In 1938, Edward Digby Baltzell, a product of Philadelphia’s best tennis clubs, found himself working retail. Baltzell’s alcoholic father, had pissed away the family fortune, turning his son into that rarest of things: a downwardly mobile WASP. After the younger Baltzell’s friends – some of whom sported even sillier middle names – conspired to underwrite his BA and return him to his rightful place on the UPenn campus, he moved to Harlem, got a PhD in psychology, and wrote the most important American book absolutely no one reads.
The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America is an artifact of a very different era. It is not an indictment of privilege, a rant against inequality, or the kind of Jeremiad that secures vegan authors interview slots on All Things Considered. A startling earnest, self-effacing inquiry into the social function of the overserved, overcapitalized Episcopalians Baltzell spent his childhood watching slip out of their khakis to furtively inbreed among the azaleas, the book is an oracular description of an apocalyptic war for status to come.
For Baltzell, America was a territory disputed by two groups: Haughty aristocrats determined to build a rules-based society in service of national prosperity and egalitarian individualists determined to break rules in service of personal prosperity. The first group was politically benevolent but socially selfish – perfectly fine hoarding opportunity and keeping Jews out of their clubs. The second group was socially progressive, but politically selfish – perfectly fine trampling the rights of others in order to find cheap labor.
“A powerful, wealthy, yet declassed elite may be one of the greatest threats to freedom in modern American society,” Baltzell wrote. “Perhaps the existence of an upper class is a protection against the dangers of corporate feudalism.”
For Baltzell, the conflict between noblesse oblige and l'ambition was the fight for the future. He anticipated Silicon Valley’s rightward swing – a heel turn financed by defense contracts – six decades before Zuck tried to rank Harvard’s undergraduate women by hotness. He predicted that Yankee aristocrats would the way of the dodo – a bird so naively certain of its place in the ecosystem it didn’t have the good sense to duck – when DEI still meant the almighty.
After JFK – a Harvard man so indoctrinated into WASP culture he survived the Pacific Theater but not a trip to Dallas – took one for the team, the political center held together by fibrous Yankee institutionalism began fray like a front hall oriental. Strained by the Civil Rights Movement, ripped by the war in Vietnam, and cat-scratched by Second-Wave Feminism, the social fabric quickly followed. Boomer arriving on campus packed auditoriums to grab at loose threads. Norman Mailer railed against corporatization. William F. Buckley purred about the self-made men Gore Vidal hit on in faculty lounges. The marketplace of ideas bustled.
The “Me” Generation comparison shopped, but unlike the scions whose dorm rooms they’d inherited, did not settle on a single overarching ideology. They were essentially agreeable. They agreed to disagree about everything except The Beatles. Rather than becoming centrist protectors of the social order, they embraced fringe figures and moral relativism, adopting an onanistic cosmopolitanism that allowed them to constantly express concern, rarely act on it, and maintain maximum social and professional optionality.
“Advancement in business and the professions, these days, requires a willingness to follow the siren call of opportunity wherever it leads.” wrote social critic Christopher “Kit” Lasch in 1996, bemoaning the decline of “the old-money ethic of civic responsibility.” Where Baltzell pronounced establishment WASP’s terminal, Lasch pronounced their replacements useless. If his work, which describes a generation hungry for money, but peckish for power, could be summarized in two words, those words would be “OK, Boomer.”
Lasch’s contempt for the Boomers endeared him to the political right and, more specifically, to the patrons of the political right, who desperately wanted to flank their economic opposition. Since the outset of World War II business owners had been trying to put down what James Burnham dubbed “The Managerial Revolution.” They believed white-collar college grads were building complexity into their businesses (and the government) solely in order to command higher wages and gain more leverage. Over steakhouse dinners, midcentury moguls grumbled about lawyers writing contracts only other lawyers could interpret and analysts wielding data only other analysts could decode. They realized Lasch’s “limousine liberal” critique of the Boomer “Coastal Elite” would resonate politically with non-coastal, non-elites in a way their plutocratic pouting never would.
They funded the Reagan campaign and The Heritage Foundation, which, in 1993, published “The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators,” a teardown of data related to crime, divorce, teenage suicide, drug use, and fourteen other social indicators that had (according to their formula) worsened since the 1960s. They used the idea of cultural degradation to question the legitimacy of the new elite, which – as irony would have it – consisted predominantly of their employees.
The Culture Wars that followed were ostensibly about social policy, but actually about prestige and labor. By stoking cultural animosities and overstating the differences in politics and lived experience between the upper-middle and lower-middle classes, the donor class – Republican and Democrat alike – were able to herd college grads toward metroplexes, where competition and a higher cost of living undermined their footing in negotiations. White collar wages stagnated, stocks soared, and a culture of desperate credentialism blossomed in the suburbs.
By 2005, admission rates at Harvard had fallen to 9.5% from 31% in 1950, the year “Kit” Lasch moved into a Hollis Hall dorm room with his buddy John Updike. Adderall had replaced weed and cocaine, and the tireless Apple pie-starved children of immigrants had joined forces with a phalanx of over-scheduled, suburban extracurriculaires to humiliate the last of the chinless uppercrust washouts. After they graduated, these brass ringers moved to major cities at unprecedented rates. Most stayed through the Great Recession, accepting lower wages and applications to live in that third bedroom down the hall. Talent pooled. Business benefited. But those benefits accreted to shareholders – mostly the workers Boomer parents – more than to the workers themselves.
A mostly urban community of ostensibly successful, financially anxious, extremely competent, and profoundly resentful junior executives began to show some muscle. They demanded work/life balance, anti-harassment, less overt institutional racism, better snacks, transparency, and social responsibility.
These social media savvy white-collar millennials were far more willing than their parents to use their cultural power. They ascribed to Baltzell’s maxim – “the downfall of every civilization comes, not from the moral corruption of the common man, but rather from the moral complacency of common men in high places” – and used what he described as the most powerful weapon of an elite class: ostracism. During the first Trump administration, education became a better predictor of politics than wealth and the #metoo and DEI movements – fueled by honor roll SJWs – led to the much publicized “cancellation” of prominent public and industry figures. Some went away. Many massed under Burnham’s banner with the anarcho-capitalists happy to have some well-capitalized brothers in arms.
By the early 2020s, politics had been fully subsumed by the battle between cultural elites and corporate feudalists – the precise conflict Baltzell had predicted.
For a while, one side was winning. Then it wasn’t.