. (READ MORE)

→ The graphs of post-pandemic Rolex resale prices and childcare employment are very, very similar. This definitely means… something?

Upper Middle Research identifies readers with professional expertise and matches them with surveys and focus groups that pay up to $300 an hour (probably during lunch) and keep them abreast of what’s going on in their field.

Eat the rich. Get heartburn.

Last Friday, WaPo political cartoonist Ann Telnaes untenderly tendered her resignation after the opinion section editors nixed a  one-panel depicting Jeff Bezos (her boss’s boss’s boss’s boss’s boss), Tim Cook, Sam Altman, and Bob Iger in a Mickey suit bending the knee to a pedestal-perched Trump. Naturally, the cartoon was instantly everywhere, posted above the breathless comments of naifs shocked, shocked to discover bootlicking is going on in here.

If these reply guys’ surprise that billionaires prefer yachting down the path of least resistance is genuine, someone should sell them a bridge. Tides have not changed. 

In 1938, Edward Digby Balzell was working retail. Balzell, a square-jawed alumnus St. Paul’s Academy and Mainline Philadelphia’s best tennis clubs [2], had dropped out of UPenn after his father drank (and pissed) away his tuition along with the family fortune. He had become an outsider. It was a perspective he retained after his friends – some of whom had even sillier middle names – conspired to get him re-enrolled after graduating Columbia with a Ph.D. in sociology 13 years later.

As it happened, Balzell was an outsider at Columbia as well – albeit for different reasons. In the late 1940s, the sociology department was full of ethnic whites – mostly Jews – who lacked the country club connections to study the American elite. Balzell saw hole in the scholarship and turned himself into a sort of entomologist by putting the WASPs he grew up with under a microscope. He wanted to know the point of all at garden partying, frat pledging, society debuting, and furtive inbreeding. 

It took him 12 years to propose a theory. It took the form of The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America.

Balzell came to believe that the struggle for control of America had become, at its core, a fight between authoritarian aristocrats seeking to maintain national prosperity without addressing interpersonal inequality and egalitarian individualists seeking to create national inequality by prospering individually. Balzell, who felt more at home in Harlem than at Harvard, came to a grudgingly the people that raised hiim. By keeping inappropriately ambitious in their place, the WASP elite protected the woefully bad at putting masses from the cruel excesses of complete free-market meritocracy. 

Balzell summed this up succinctly: “Honor and decency come from the top down.” 

The top in the mid-1950s was the Protestant Establishment, which had been running the show since George Washington’s father’s slaves planted a cherry tree. Balzell freely admitted that many of these folks were bigots, but, rectum-puckering gringos or not, they were effective cultural referees. They had sidelined Charles Tyson Yerkes, Charles Lindbergh, and Charles Coughlin (and that’s just the Chucks), cutting them off from institutions and capital, ostracizing him until he fell into line.

Balzell understood that most self-made men were opportunists – if they weren’t, they wouldn’t be self-made. That didn’t make them bad, but it did mean that they couldn’t be counted upon to check power.

The members of the Harvard Club could.  

“A powerful, wealthy, yet declassed elite may be one of the greatest threats to freedom in modern American society,” Balzell wrote. “At the higher levels of corporate control, perhaps the existence of an upper class is a protection against the dangers of corporate feudalism.”

But by the 1950s the WASP overclass – financially exhausted by the Great Depression and war taxes, culturally exhausted by rigorous self-gratification – was on its way out. The last gasp turned out to be JFK, a Brookline-born, Harvard-educated Irishman so profoundly indoctrinated into WASP culture he survived the Pacific Theater, but not a trip to Dallas. Since he took one for the team, the egalitarian individualists (reaching a sort of apotheosis in Trump) have been both kicking and kissing ass. Rarely have any of them been thrown out of a country club for it.

“Ostracism is class ostracism,” Balzell once remarked. “Mass ostracism is impossible.”

When Chicken Littles express shock that the elite refuse to push back agains the excesses of MAGA-ism, it’s because they have their elites confused. Mickey doesn’t push back. Muffy pushes back. 

Or at least she did. Now that the WASP elite have been displaced by a diverse coalition of highly credentialed, culturally anxious, and morally relativistic dweebs (my people!), there’s no one left to ostracize Jeff Bezos or – better yet – work him over with a tennis racket. There’s just the LinkedIn pity party, which is precisely as inclusive as it is ineffective.

→ The best dressed person at the Golden Globes was Ayo Edibiri, who wore a baggy grey (Loewe, ofc) suit. Hollywood stylists seem to be operating in default mode. Expect more vintage Givenchy.

→ Director Steven Soderbergh has released his annual list of everything he watched in the past year and boy is he on a tennis kick. In addition to watching the Madrid Open, Wimbledon, and the Olympics, Soderbergh watched Break Point, Gods of Tennis, and Top Class Tennis while also readingTennis Lessons By Susannah Dickey and The Winner by Teddy Wayne. An Oceans 14 set at Roland Garros? Yes please. (READ MORE)

→ As part of its ongoing “Flailing Around Helplessly” initiative Starbucks has brought back the Cortado. Cynics will say it’s because it’s basically an unfuckable heated latte that can be sold at higher margins. Realists know it’s because Emma Chamberlain has become a super effective cheerleader for what the Portuguese call a “galao” and the Italians call “we don’t make that.” (READ MORE)

→ Ralph Lauren accepted the Presidential Medal of Freedom this weekend – the first designer to do so – wearing a herringbone jacket. No notes. 

→ The Japanese brand Kapital, which makes those jacquard fleeces favored by “cool bosses” (Editor’s Note: I’m wearing one) sold to LVMH, which is getting cozy with upper middle market brands as the Chinese luxury market going thbbbpt. The statement fleece is back despite having never gone away.

→ A (very anecdotal) Business Insider report looking at the uptick in public complaints about “toxic” workplaces and bosses posted to LinkedIn suggests that employees are now going around HR and speaking directly to their professional communities. But this isn’t just about the general two-faced uselessness of most HR department, it’s about loyalty to communities based in expertise over employers. With white-collar layoffs becoming increasingly common, peer networks are becoming more valuable. Going there first is a bit passive aggressive, sure – real professionals yell [4] – but it’s not illogical. (READ MORE)

→ MBA students at the University of Indiana assigned to present a mock proposal for an exclusive golfing community in Puerto Rico are now suing the very real developers who volunteered to work with them (ostensibly in the spirit of business education) then stole all of their ideas and did the thing. On the one hand, these students definitely deserve an A. On the other hand, they definitely deserve an F. (READ MATT LEVINE COVER THE MOST MATT LEVINE STORY EVER)

→ According to the Journal of Consumer Affairs, there are now 11 cities in the United States where 180K is a middle class income (defined as 125% of the median income). They are not all the ones you might expect.

[2] The dude looked just like Robert Redford in Spy Game, perhaps the best representation of the Preppy Deep State ever committed to film.

[3] This is why people misunderstand or misinterpret Bill Burr. He’s got that Bahstin accent and rough edges so it feels working class, but it’s really the opposite, which is why he can so easily dismantle a wannabe public intellectual like Bill Maher.

[4] Bring back the “scene.” The “scene” was good. No shame in going out in a blaze of “fuck you, fuck you, you’re cool….”