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 know anime is tangential, but the final season of Attack on Titan depicts this kind of manipulation of an underclass and it's so emotionally impactful.
I think the basic distinction is this: Nixon could understand that very few people were "truly Franklins", and that most people were constantly under the shadow of Franklins (and could consequently become Orthogonians). Hence, the class boundaries were fuzzy.
Here, the class boundaries between upper classes and lower classes are not fuzzy at all. An Indian Nixon cannot necessarily swell the ranks of the lower castes by using some clever maneuvering. Hence, only an all out battle between the pre-defined classes may equalize the playing field somewhat
Also, the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them, they're given the worst of everything: the worst jobs, the worst education, the worst access to government resources. So there you have a totally subjective, arbitrary distinction that eventually manifests as an objective reality regarding coolness: it's really hard to be cool when you're prevented from doing any job that is even remotely cool.
And that's key to maintaining the class distinction, too. An "omega" caste that's given an opportunity to perform work that allows them to accumulate resources and respect eventually results in either repressive violence to "put them back in their place", or results in a forced change to the caste system in place. See e.g. Ashkenazi Jews.
Yes and no. Dalits have reservations, like the US' affirmative action system on steroids, for education and government jobs. Of course, that only benefits a tiny elite of the Dalits, not the overwhelming majority that like most Indians has neither education nor government jobs, but it also breeds resentment from upper-caste folks who considered those perks their exclusive privilege, hence the often violent reaction against them.
"the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them"
Ashkenazi Jews became smart by being forced into certain occupations and marrying among themselves for hundreds of years. No reason to think the same thing hasn't differentiated different castes in India.
I think if you want to claim people are genetically less intelligent, you need direct evidence. The stakes are too high in terms of the effects of the conclusions drawn to rely on a circumstantial case.
I'm pointing out that there's no reason to assume that there's definitively NOT anything genetic that contributes to them being "uncool", without direct evidence.
Anyway, I don't think the stakes of an anonymous internet comment is very high.
This seems backwards. We know that culture, educational opportunities, early childhood nutrition, etc. are incredibly powerful forces. It's impossible to truly control for them.
It seems that the parsimonious explanation is that the factors we know about that are capable of causing the differences cause the differences. The alternative is that the factors we know about and unknown genetic factors cause the differences.
I'm not going to assume genetic factors without some specific evidence.
The stakes of this are not just some internet comment. The stakes are "Do I assume genetic differences account for differences between groups." This includes the groups in my own society. If I believe that poorly performing groups in my own society are genetically inferior, I will act accordingly. That's pretty damn high stakes.
Well, the Ashkenazis were the "beneficiaries" of an unintentional selective breeding program by their European persecutors, but of course most other persecuted minorities like the Romas did not have the cultural traits that allowed them to adapt and thrive despite it.
Indian genetics are very unusual. The Han Chinese are one population of a billion, India is home to hundreds of sub-populations of around 3M each, that have managed to maintain a higher level of endogamy than the Ashkenazis for over a millennium (from the excellent book on human population genetics *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich).
There are certainly some very successful groups like the entrepreneurial Patels but the only one I can think of matching your description is the Parsis (like the founders of Tata & Sons), they are fairly recent immigrants (18th Century IIRC) and not Hinuds but Zoroastrians, so not subject to the caste system (but still practicing endogamy for cultural/religious reasons).
There's doubt about Jewish intelligence truly being high. See Taleb's article about IQ: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39. Another explanation for Jewish success is nepotism. Nepotism would explain why Jewish success is concentrated in certain industries like Hollywood and the media as opposed to, say, engineering. I would say that Anglo-Saxons, Koreans, and a lot of other notably successful groups are also largely successful due to nepotism (not singling Jews out). It's easy to succeed when other people give you preferential treatment.
I'm going to copy and paste my response to another participant, with apologies for not crafting a reply specifically to you:
"I was hesitant to get into the subject, but it's not that I'm ruling out genetics playing a role, it just doesn't strike me as strongly relevant to the anthropological principle I suggested - which is that when a lower-caste group is given a consistent opportunity to accumulate wealth and glory, they're quickly going to cease to be lower caste.
"Genetics" is at best an auxiliary factor with respect to the success of the Western Jewish population. The primary factors are obviously (i) their restriction to providing financial services, combined with strong internal cultural/kinship connections across multiple cities, at a time in human history when international finance became obscenely lucrative, and (ii) a cultural focus on educational achievement, due to aforementioned restrictions to primarily intellectual careers, at a time when educational attainment was swiftly becoming extremely important to success."
How does that explain the massive success of Jewish immigrant kids in intellectual fields in the US? Nobody needed to impose an Irish Quota to keep the Irish from taking all the admissions slots to Harvard.
Are there any identifiable ethnic/religious groups who are more overrepresented than Ashekenazi Jews in, say, Nobel prizes, Fields medals, or chess championships?
One, that'd get you killed in short order in the rural hinterlands of the country.
Two, it's illegal - harassment bordering on assault - under any sane legal code, including the Indian one, and would be treated as such - in the cities, you'd be arrested.
Three, few people believe in such pollution that literally, and for those who do, there are purification rites you can perform to get cleanse yourself of any such pollution.
In practice, being nonconsensually touched by people of all castes is already a reality of life in urban India - trains, buses, public transport, civic life, etc etc etc - simply because of space constraints, the same way it is on a crowded subway train.
I assume that this sort of ritual contamination is therefore only active in certain social situations where purity is at stake? At a guess politics and marriage?
Well, for me personally, it's practically never at stake except some ritual situations, such as bathing after a haircut or a funeral, or before any kind of puja, for traditional and cultivatory reasons. I subscribe to *modern* theories of purity and impurity, dammit, with little creepy crawlies and their transmission being the causally relevant factor!
Marriage-wise, for most (urban) people who still care, it's not a matter of purity but more so of community, compatibility, tradition, and identity - castes are, well, *actually* diverse, you see, not the fake diversity of 'clothes, food, and a few days of ethnic stuff, but nothing that *really actually* matters' which diversity has been reduced to in most industrial and post-industrial societies. (I exaggerate, of course, but only somewhat. This deracinated class exists in India as well, don't get me wrong, yet history lives in a far more visceral way than in many other places I've seen.)
Note that two people from different castes in India, whose castes have been living together for the last 1000 years as neighbours but not intermarrying, are *more* genetically distinct - and have been for a thousand years - than a Sicilian and a Swede. And there are *thousands* of groups like this. Endogamy has been well-nigh absolute in the subcontinent for a millennium and a half or so. (Had the genetic analyses not shown these results to be the case, they would have been believed to be impossible, so strong is the sociological prior that people living as neighbours will, at least like *once in a hundred years*, fuck.)
Probably because 'can' is very much the operative word in that sentence - my guess is that in practice, no high-caste person is kicked out for such an occurrence unless they've already got other high-caste enemies calling for their ouster.
Because whatever actions hurt those who (have political power/are high class/the socially privileged) is viewed as an assault and punished accordingly. This is true even if it is voluntary.
Look at what triggered lynchings and white race riots in the US. Look at how unwanted suitors of high class ladies were treated in the past. Look at how authority figures (from teachers to parents to cops) treat being ignored. For a comic example, look at how certain types of customers respond to minor failings at customer service.
If the Brahmin loses their caste because of something the Dalit did, what is the Dalit going to lose?
"Hey remember the time you've beaten the living shit out of that Dalit guy for *almost* touching you? Yeah yeah sure he didn't, everyone seen that! But he was so close right?"
(Yes you can beat the living shit out of someone without touching them, using a stick or other people or booted feet. I'm sure there's some exception allowing to dole put corporal punishment to the lowest cast)
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!
That might explain why Nixon won in '68 instead of Humphrey. But just becoming a major party presidential candidate in the first place is a pretty impressive achievement that most people never accomplish in their lives, even among politicians who would like to. So presumably Nixon had some degree of talent to get there in the first place.
People keep forgetting that Nixon was Eisenhower's VP. Being second in line for one of the most beloved Generals and Presidents in American history is more than enough to explain his initial success.
He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken.
"He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken."
Um .... I'd score this as 8+ years rather than exactly 8. The I'd ask how many opportunities there have been. The exceptions I can think of are:
*)1904: Roosevelt follows his own 1st full term and McKinley
*)1908: Taft follows Roosevelt
*)1928: Hoover follows Coolidge
*)1940: Roosevelt (the other one) follows 8 years of himself
*)1944: Roosevelt again
*)1948: Truman
*) 1988: Bush follows Reagan
More than eight years of the same party seems to have gotten rarer, but the "natural tendency" seems to be recent and was frequently broken in the past.
To put it another way, by my count out of 14 total elections in the 20th Century where one party had held the presidency for 8 years or more, they held it in 7 of them- exactly half. It seems to me that the tendency to switch is more reversion to the mean than any specific desire from voters to switch things up.
From Eisenhower /onwards/ there have been 8 elections where one party had held the presidency for eight or more years - 1960, 1968, 1976,1988,1992,2000,2008,2016 - and the presidency changed parties in 7 of those 8.
By contrast, since 1896 years there have been 14 elections where one party had held the presidency for just 4 years - 1900,1916, 1924, 1936, 1964,1972,1980, 1984, 1996, 2004,2012,2020 - and the incumbent party won all but 2 of them.
Now, obviously, I'm slightly data-hacking by choosing my start points to get the strongest possible effects - if you look back further, one party holding the presidency for longer becomes much more common, and four-year holds slightly but not much more so.
But I think the effect sizes I'm able to find by doing so are strong enough that I'd bet on a theory close to "in the post-war high-media-scrutiny era having held the presidency for eight years causally puts you at a disadvantage, and having taken power from the other party four years ago is strongly correlated with, and possibly causal of, winning again" remaining true for the next few elections - in essence, some kind of hidden Markov model.
The one place I'd put a big question mark is the very next election - what happens immediately after two consecutive changes is harder to predict, because it's happened so rarely in the last 120 years.
This is where the numbered "party systems" that US political scientists talk about come in:
1861-1913: the Republicans always win and dominate US politics; the only exceptions are Johnson, (Lincoln's VP who never won an election) and Cleveland (who was a "Democrat In Name Only" and won non-consecutive terms because of defecting Republicans). Weirdly, almost all the Republicans are from Ohio (the ones that aren't tend to have ben VPs.
Wilson wins when the Republicans split in 1912, then gets another term. After him, everything goes back to the way it was before him until 1932.
1933-1968: All Democrats other than Eisenhower, who was a moderate New Deal Republican who won with Democrat support (not quite Cleveland in reverse, but not that far off. The Democrats then implode after LBJ.
1969-1992: All Republicans, other than Carter who sneaks in for a term when the Republicans implode after Watergate. Republicans win two 49-state landslides in this time
1993 onwards: Goes back and forth, generally every two terms, although it's only four presidents so this may just be a fluke in a narrow electoral environment.
Are we supposing he wandered into that smoke filled room by accident looking for the men's room? One way or another getting nominated for president requires some kind of talent.
Nixon had only just become a Senator (1950) when Republican leaders pushed him on Eisenhower. He won his Senate race by, essentially, accusing his opponent of being a Communist.
And why did those leaders choose him out of dozens of Republican senators, not to mention however many other candidates like governors and so on?
I suppose it's not impossible that Nixon's entire career was purely due to a long series of unrelated lucky breaks but my priors say it's much more likely he had some talent of his own.
Oh, make no mistake, I'm not claiming Nixon wasn't a gifted politician. The Checkers Speech, which saved his vice-presidency, shows that without a doubt. I'm just saying that his path to higher office wasn't completely unprecedented.
The mere fact of being elected to the House of Representatives, beating a Democratic incumbent, at the age of 34 is impressive enough. Then just three years later he got elected to Senate, again defeating a Democratic incumbent. Three years after that, he was selected as Vice President.
Now, once you've been a popular President's VP, becoming President isn't all that unlikely. But the run of successes that took him from being an obscure lawyer/Navy officer in 1947 to Vice President of the United States in 1953 is surely a sign that he must have been pretty bloody good at _something_.
I think you might need to factor in the times. The younger generation that had been enlisted men and junior officers in the war had begun to enter middle age, and I think they were a little restless about continuing to follow the leadership of their generals (like Ike) who had been born in the 19th century. Sputnik had been a major shock, and strengthened an impression among this somewhat younger generation that the older generation might be a little out of touch in dealing with the "modern" technological world, full of atomic bombs, missiles, transistor radios. Indeed, JFK exploited this impression to the hilt in the election of 1960 and I think it was a big contributor to why he won.
But that means that being Ike's Vice President was a very mixed blessing for Nixon. On the one hand, yes, he'd spend time in a very successful Administration that was widely admired. On the other...he was vulnerable to the charge of being a fossil himself, and it didn't help that he was kind of the antithesis of youthful "vigah" (you have to say that with a thick Boston accent) in his looks and presentation.
I'd add that VPOTUS was seen as a role where many potential rivals were warehoused away. LBJ, for example, thought being JFK's VP was going to be his own political death.
IDK I see a lot of parallels with Trump (insert corruption joke here). But seriously, both were popular at a time when working class Americans felt slighted (first by the hippies, now by everybody), won popularity by courting a group that other people considered unworthy of cultivation, and crashed and burned in spectacular fashion courtesy of their own hubris. It's really kind of eerie.
And you're forgetting to be properly weirded out by the Roger Stone connection -- the guy with a huge tattoo of Nixon on his back -- the guy who was hanging out with the Capitol insurrectionists. The visionary who forecast America's latest thirst for an authoritarian strongman and who, arguably, carried The Donald to fruition. Turns out he is literally The Penguin of Batman fame, who, with twinkle in eye, discovered a method for alchemizing bruised egos into populist power grabbers willing to subvert the Constitution for the benefit of the pathologically wicked.
The first was ultimately too constrained by vestigial shame or maybe his Quaker roots to go all the way (alas, he choked like a cuck). The second, a stable genius, was no choker of course, but he certainly broke new ground, thanks to his genetic superiority! Fortunately he pardoned Stone, so The Penguin gets another chance at world domination: third time's a charm?
Well...I think the Vietnam War was a bigger issue by 1968, plus the fact that the President (LBJ) took himself out of the running in March of 1968 and threw the Democratic side into some chaos. But I think you need to give credit to Nixon for (1) coming back from his loss in 1960, it isn't often that a losing candidate is given a second bite at the apple by his party, and (2) being able to win despite the mood of the country shifting significantly *left* from 1960 and 1964, so far as anyone could tell.
you could do absolutely terrible in a presidential election, but just to have your name on the ballot at all means you're an extreme outlier in the tiny percentage of people who ever get that far
You may be right about the General Election, but the General Election is almost always close to a coin flip anyway in our two-party system.
I think the real political wizardry is shown in becoming your party's candidate in the first place. That's proving yourself in a field of (dozens? thousands?), as opposed to a field of 2.
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.
Just because it's bleak, doesn't mean it's not true. Among humans (and, indeed, most primates), competitive conquest and status games in general are undeniably more valued than pretty much anything else.
Which is why we spend all our time talking about and monitoring social status. It's a "fish who don't understand what water is" thing. We all live and breathe status competition, and that's exactly what you'd expect of a social ape species.
Whether or not something is "laudable" is a subjective value judgement; it's like saying "chocolate ice cream is delicious". It's interesting to talk about, but it has little to no bearing on making informed decisions. The question is not, "is it nice that status games are valued more than empathy ?", but rather, "given that status games are valued more than empathy, what should I do if I want to be at least as successful as Nixon ?"
It implies stasis. An inability to change. A silent, "... and that is how it will ever be," if you will.
Whether or not something is, in fact, "human nature" tells us nothing about whether we, as individuals, should allow it to be *our* nature. It does not tell us about the best way to make ourselves happy or the best way to build a better world. Understanding what the world is like is important, but it's also important to understand how you'd like the world to be.
Suppose you do understand it, what then? How do you propose to remake the world in your perfect vision? Many throughout history tried, with vastly varying incompatible ideals, but the human nature is still much the same, as far as I can tell.
Of course, unlike human nature, technology does appear to change, so a new kind of utopianism has become available recently. However much Yudkowsky & Co. dislike the phrase "rapture of the nerds", that is essentially the promise of their "friendly AI". Regardless of whether this particular idea has any merit, some application of new technology seems to be best positioned in the medium term to make the biggest impact on the world (and the human nature, including whether this notion would even retain its relevance).
Perhaps, but not "undeniably," as humanity has generally been committed to a long-term cooperative project of mitigating the more destructive aspects of competition with empathy, awareness, choice, and other gifts stemming from our evolved consciousness.
This project gets set back every now and again (and maybe even eventually snuffed out, so we can become a Mad-Max-style libertarian fantasyland?).
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."
This kind of comment, made with a straight face, was seen often lately in golf forums in defense of the notorious pro golf cheat, Patrick Reed, who, like his president, is totally unashamed whenever he's caught; he just calmly claims that what everyone saw with their own eyes never happened.
It's just one tidbit of evidence of how the revenge of the (anti-democratic) Nixon nerds, the classless trumps, and the malevolent Roger Stones, gives permission for those with conquest in their bones to proudly declare their allegiance to their "animal nature" in opposition to the quaint notions of empathy and democracy favored by cucks.
I don't think the long-term cooperative project in question prevents, or even slows, down, status competition *within* the cooperative, and that's because the urge to seek status - to socially compete with our fellow apes - is incredibly hardwired, even in the most informal and equitable of settings. It's not an accident that every time someone attempts a communist-style government, even on a very local level, leaders/politics emerge.
Your comment suggests a hierarchy of intrinsic human drivers, with competition in the category of "inseparable."
But -- unless you are suggesting any and all competition-driven behavior must be excused -- the modern world demands you provide criteria to define what kind of competition-driven behavior is unacceptable. E.g., all the cucks like to pick on poor Patrick Reed just because he very naturally followed his human instinct (to win) (by cheating). Should we ridicule the cucks, or should we ridicule Reed? I'm getting confused.
And then there's poor little Donnie Trump. What are we to make of his insatiable appetite for "winning" (at any cost)? And what about the big ol' basket of deplorables who support him because they recognize his "very good genes" (i.e., eagerness to win at any cost)?
Since you're so tuned into the hardwiring of the human brain, tell us: have we just stretched it too far with our "no cheating" demands? Where exactly should we re-draw the line?
I'm reminded of a passage in Johnathon Heidt's Righteous Mind where he talks about how humans have evolved to both respect and resent authority - we want to elevate and follow leaders, but we also don't like it when they have a lot more than us. I think there's a definite truth to that, these conflicting desires probably explains a lot of left-right conflict (even if that;s more cultural than evolutionary).
I think that it's more that we want authority to be deserved. We want to follow the leader that saves us from harm, but not the leader that fails to protect us well enough or that harms us.
It's only bleak when framed that way. When it's the numberless orcs overwhelming the beleaguered few at the Fords of Isen, then it's a sad testament to the power of mass evil. When it's the honest peasantry storming the Bastille and putting the corrupt noblemen in chains, then it's a heroic tale of the majority reclaiming its heritage, and so forth.
Same thing with the value of empathy and cooperation. When it's Grant allowing Lee to keep his sword, it's the healing power of empathy. When it's Chamberlain understanding the Germans of the Sudetenland really did prefer to be part of the Reich than be ruled by Prague, it's appeasement and cowardice.
Indeed he did. But my point is that just as treason is a matter of dates, whether the fact that the majority usually wins a conflict is tragic or noble depends on our opinion of the winners and losers in the examples that come to mind.
Yes but your macro perspective makes it too easy to ignore the shorter view of America as, arguably, the world's most resilient experiment in democracy. So, unless and until someone (like a trump) succeeds in making the franchise irrelevant, those who want to undermine or overthrow our system simply cannot belong in the same historical bucket, even in theoretical macro terms, as honest peasants trying to overthrow the corrupt. That's why the Big Lie (writ large) is so important to Trump and Stone: the more people who believe the government is illegitimate, the more they can convince themselves they are no different from the revolutionaries who battled King George.
The historical jury is I would say still out in terms of the resilience of the American republic. It has lasted a bit longer than the Dutch Republic, which was I believe rather a model for the Founders, but is still only half the age the Roman Republic achieved. Given the growth in the so-called "Imperial" Presidency over even my lifetime, I am only mildly optimistic it will celebrate its 300th birthday, and somewhat doubtful it will make it to 400 or 500.
Also, I would say "this government is illegitimate/corrupt/evil/in the pay of Bad People" is kind of a staple of American populism, reaching back to early in the 19th century. I'm not really seeing anything new about that thread. What concerns me more is the quiet, steady growth, even *outside* the Sturm und Drang of an election, in the degree to which citizens look to the Federal Government, and even more specifically the President, to solve every quotidian problem. It's that kind of expectation that leads inevitably to single-man rule -- the only remaining debate (and of course it will be fierce) is *which* man.
I realize this is just a comparison of framing devices, but the actual story of the Bastille might surprise you for how poorly it fits its own noble framing device.
The Bastille was a defunct prison, and at the time of storming, it had only seven inmates, several of them mentally ill and arguably in better care than was otherwise available at the time.
In one of the most shockingly frustrating personal incidents in all of history, the governor of the prison, de Launay, surrendered, was beaten badly, then frog marched a mile to the Hotel de Ville. Here, the crowd wanted to kill him, but a group of people defended his right to live. However, de Launay was so angry at this point that he *kicked another man in the balls*, screamed "Enough! Let me die!" and was promptly stabbed to death.
I am not sure what to make of your comment. How did you get to "a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation" from this?
You think Nixon effectively _organizing_ a group of disaffected people to secure for them more power and status (as insignificant as it might ultimately be) to be a bad thing itself? Do you really think that other politicians are different? Are you basing that on what those other politicians say or write?
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that politicians are mostly the people that want political power and thus those that figure out how to secure that power, however it is they do so?
"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.
That’s partially true, but the “mean girls” phenomenon is about entrenching social power through emotional manipulation. A nice, friendly person with desirable social qualities (attractive, athletic, engaging) can make friends, but a cutthroat person with those qualities can gain social dominance by making their rivals into pariahs. Your school might have functioned differently, but high school is often a training ground for young sociopaths learning how to manipulate their images and the social order.
The thing is, in real life, that's actually a terrible strategy outside of politics (and even in politics, it's a dangerous one, which is why people in primaries generally avoid angering their rivals too much - they have to work with them in the future AND that person might win anyway, in which case they're screwed).
You never know what the future holds, and its a big world. Having a lot of positive contacts means that there's a bunch of people who will happily hire you or work with you or shoot you a notice about there being job openings where they work or whatever; having a bunch of negative contacts will result in those not being available.
Doubly so because trying to attack everyone else usually ends up with them all ganging up on you, and if they're actually your peers, you're going to lose.
I think the problem here is the word enemies. Who really has enemies? Rivals maybe, bullies or victims certainly, but people you interact with who are actual enemies?
Mean girl types are bullies with a good social position to defend them, not schemers. Different dynamics than the Franklins Nixon encountered, in that they are using coercion to assert social dominance rather than asserting it through an existing social network. Their social pre-eminence is not entrenched and they have to performatively reassert it regularly. It's a striking example if Foucault's theories of how power is constructed spotted in the wild.
I wonder if there's a difference over time. I know my high school experience was nothing like that, but many older people experienced something similar. I'm tempted to suggest the internet as the cause, but that may be unwise.
The best strategy for the top tier kids is typically to do nice things for the sub top, but to be mean to the bottom tier, which in turn keeps the middle tier in check due to fear. Doing nice things for everyone is high cost and you typically don't need to.
You don't need to do nice things for people, just generally treat people reasonably well.
And really, people don't care about the dysfunctional kids very much to begin with, which means that "controlling via fear" doesn't really work well because they're not seen as part of their group to begin with.
Someone once told me essentially the opposite--that if you're nice to the people one tier below you, you become associated with them and risk being reduced to their tier. Thus, people one tier above you will either pick on you to show dominance or will ostracize you out of self-defense; meanwhile, top kids can afford to be nice to bottom kids because the top kids aren't at any risk of being mistaken for bottom-tier.
The entire model there is a model of fashion, it's not a model of actual human interaction.
Being nice to your subordinates is in fact almost always recommended in leadership. It is dangerous to get overly chummy, though this is more because sometimes you have to tell them to do something unpleasant and they need to understand that they actually need to do it (though if it is dumb, they should warn you beforehand and feel comfortable explaining why you are driving them all off a cliff if you do this thing) and also sometimes you need to fire someone.
Having a group of people who are "yours" is valuable, and setting them up to succeed is to also make them want you to succeed. And given that ranks are often quite close, particularly in the business world, it's possible that someday they might be your peer or above you, or vice-versa (and in fact, you should make especial care to befriend those who have a lot of talent/promise to rise, as those people are the most valuable friends to have down the road).
Indeed, if you look at real world groups, who they tend to exclude most harshly are those who are poor at socialization, because it makes everyone else around them uncomfortable. Excluding those who are bad at socializing and getting along with other people is beneficial to the group, and bringing in bad people reflects poorly on you and your judgement.
People who are bad at socializing aren't able to recognize that they're the problem (per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, their poor social skills also render them incapable of recognizing their own incompetence at it) and believe that people are picking on them for no reason, rather than that they're trying to make them go away because people don't want to be around them.
Indeed, you will often see very socially inept people repeatedly challenge the social order without having the slightest clue what they're doing. That's why the dregs (socialists, fascists, neo-confederates, gang members, ect.) constantly rant about the evil elites - because clearly, the reason why they're on the bottom is because of a conspiracy against them, and not because they're unlikable, incompetent, and antisocial.
I think that being nice to the losers only works with very stable and clear 'classes.' In most situations, ignoring them is the smartest move (little to be gained by interacting with them and much to lose).
@Titanium Dragon: in a not-at-all-contentious spirit, and out of genuine sociological curiosity... would you mind saying what years you went to high school, and in what sort of setting?
Also went to public high school in Oregon, 2001-2005 and can mostly echo what you wrote. Now living in California, I've found that my high school experience was far more inclusive and much less stereotypical than people who went to HS in CA.
When I look at younger people, the ones who tend to be the worst at socializing also seem to have the worst high school experiences. This suggests to me that a lot of what are seen as "typical" power structures by some people are instead a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect - people who are bad at socializing see school as a means of pushing them down, of suppressing them, of exclusive cliques who don't want them as a member, of groups constantly vying for dominance.
The problem is, they don't actually understand what is really going on with the greater student body, so they create this bizarre alternate reality power structure that casts themselves in the role of a struggling picked-upon hero.
In reality, people who are bad at socializing are often excluded because they are uncomfortable to be around, because they are abrasive, because they bore other people and don't understand how to converse "normally", because they're bad at reading the room, or because they are constantly trying to challenge/confront people. They don't see what they're doing as dysfunctional social behavior because they don't understand how to socialize, so they cannot recognize what they're doing wrong.
This also matches what I'd call the "high school pattern" you see in biographical stories - stories told from the point of view of people who were good at socializing in high school don't show these stratified power dynamics, and instead show a totally different sort of "circles of overlapping friends" thing instead, sometimes with some random yappy jerks who are often very much on the periphery.
People who are dysfunctional at socialization are also the most vulnerable to predatory bullying because they are isolated and alone, so they will also tend to disproportionately be targeted by it.
Spot on. I was in student government and was an athlete. I've been told before that "maybe you didn't see rampant bullying because you were high-status". I was like, I dunno, I feel like, through knowing everyone, I had a pretty transparent view into the entire school...
Wonderful. Now you can follow up by explaining to all the Uhgyers in western China how they aren't Really being shipped off to concentration camps for forced labor. They merely failing to see how poor they are at being Chinese due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In my high school, jocks were frequently guilty of sexual assault and violence against unpopular kids. None of them ever suffered for it, the administration preferring to punish minor offenses by people who weren't star athletes.
The only way not to notice was to be stupid or willfully ignorant, and hardly any of the popular kids were stupid.
High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular. I'm the son of a star athlete...football quarterback no less. I was one of those "silent majority" players filling out the team. Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
The popular kids at my school were violent and nasty. Same goes for a lot schools my friends went to.
The younger people I talk to seem to have better school experiences. Although many of those in deprived areas have even worse ones.
I'd definitely be cautious about dismissing a wide range of popular culture and human experience as "written by people who didn't understand social dynamics very well".
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.
I would add that Perlstein's book arguably has an application to the issue of trapped priors and partisan dialogue. I think Perlstein may be saying, with some justice, that right and left talk past each other, not so much because they are blinded by bias, as because each understands the other all too well.
I do think the past few years have flushed out real beliefs (as much as beliefs can be real) past their usual porticos of politeness. And what I've learned is that the core of the Right is genuinely disdainful and dismissive of democracy itself. This is just a fact of life in 2021 -- and if you want to say that that's just my trapped priors talking, I say you are simply gaslighting me.
Since, for now, we have recommitted to democracy, the way to move forward is for the anti-democrats to either admit they'd been on a destructive dopamine binge, or at the very least stop the gaslighting. You're not going to erase the last decade by pretending it didn't happen. If you continue to smirk about owning the libs and blowing things up you are simply not ready to again participate in civil democracy. So if you hate democracy THAT much, then your best choice now is to crawl back under a rock.
JKPaw, I'm wondering why you posted that in response to my comment. Do you see me as a rightist? I'm not! I've been a Dem voter all my life. I do appreciate Perlstein's (relative) evenhandedness though. He's very good at pointing out the flaws on "my" side in its 1965-72 incarnation. (Or perhaps by "you" you mean the impersonal you, not me?)
Yes, no, "you" was not intended to be directed at you, but at the anti-democrats.
I had no critique of your comments, even though I wasn't sure if you were of the sort who believed we're simply dealing with two competing visions for democracy -- and that we just disagree over the details. From my vantagepoint, we're dealing with one side who has demonstrated they are willing to throw democracy, truth, etc completely overboard in their quest for power (and they continue to gaslight us with their snickering denials and diversions). So I bristle at false equivalencies, but was agnostic about whether you were offering such.
I suppose we could place both-sider-ism in a trapped priors bucket, but it's also one of the many dishonorable tactics the Right has latched onto, especially in recent years -- but, admittedly, a pretty effective one, related somewhat to trump's strategy of stinking up the entire house with feces every day so casual voters had no way of knowing where the smell was actually coming from.
Just one example: the Fox echo-chamber specializes in existential -level outrage over anything and everything (like email servers or Benghazi) -- and after month after month and year after year of righteous repetition, casual voters could be excused for thinking the thousands of charges against trump were just more of the same mud-slinging from genetically corrupt, scandalous politicians.
They weren't, and they aren't. It's just a cynical strategy that trump was more than willing to shamelessly take advantage of.
Around that time I read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial" H.S. Thompson. About the '72 election. I can't recall details, but it had a big effect on me.
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.
Not only does it open up that period of US history, it makes a lot of the 90s and 00s make a lot more sense once you know how much of those periods involved not just rehashing the same conflicts he stoked, but involved *the same people* doing the rehashing that had participated in the conflicts in his time (Karl Rove vs John Kerry in 2004 being the outstanding example).
_Before the Storm_ is also amazing. Perlstein gives a genuinely fair-minded assessment of Goldwater despite obviously hating almost everything he stood for. It's remarkable as an examination of the kinds of self-deceiving narratives people tell about themselves and others: Goldwater's supporters and opponents *both* told themselves lies about what sort of person he was and what he supported in order to make themselves feel more righteous. It's also worthwhile as an examination of right-libertarian fusionism, the understandable sentiments that motivated it, and the ways in which it veered off into crankery and craziness.
_The Invisible Bridge_ is good for completists but really too long. I got through it only because it micro-analyzes the period of history just before I was born, and I knew almost nothing about that period before, which I think must be a common problem: after all, when you're growing up that period of history is too long ago to be current events and too recent to be taught in history classes.
I haven't read _Reaganland_ yet but probably will sometime in the next few years.
You're right about Nixonland making sense of decades that followed. The biggest thing I took away from it was how much the current political climate is a resurfacing of age-old grievances. There is a strange comfort knowing we're no more uniquely screwed than our predecessors, and by many measures are doing much better.
Um. We certainly came MUCH closer than we did in 1973 to losing our democracy. I think it's a false comfort to believe that our current political climate is simply cyclical. Like a stock being repeatedly tested at a resistance level, our country may well be poised to finally blow the lid off democracy. The Roger Stones of the world have learned a great deal about manipulating populism, so the next test could very well be the one that succeeds.
I would have said that we came closest to losing our democracy with FDR. He was the first president ever to run for, and win, a third term. If he hadn't died, I could see him becoming a permanent president and gradually establishing the substance of one man rule under the form of democracy. His moves towards packing the Supreme Court failed, but they did apparently intimidate the court sufficiently to get it to reverse its position on the limits of federal power in the context of the farm program. And he put a whole lot of US citizens in concentration camps with no form of trial and no claim that they had done anything wrong.
The current threat to democracy isn't Trump — he is only symptom. As things stand, I can see politics swinging in favor of one side or the other and never being allowed to swing back. It's not as if the other side is viewed as decent people with a reasonable, if somewhat mistaken, point of view — by either left or right.
By definition, there's really only ONE thing that ultimately binds us, politically, and that's American democracy. (We're specifically all playing football, not Calvinball.)
I am furious at the current state of our courts, and especially the Supreme Court -- thanks to Mitch McConnell's dishonorable behavior (for example). But that behavior, as flaggable as it was, did not constitute an actual attempt to sabotage the entire game's existence.
As for your premonition about politics failing to "swing back," you're certainly on to something: sadly for you Rightests, the state of the game is now such that you simply cannot win anymore in current conditions without foul play. Your collective fears of the welfare state, wokeness, baby-killing, whatever, have led you to (flaggable) unholy alliances with racists, voter suppression (flaggable and worse, including the cynical disembowelment of the Voting Rights Act), and of course they've led to a raging nonstop torrent of lies and corruption (flaggable and worse).
All of which leaves us on the precipice of the game's destruction -- because enough of you have decided your goals (like ending baby killing, etc) are simply more vital than any pointy headed devotion to rules and principles by a bunch of loser cucks.
In Nixon's day, Roger Stone was still a radical outlier. Nowadays, his anti-democratic heritage has blossomed into a recharged idea: maybe democracy as we know it is no longer as useful as we used to pretend. The (alternative) idea that the world is changing, and that new voices and perspectives (new players) are naturally rising in agency (along with safety nets that emerge from their experiences), is just too unacceptable for most of you to remain sanguine as such changes are implemented.
That's why y'all who cannot abide such change should either admit you are actively trying dismantle democracy (either directly, or by giving monsters like trump a pass), or just suck it up, play your golf, and wax nostalgic about how football just ain't the same game anymore. What you can't do is pretend you're still playing the game when you're really trying to end it. Those who have nothing left but their gaslighting prowess don't get to "debate" policy in polite company without first renouncing their part in trying to change the Constitution without the votes to do so legally.
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.
You nailed it. If the cool kids are cool only due to the inertia of social status, they're going to be much more vulnerable to an "upset" of the kind Scott proposes. The more that social status is built on/incorporates objectively cool traits, the more secure it is, which is why the upper crust in most societies is usually eager to promote the very best (and richest) of the lower classes into their number.
He sounds like people that I know, and have known in the past. At first they can seem awkward and offputting, but they're so earnest and keen to be nice to you that they can eventually win you over.
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 feel like academic fields are often notable for having disjoint sets of "cool kids" that look down on each other, and are looked up to by different segments of the community.
I think you are absolutely right about this. Does this make it more difficult for the "silent majority" to organize? After all, colleges also have disjoint sets of "cool kids" though they probably lood less down on each other than the case is in academia.
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.
I would suggest, with respect to the Nixon example, that you're looking at a situation where the objective measures of social desirability underlying the dynamics at his college weren't very pronounced. If there's no strong "gradient" of cool (someone with a chemistry background help me out here), then it's easy to rearrange the rankings.
So, this article makes it seem like the cool kids at Nixon's college were cool more or less only due to their wealth. That's a powerful point of "cool" leverage, but it's a long way from the only objective measure of cool. So, if the wealthy kids at Nixon's college didn't have much else going for them, I have no trouble believing he'd be successful creating a new hierarchy of cool based around other traits. It doesn't surprise me in that sense that Nixon made allies of the athletes.
But even if you initially distribute coolness and uncoolness at random, the system could still perpetuate itself, if uncool kids are rewarded by the cool kids for putting down other uncool kids. It's a coordination problem, where they'd all be better off if they worked together to overturn the system, but they won't be able to work together without a politically gifted leader like Nixon.
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.
This disturbed me, so I did a keyword search on Google Books. The only reference I can find to Planet of the Apes is page 238. The exact wording is: "A new movie, Planet of the Apes, imagined what life would be like if whites suddenly found themselves a subject population." This sentence occurs within an extended discussion of the heightened racial tensions of the late 60s, and read in context, the claim does not seem to me racist or inappropriate. It's widely acknowledged by film critics that racial conflict was a theme of the Planet of the Apes series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes#Race
At best, you could censure the author for using the poorly-aged word "Negroes" in the sentence, "[The gang] called themselves the Up Against the Wall Motherf*ckers, after the command supposedly barked by Newark cops to Negroes under custody, transformed into a line of poetry by LeRoi Jones", which occurs in the same paragraph.
Your mistake here is to assume reading in context is required to take offence. Or, if you're right on the text being discussed, the ability to quote from the source text properly...
Well, you make an odd argument, considering both Lady Macduff and cheeky little Son to Macduff got slaughtered very efficiently by the traitors just minutes after his quip!
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 would tend to agree with that, subject to the proviso that Jimmy Carter may also be in that class -- Carter, too, was a very smart man.
Kind of interesting that the two smartest men to hold the office since 1950 or so ended up being among the least liked. Even Democrats don't like Carter very much, and even Republicans aren't very thrilled with Nixon, these days.
"You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy.
How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims “the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times."
"You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression"
Only if you remember FDR the same way, as perhaps you should. Hoover followed essentially the same policy of sharply increasing federal spending while trying to persuade companies not to cut wages, although he didn't have as long to follow it for.
FDR ran and won 1932 as a State's Rights Democrat, fighting the spendy centralizer Hoover. Fired 100k R hacks when he took office in the name of small government.
Then, reversed himself, hired 500k D hacks by 1936 and of course the wild increased spending everyone knows him for.
Well someone has to be responsible for the length of the depression in the US. Most if Europe was out of it by 1932...
Amusing sidenote. A clear marker of US influence on UK politics is people referencing the Great Depression as something that affected the UK in a serious way (the UK devaluedits currencyand pulled out rapidly). It also tends to be a pretty good marker for people whose facts you really want to check...
According to Garry Wills' 'Nixon Agonistes' Nixon's parents always told him they'd help him get anything he wanted as long as they saw him trying. Then he deeply respected Eisenhower, an incredibly cunning administrative solder from the hard school of military politics where if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. Like oysters and whisky, both good on their own, but but Nixon combined them.
"Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 [I.Q.] when he was in Fullerton High School in California. Kennedy biographer Thomas C. Reeves tells us JFK tested at 119 just before entering Choate Academy."
Nixon (b. 1913) and Kennedy (b. 1917) were likely the top political talents of their cohort. JFK had everything except brains -- money, looks, sex appeal, wit -- and Nixon had nothing but brains and work ethic. As it turned out, they were very closely matched in 1960.
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.
My impression from highschool was that, contrary to depictions in pop culture, the popular kids acted nice toward everybody and felt secure in their popularity. Of course, I was an introvert mostly ignoring the rest of the student body, so others with their fingers on the pulse may have noticed things contrary to that image I was unaware of.
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.
A google image search for "Young Richard Nixon" is somewhat enlightening. In the pictures in his football uniform he looks downright handsome, but the pictures that show him in more formal clothing and poses look stiff, awkward, and... well, like a young Richard Nixon.
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.
Perhaps Nixon had what we would nowadays call "Impostor syndrome".
If he had been born eight decades later he'd have lots of encouraging internet articles on "Overcoming impostor syndrome" to fall back on, but he wasn't so he didn't.
That's a theme throughout the book. Both LBJ and Nixon felt intimidated by Ivy League types, both hating them and wanting their approval. Especially important here, of course, were the Kennedys.
That sounds a lot like Camelot apologia, of which there was a ton among historians after Kennedy's death. It's certainly the case that both LBJ and Nixon felt threatened by the rise of the Kennedys, and somewhat bewildered that any of them should be more than a flash in the pan -- and they were certainly irritated by the claim by the Kennedys and their fanbois that they were the smartest guys in the room* -- but neither LBJ nor Nixon were easily intimidated, and I while both hungered after the power that comes from tens of millions of votes, I really can't see either having a secret longing to be approved of by people they considered pretentious whippersnappers who hadn't paid their dues and were a lot less "street" smart.
------------
* And I must say the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy's initiation of the intervention in Vietnam went a good way to demonstrate that they were not. Few Presidents have made as many serious foreign-policy mistakes in their first 3 years. Had Nixon won in 1960 it's hard to see him making any of them.
Nixonland is most definitely not an apology for the Kennedys, or for LBJ, or for Nixon. Perlstein's is more a realistic portrait of his characters and the period in its full complexity, with the contradictions and weaknesses of all sides on full view. Both LBJ and RN had very complex feelings about the Kennedys and the adulation they got from the "Franklins" of society; for Perlstein, the issue isn't who is more deserving of our praise, but trying to understand the psychology of LBJ and RN. Perlstein actually evinces little interest in JFK except in terms of how his successors felt about him.
Thanks for the response. I haven't read the book, so I can't really say much about it, and I appreciate your observations on it. I certainly agree Nixon and LBJ were both complex and driven men but, as I said, I just find it doubtful either was insecure or craved the admiration of the Kennedys. I don't remember LBJ very well, but I do remember Nixon, and it just doesn't fit with what I remember. Of course, I only knew his public personality, so there's that.
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'm pretty certain Bill Clinton was subject to a similar process, albeit one that was disrupted by his wife running for president. Since Jummy Carter is in the senior Bush group of seemingly inconsequential presidents, there's a bit of a lack of data on earlier Democrat presidents to confirm this pattern, but my prediction is that in three years time Fox news will be comparing Obama's presidency positively with Biden's.
I do think you're applying good insight here but that your priors are affecting the way you frame this to the point of partisanship. From an outsider's point of view, both US political coalitions have their fair share of demonstrative idiots as you describe. From a cynical point of view I can't help but wonder if the party that wins is the one that shuts their own idiots down best.
I think this is the key difference between the two. Republicans tend to view the Democrats as a collective group who are all trying to destroy America. Democrats tend to view each individual Republican as a lone extremist trying to establish a fascist dictatorship (I remember at least one op-ed saying that Bush Jr was trying to do just this, with the sort of numbered checklist you used to get about Trump). Obviously they're both being melodramatic about people disagreeing with them, but it's fun to speculate about where the different manifestations come from...
Well, these wild accusations tend to come when each party is attempting to buck up its base, so it makes sense they would appeal to a caricature of the other side: the Republicans would suggest to their wavering loyalists that the Democrats are pretty much Communists, mindless collectivists who if they could would dispense with any shred of individual liberty. Democrats would suggest to their wavering loyalists that the Republicans are pretty much the party of Pinochet, and long for single-man dictatorship, and if they could would dispense with democracy entirely.
The caricatured end points goes right back to the founding of each party: Andy Jackson was nothing if not a raging populist and held profound disdain for money and title. The Party of Lincoln was founded on the rather anti-democratic principle that certain things (e.g. slavery) were Right or Wrong regardless of how many people might vote for or against them.
Reagan had the Iran-Contra Scandal. Bush Jr. had people tortured. Trump committed a long litany of crimes, from fraud, to tax fraud, to obstruction of justice, to misappropriation of federal funds.
Bush Sr. had far less of this because his administration was just far less "scandalous", and consequently, you left him off your list of people that the Democrats were "deranged" about.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Republicans are just really corrupt, and that the Democrats are outraged over that?
"Ask a Democratic foreign-policy expert which presidents they most admire. They will likely answer Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy… and George H.W. Bush.
This is especially striking given that when Bush left office a quarter-century ago after only one term, liberals derided him both for caring too much about problems abroad instead of those at home and for being a wimp. In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton—whom Bush and his team then considered a draft-dodger wholly unqualified to be commander in chief—criticized Bush for coddling the “butchers of Beijing” after the Tiananmen Square massacre and for a feckless response to the war in Bosnia. It may seem hard to imagine, but the Clinton team worked to bring neoconservatives, who had become similarly disillusioned with Bush, back into the Democratic Party fold with the aim of forging a new foreign-policy consensus."
"Now George H.W. Bush, hated by Democrats with at least the required partisan loathing during his term in office, is their favorite Republican. ...The new nostalgia for the older Bush often revolved around pop psychology — the son was there to finish what his father had started, and was obsessed with avoiding his dad’s political mistakes, they said. But it also offered Democrats a response to a new, neoconservative chorus that compared the Iraq War to Bill Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, and Saddam Hussein’s human rights record to that of Balkan war criminals."
I mean, you're citing an article which talks about "the US backed dictatorship of Saddam Hussein". You know, the guy who Bush beat down in a war, and imposed sanctions on?
The reality is that Saddam Hussein was a monster. The US made use of him in the same way that they made use of Stalin, who was another monster - they used him against their enemies, but never liked him, and wanted him gone.
This is a common part of real world international politics - we have to deal with bad people, because some countries are run by bad people, and we don't want to fight a war simultaneously against half the planet at the same time. We pick and choose our fights and play bad guys against each other while we gradually undermine them by planting the seeds of democracy and liberty so that people eventually get tired of their leaders and overthrow them.
It's widely agreed as fairly optimal foreign policy. We avoid some conflicts, smack down on people sometimes when we need to, and play bad guys against each other while we gradually push for democracy.
I mean, the other option is to suggest that the US invade every country run by a dictator, kill them and their followers, and impose democracy by force. We can do this, but it's expensive and difficult, and only really works in countries where most of the population is in favor of democratic pluralism.
I mean, you're citing an article which is citing a long discredited study about child mortality:
Claiming that the sanctions killed massive numbers of children (subsequent studies suggest, whoops, not so much, that was just propaganda from Saddam's government to try and influence people to lift the sanctions - a lie you appear to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker).
How many of your beliefs are propaganda, do you think?
The same applies towards Panama - the US didn't really like Noriega, but made use of him when it was convenient to do so. When he got too nasty and rigged an election, we kicked him out by force, because keeping him around was worse.
Kicking over regimes in countries has consequences.
Complaining about the US "supporting" a dictator and then complaining about the US removing them is intrinsically contradictory, but the article there talks out of both sides of the mouth, complaining that both are bad.
It's standard propaganda pap.
That's not to say that Bush never was involved in anything shady ever, but his presidency was quite clean on the whole. The argument over the Gulf War was really over the Kuwaiti crisis actors, but in reality, the Iraqis had invaded and conquered Kuwait, and it has definitely been for the best that Kuwait has remained a free state in the middle east allied with the US.
Well, now! Somebody - or rather, two somebodies - are getting their knickers in a twist over this. Did I indicate anywhere my opinion of Bush the Elder or what the Democrats of the day were?
You postulated that nobody said nothing bad about Bush senior. I merely linked to show that in his day, there were people ready, willing and able to say bad things about him. Take up the cudgels against "Rolling Stone" for their characterisation of him as a war criminal, you don't know my views from that.
You are attempting to mislead if you are suggesting there is any actual "nostalgia" for GW among Dems. If such a sentiment is expressed it is done so at least half-ironically, because it is rooted in comparative realities. Bush did bad shit, so we gave him shit for it. Now we "can't believe how good we had it back then," compared to living under a pathological monster! Why is this hard to understand?
Moreover Bush, post-presidency, has actively worked on his character to elevate his connection to humanity (via expressing empathy with his adversaries, humility, painting, whatever), while trump does absolutely nothing but forge on with his totally self-serving attempts to destroy our democracy.
HW Bush was correct about foreign policy, by and large. People recognizing that they are wrong about something is not a bad thing.
Clinton ended up understanding the situation after he became president. Hillary Clinton understood things a lot better as a result as well.
It's just the reality of the situation. It's easy for people to whine about the president from every angle, but when you are president, the decisions you make can and do kill people. You need to use your resources wisely and try to do the best you can.
Clinton learned that lesson the hard way after Somalia. He didn't respond to the next African crisis because of whining from the public about that, and so two million people died in Rwanda.
That's why he intervened more aggressively later in his term against potential genocides.
And the idea that Democrats really hated HW is really questionable. HW had pretty high approval ratings apart from a short period of time (which ironically included the election) and left office well-regarded. He would have won re-election if he hadn't gotten shafted by the timing of the 1991 economic downturn - if it had happened three months sooner, his popularity would have likely recovered by the time of the election and he would have cruised to victory.
My parents are Democrats and have been their whole lives, and while they badmouthed Reagan, and thought Dubya was a moron, and obviously strongly disliked Trump, I never heard them complaining about HW.
Heck, HW said that Reagan's policies were "voodoo economics".
The reality is that HW was a moderate who simply wasn't very hated.
Yes! And let's not forget the flip side. The Obama admin (for example) was probably the cleanest in modern history -- yet the GOP managed to freak out about him and his tan-suit or Dijon-mustard issues on a daily basis.
We're really talking here about apples and oranges -- and after the last four years of destructiveness the Right cannot get away with gaslighting as their primary strategy anymore (sorry). At some point, if they actually grow a desire to rejoin civilized democratic debate they are going to have to admit to the shit they've been supporting and promise to do better as human beings.
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most accurate. But I guess it hasn't occurred to you that Trump's attempts to overthrow democracy with a nonstop torrent of lies and thuggish corruption was ACTUALLY worse than Bush lying to start a war that he believed his cuck father should have completed.
But if y'all nominate such a proven stand-up guy as Ted Cruz -- or maybe someone with the rugged authenticity of Trump Jr -- then I'm sure you'll have absolutely no trouble winning the overwhelming respect of our scrappy Dem coalition!
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?
Outside of high-school, the social elite has access to money and men. What you're describing is a rebellion, and it would probably be put down.
It's comments like this that make me resent the loss of a Like button.
Because that's bad for your Karma.
I know anime is tangential, but the final season of Attack on Titan depicts this kind of manipulation of an underclass and it's so emotionally impactful.
And the name for these unfortunate exiles? Caste-aways.
It makes so much sense!
I've seen the word "outcast" used in that context, and it actually made me wonder about its etymology.
I should imagine that comes more from the idea that the outcast was “cast out” of society, in the same sense that fishermen cast nets.
Why the British didn't call the Untouchables the Outcastes is beyond me, you would think they would find the pun irresistible.
I think the basic distinction is this: Nixon could understand that very few people were "truly Franklins", and that most people were constantly under the shadow of Franklins (and could consequently become Orthogonians). Hence, the class boundaries were fuzzy.
Here, the class boundaries between upper classes and lower classes are not fuzzy at all. An Indian Nixon cannot necessarily swell the ranks of the lower castes by using some clever maneuvering. Hence, only an all out battle between the pre-defined classes may equalize the playing field somewhat
Also, the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them, they're given the worst of everything: the worst jobs, the worst education, the worst access to government resources. So there you have a totally subjective, arbitrary distinction that eventually manifests as an objective reality regarding coolness: it's really hard to be cool when you're prevented from doing any job that is even remotely cool.
And that's key to maintaining the class distinction, too. An "omega" caste that's given an opportunity to perform work that allows them to accumulate resources and respect eventually results in either repressive violence to "put them back in their place", or results in a forced change to the caste system in place. See e.g. Ashkenazi Jews.
Yes and no. Dalits have reservations, like the US' affirmative action system on steroids, for education and government jobs. Of course, that only benefits a tiny elite of the Dalits, not the overwhelming majority that like most Indians has neither education nor government jobs, but it also breeds resentment from upper-caste folks who considered those perks their exclusive privilege, hence the often violent reaction against them.
"the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them"
Ashkenazi Jews became smart by being forced into certain occupations and marrying among themselves for hundreds of years. No reason to think the same thing hasn't differentiated different castes in India.
I think if you want to claim people are genetically less intelligent, you need direct evidence. The stakes are too high in terms of the effects of the conclusions drawn to rely on a circumstantial case.
I'm pointing out that there's no reason to assume that there's definitively NOT anything genetic that contributes to them being "uncool", without direct evidence.
Anyway, I don't think the stakes of an anonymous internet comment is very high.
This seems backwards. We know that culture, educational opportunities, early childhood nutrition, etc. are incredibly powerful forces. It's impossible to truly control for them.
It seems that the parsimonious explanation is that the factors we know about that are capable of causing the differences cause the differences. The alternative is that the factors we know about and unknown genetic factors cause the differences.
I'm not going to assume genetic factors without some specific evidence.
The stakes of this are not just some internet comment. The stakes are "Do I assume genetic differences account for differences between groups." This includes the groups in my own society. If I believe that poorly performing groups in my own society are genetically inferior, I will act accordingly. That's pretty damn high stakes.
Well, the Ashkenazis were the "beneficiaries" of an unintentional selective breeding program by their European persecutors, but of course most other persecuted minorities like the Romas did not have the cultural traits that allowed them to adapt and thrive despite it.
Indian genetics are very unusual. The Han Chinese are one population of a billion, India is home to hundreds of sub-populations of around 3M each, that have managed to maintain a higher level of endogamy than the Ashkenazis for over a millennium (from the excellent book on human population genetics *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich).
There are certainly some very successful groups like the entrepreneurial Patels but the only one I can think of matching your description is the Parsis (like the founders of Tata & Sons), they are fairly recent immigrants (18th Century IIRC) and not Hinuds but Zoroastrians, so not subject to the caste system (but still practicing endogamy for cultural/religious reasons).
There's doubt about Jewish intelligence truly being high. See Taleb's article about IQ: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39. Another explanation for Jewish success is nepotism. Nepotism would explain why Jewish success is concentrated in certain industries like Hollywood and the media as opposed to, say, engineering. I would say that Anglo-Saxons, Koreans, and a lot of other notably successful groups are also largely successful due to nepotism (not singling Jews out). It's easy to succeed when other people give you preferential treatment.
I'm going to copy and paste my response to another participant, with apologies for not crafting a reply specifically to you:
"I was hesitant to get into the subject, but it's not that I'm ruling out genetics playing a role, it just doesn't strike me as strongly relevant to the anthropological principle I suggested - which is that when a lower-caste group is given a consistent opportunity to accumulate wealth and glory, they're quickly going to cease to be lower caste.
"Genetics" is at best an auxiliary factor with respect to the success of the Western Jewish population. The primary factors are obviously (i) their restriction to providing financial services, combined with strong internal cultural/kinship connections across multiple cities, at a time in human history when international finance became obscenely lucrative, and (ii) a cultural focus on educational achievement, due to aforementioned restrictions to primarily intellectual careers, at a time when educational attainment was swiftly becoming extremely important to success."
How does that explain the massive success of Jewish immigrant kids in intellectual fields in the US? Nobody needed to impose an Irish Quota to keep the Irish from taking all the admissions slots to Harvard.
Are there any identifiable ethnic/religious groups who are more overrepresented than Ashekenazi Jews in, say, Nobel prizes, Fields medals, or chess championships?
One, that'd get you killed in short order in the rural hinterlands of the country.
Two, it's illegal - harassment bordering on assault - under any sane legal code, including the Indian one, and would be treated as such - in the cities, you'd be arrested.
Three, few people believe in such pollution that literally, and for those who do, there are purification rites you can perform to get cleanse yourself of any such pollution.
In practice, being nonconsensually touched by people of all castes is already a reality of life in urban India - trains, buses, public transport, civic life, etc etc etc - simply because of space constraints, the same way it is on a crowded subway train.
I assume that this sort of ritual contamination is therefore only active in certain social situations where purity is at stake? At a guess politics and marriage?
Well, for me personally, it's practically never at stake except some ritual situations, such as bathing after a haircut or a funeral, or before any kind of puja, for traditional and cultivatory reasons. I subscribe to *modern* theories of purity and impurity, dammit, with little creepy crawlies and their transmission being the causally relevant factor!
Marriage-wise, for most (urban) people who still care, it's not a matter of purity but more so of community, compatibility, tradition, and identity - castes are, well, *actually* diverse, you see, not the fake diversity of 'clothes, food, and a few days of ethnic stuff, but nothing that *really actually* matters' which diversity has been reduced to in most industrial and post-industrial societies. (I exaggerate, of course, but only somewhat. This deracinated class exists in India as well, don't get me wrong, yet history lives in a far more visceral way than in many other places I've seen.)
Note that two people from different castes in India, whose castes have been living together for the last 1000 years as neighbours but not intermarrying, are *more* genetically distinct - and have been for a thousand years - than a Sicilian and a Swede. And there are *thousands* of groups like this. Endogamy has been well-nigh absolute in the subcontinent for a millennium and a half or so. (Had the genetic analyses not shown these results to be the case, they would have been believed to be impossible, so strong is the sociological prior that people living as neighbours will, at least like *once in a hundred years*, fuck.)
Probably because 'can' is very much the operative word in that sentence - my guess is that in practice, no high-caste person is kicked out for such an occurrence unless they've already got other high-caste enemies calling for their ouster.
Because whatever actions hurt those who (have political power/are high class/the socially privileged) is viewed as an assault and punished accordingly. This is true even if it is voluntary.
Look at what triggered lynchings and white race riots in the US. Look at how unwanted suitors of high class ladies were treated in the past. Look at how authority figures (from teachers to parents to cops) treat being ignored. For a comic example, look at how certain types of customers respond to minor failings at customer service.
If the Brahmin loses their caste because of something the Dalit did, what is the Dalit going to lose?
Because anyone trying to do that would be the immediate subject of enormous extra legal violence. As would their entire community
"Hey remember the time you've beaten the living shit out of that Dalit guy for *almost* touching you? Yeah yeah sure he didn't, everyone seen that! But he was so close right?"
(Yes you can beat the living shit out of someone without touching them, using a stick or other people or booted feet. I'm sure there's some exception allowing to dole put corporal punishment to the lowest cast)
Reminds me of the character Widmerpool in Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time"
Wow, that's not nice. Nixon, at least, had pride and dignity.
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!
That might explain why Nixon won in '68 instead of Humphrey. But just becoming a major party presidential candidate in the first place is a pretty impressive achievement that most people never accomplish in their lives, even among politicians who would like to. So presumably Nixon had some degree of talent to get there in the first place.
People keep forgetting that Nixon was Eisenhower's VP. Being second in line for one of the most beloved Generals and Presidents in American history is more than enough to explain his initial success.
He lost the first time he ran for president, in 1960.
He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken.
"He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken."
Um .... I'd score this as 8+ years rather than exactly 8. The I'd ask how many opportunities there have been. The exceptions I can think of are:
*)1904: Roosevelt follows his own 1st full term and McKinley
*)1908: Taft follows Roosevelt
*)1928: Hoover follows Coolidge
*)1940: Roosevelt (the other one) follows 8 years of himself
*)1944: Roosevelt again
*)1948: Truman
*) 1988: Bush follows Reagan
More than eight years of the same party seems to have gotten rarer, but the "natural tendency" seems to be recent and was frequently broken in the past.
This is simply untrue.
1897-1913 was all Republicans.
1921-1933 was all Republicans.
1933-1953 was all Democrats.
So in the last 70 years prior to that election, 44 of them had been spent with multiple presidents in a row from the same party.
It's also worth remembering that the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once since 1988 for president - in 2004.
The idea that the presidency goes back and forth is not really true.
To put it another way, by my count out of 14 total elections in the 20th Century where one party had held the presidency for 8 years or more, they held it in 7 of them- exactly half. It seems to me that the tendency to switch is more reversion to the mean than any specific desire from voters to switch things up.
Showing my work:
1904: Republicans hold for a third term.
1908: Republicans hold for a fourth term.
1912: Republicans lose.
1920: Democrats lose.
1928: Republicans hold for a third term.
1932: Republicans lose.
1940: Democrats hold for a third term.
1944: Democrats hold for a fourth term.
1948: Democrats hold for a fifth term.
1952: Democrats lose.
1960: Republicans lose.
1968: Democrats lose.
1988: Republicans hold for a third term.
1992: Republicans lose.
This depends what timescale you're looking at.
From Eisenhower /onwards/ there have been 8 elections where one party had held the presidency for eight or more years - 1960, 1968, 1976,1988,1992,2000,2008,2016 - and the presidency changed parties in 7 of those 8.
By contrast, since 1896 years there have been 14 elections where one party had held the presidency for just 4 years - 1900,1916, 1924, 1936, 1964,1972,1980, 1984, 1996, 2004,2012,2020 - and the incumbent party won all but 2 of them.
Now, obviously, I'm slightly data-hacking by choosing my start points to get the strongest possible effects - if you look back further, one party holding the presidency for longer becomes much more common, and four-year holds slightly but not much more so.
But I think the effect sizes I'm able to find by doing so are strong enough that I'd bet on a theory close to "in the post-war high-media-scrutiny era having held the presidency for eight years causally puts you at a disadvantage, and having taken power from the other party four years ago is strongly correlated with, and possibly causal of, winning again" remaining true for the next few elections - in essence, some kind of hidden Markov model.
The one place I'd put a big question mark is the very next election - what happens immediately after two consecutive changes is harder to predict, because it's happened so rarely in the last 120 years.
This is where the numbered "party systems" that US political scientists talk about come in:
1861-1913: the Republicans always win and dominate US politics; the only exceptions are Johnson, (Lincoln's VP who never won an election) and Cleveland (who was a "Democrat In Name Only" and won non-consecutive terms because of defecting Republicans). Weirdly, almost all the Republicans are from Ohio (the ones that aren't tend to have ben VPs.
Wilson wins when the Republicans split in 1912, then gets another term. After him, everything goes back to the way it was before him until 1932.
1933-1968: All Democrats other than Eisenhower, who was a moderate New Deal Republican who won with Democrat support (not quite Cleveland in reverse, but not that far off. The Democrats then implode after LBJ.
1969-1992: All Republicans, other than Carter who sneaks in for a term when the Republicans implode after Watergate. Republicans win two 49-state landslides in this time
1993 onwards: Goes back and forth, generally every two terms, although it's only four presidents so this may just be a fluke in a narrow electoral environment.
"He lost the first time he ran for president, in 1960."
He got the nomination, though.
Part of the question is: Why was he even in play at all??
That was before primaries were so dominant. He was next in line in the smoke filled room.
Are we supposing he wandered into that smoke filled room by accident looking for the men's room? One way or another getting nominated for president requires some kind of talent.
How can being Eisenhower's VP "explain his initial success" when a lot of success is required just to become Vice President in the first place?
Dan Quayle?
Joe Biden?
Nixon had only just become a Senator (1950) when Republican leaders pushed him on Eisenhower. He won his Senate race by, essentially, accusing his opponent of being a Communist.
And why did those leaders choose him out of dozens of Republican senators, not to mention however many other candidates like governors and so on?
I suppose it's not impossible that Nixon's entire career was purely due to a long series of unrelated lucky breaks but my priors say it's much more likely he had some talent of his own.
Oh, make no mistake, I'm not claiming Nixon wasn't a gifted politician. The Checkers Speech, which saved his vice-presidency, shows that without a doubt. I'm just saying that his path to higher office wasn't completely unprecedented.
I agree that it was probably due to more than luck, however counterexample would be Truman, who truly truly became president due to dumb luck
The mere fact of being elected to the House of Representatives, beating a Democratic incumbent, at the age of 34 is impressive enough. Then just three years later he got elected to Senate, again defeating a Democratic incumbent. Three years after that, he was selected as Vice President.
Now, once you've been a popular President's VP, becoming President isn't all that unlikely. But the run of successes that took him from being an obscure lawyer/Navy officer in 1947 to Vice President of the United States in 1953 is surely a sign that he must have been pretty bloody good at _something_.
I think you might need to factor in the times. The younger generation that had been enlisted men and junior officers in the war had begun to enter middle age, and I think they were a little restless about continuing to follow the leadership of their generals (like Ike) who had been born in the 19th century. Sputnik had been a major shock, and strengthened an impression among this somewhat younger generation that the older generation might be a little out of touch in dealing with the "modern" technological world, full of atomic bombs, missiles, transistor radios. Indeed, JFK exploited this impression to the hilt in the election of 1960 and I think it was a big contributor to why he won.
But that means that being Ike's Vice President was a very mixed blessing for Nixon. On the one hand, yes, he'd spend time in a very successful Administration that was widely admired. On the other...he was vulnerable to the charge of being a fossil himself, and it didn't help that he was kind of the antithesis of youthful "vigah" (you have to say that with a thick Boston accent) in his looks and presentation.
I'd add that VPOTUS was seen as a role where many potential rivals were warehoused away. LBJ, for example, thought being JFK's VP was going to be his own political death.
Nixon achieved it *twice*, which is even more impressive and almost unprecedented
IDK I see a lot of parallels with Trump (insert corruption joke here). But seriously, both were popular at a time when working class Americans felt slighted (first by the hippies, now by everybody), won popularity by courting a group that other people considered unworthy of cultivation, and crashed and burned in spectacular fashion courtesy of their own hubris. It's really kind of eerie.
And you're forgetting to be properly weirded out by the Roger Stone connection -- the guy with a huge tattoo of Nixon on his back -- the guy who was hanging out with the Capitol insurrectionists. The visionary who forecast America's latest thirst for an authoritarian strongman and who, arguably, carried The Donald to fruition. Turns out he is literally The Penguin of Batman fame, who, with twinkle in eye, discovered a method for alchemizing bruised egos into populist power grabbers willing to subvert the Constitution for the benefit of the pathologically wicked.
The first was ultimately too constrained by vestigial shame or maybe his Quaker roots to go all the way (alas, he choked like a cuck). The second, a stable genius, was no choker of course, but he certainly broke new ground, thanks to his genetic superiority! Fortunately he pardoned Stone, so The Penguin gets another chance at world domination: third time's a charm?
Well...I think the Vietnam War was a bigger issue by 1968, plus the fact that the President (LBJ) took himself out of the running in March of 1968 and threw the Democratic side into some chaos. But I think you need to give credit to Nixon for (1) coming back from his loss in 1960, it isn't often that a losing candidate is given a second bite at the apple by his party, and (2) being able to win despite the mood of the country shifting significantly *left* from 1960 and 1964, so far as anyone could tell.
you could do absolutely terrible in a presidential election, but just to have your name on the ballot at all means you're an extreme outlier in the tiny percentage of people who ever get that far
You may be right about the General Election, but the General Election is almost always close to a coin flip anyway in our two-party system.
I think the real political wizardry is shown in becoming your party's candidate in the first place. That's proving yourself in a field of (dozens? thousands?), as opposed to a field of 2.
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.
Just because it's bleak, doesn't mean it's not true. Among humans (and, indeed, most primates), competitive conquest and status games in general are undeniably more valued than pretty much anything else.
Which is why we spend all our time talking about and monitoring social status. It's a "fish who don't understand what water is" thing. We all live and breathe status competition, and that's exactly what you'd expect of a social ape species.
Saying, "That is how it is" is one thing. Saying, "That is laudable" is entirely different.
Whether or not something is "laudable" is a subjective value judgement; it's like saying "chocolate ice cream is delicious". It's interesting to talk about, but it has little to no bearing on making informed decisions. The question is not, "is it nice that status games are valued more than empathy ?", but rather, "given that status games are valued more than empathy, what should I do if I want to be at least as successful as Nixon ?"
It implies stasis. An inability to change. A silent, "... and that is how it will ever be," if you will.
Whether or not something is, in fact, "human nature" tells us nothing about whether we, as individuals, should allow it to be *our* nature. It does not tell us about the best way to make ourselves happy or the best way to build a better world. Understanding what the world is like is important, but it's also important to understand how you'd like the world to be.
Suppose you do understand it, what then? How do you propose to remake the world in your perfect vision? Many throughout history tried, with vastly varying incompatible ideals, but the human nature is still much the same, as far as I can tell.
Of course, unlike human nature, technology does appear to change, so a new kind of utopianism has become available recently. However much Yudkowsky & Co. dislike the phrase "rapture of the nerds", that is essentially the promise of their "friendly AI". Regardless of whether this particular idea has any merit, some application of new technology seems to be best positioned in the medium term to make the biggest impact on the world (and the human nature, including whether this notion would even retain its relevance).
Perhaps, but not "undeniably," as humanity has generally been committed to a long-term cooperative project of mitigating the more destructive aspects of competition with empathy, awareness, choice, and other gifts stemming from our evolved consciousness.
This project gets set back every now and again (and maybe even eventually snuffed out, so we can become a Mad-Max-style libertarian fantasyland?).
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."
This kind of comment, made with a straight face, was seen often lately in golf forums in defense of the notorious pro golf cheat, Patrick Reed, who, like his president, is totally unashamed whenever he's caught; he just calmly claims that what everyone saw with their own eyes never happened.
It's just one tidbit of evidence of how the revenge of the (anti-democratic) Nixon nerds, the classless trumps, and the malevolent Roger Stones, gives permission for those with conquest in their bones to proudly declare their allegiance to their "animal nature" in opposition to the quaint notions of empathy and democracy favored by cucks.
I don't think the long-term cooperative project in question prevents, or even slows, down, status competition *within* the cooperative, and that's because the urge to seek status - to socially compete with our fellow apes - is incredibly hardwired, even in the most informal and equitable of settings. It's not an accident that every time someone attempts a communist-style government, even on a very local level, leaders/politics emerge.
Your comment suggests a hierarchy of intrinsic human drivers, with competition in the category of "inseparable."
But -- unless you are suggesting any and all competition-driven behavior must be excused -- the modern world demands you provide criteria to define what kind of competition-driven behavior is unacceptable. E.g., all the cucks like to pick on poor Patrick Reed just because he very naturally followed his human instinct (to win) (by cheating). Should we ridicule the cucks, or should we ridicule Reed? I'm getting confused.
And then there's poor little Donnie Trump. What are we to make of his insatiable appetite for "winning" (at any cost)? And what about the big ol' basket of deplorables who support him because they recognize his "very good genes" (i.e., eagerness to win at any cost)?
Since you're so tuned into the hardwiring of the human brain, tell us: have we just stretched it too far with our "no cheating" demands? Where exactly should we re-draw the line?
If you reread my comments, you'll notice I'm discussing the matter in a positive sense, not a normative one.
I'm reminded of a passage in Johnathon Heidt's Righteous Mind where he talks about how humans have evolved to both respect and resent authority - we want to elevate and follow leaders, but we also don't like it when they have a lot more than us. I think there's a definite truth to that, these conflicting desires probably explains a lot of left-right conflict (even if that;s more cultural than evolutionary).
I think that it's more that we want authority to be deserved. We want to follow the leader that saves us from harm, but not the leader that fails to protect us well enough or that harms us.
It's only bleak when framed that way. When it's the numberless orcs overwhelming the beleaguered few at the Fords of Isen, then it's a sad testament to the power of mass evil. When it's the honest peasantry storming the Bastille and putting the corrupt noblemen in chains, then it's a heroic tale of the majority reclaiming its heritage, and so forth.
Same thing with the value of empathy and cooperation. When it's Grant allowing Lee to keep his sword, it's the healing power of empathy. When it's Chamberlain understanding the Germans of the Sudetenland really did prefer to be part of the Reich than be ruled by Prague, it's appeasement and cowardice.
I think even Chamberlain realized after the fact that things didn't work out as he expected.
Indeed he did. But my point is that just as treason is a matter of dates, whether the fact that the majority usually wins a conflict is tragic or noble depends on our opinion of the winners and losers in the examples that come to mind.
Yes but your macro perspective makes it too easy to ignore the shorter view of America as, arguably, the world's most resilient experiment in democracy. So, unless and until someone (like a trump) succeeds in making the franchise irrelevant, those who want to undermine or overthrow our system simply cannot belong in the same historical bucket, even in theoretical macro terms, as honest peasants trying to overthrow the corrupt. That's why the Big Lie (writ large) is so important to Trump and Stone: the more people who believe the government is illegitimate, the more they can convince themselves they are no different from the revolutionaries who battled King George.
The historical jury is I would say still out in terms of the resilience of the American republic. It has lasted a bit longer than the Dutch Republic, which was I believe rather a model for the Founders, but is still only half the age the Roman Republic achieved. Given the growth in the so-called "Imperial" Presidency over even my lifetime, I am only mildly optimistic it will celebrate its 300th birthday, and somewhat doubtful it will make it to 400 or 500.
Also, I would say "this government is illegitimate/corrupt/evil/in the pay of Bad People" is kind of a staple of American populism, reaching back to early in the 19th century. I'm not really seeing anything new about that thread. What concerns me more is the quiet, steady growth, even *outside* the Sturm und Drang of an election, in the degree to which citizens look to the Federal Government, and even more specifically the President, to solve every quotidian problem. It's that kind of expectation that leads inevitably to single-man rule -- the only remaining debate (and of course it will be fierce) is *which* man.
I realize this is just a comparison of framing devices, but the actual story of the Bastille might surprise you for how poorly it fits its own noble framing device.
The Bastille was a defunct prison, and at the time of storming, it had only seven inmates, several of them mentally ill and arguably in better care than was otherwise available at the time.
In one of the most shockingly frustrating personal incidents in all of history, the governor of the prison, de Launay, surrendered, was beaten badly, then frog marched a mile to the Hotel de Ville. Here, the crowd wanted to kill him, but a group of people defended his right to live. However, de Launay was so angry at this point that he *kicked another man in the balls*, screamed "Enough! Let me die!" and was promptly stabbed to death.
Hell of a tale, the Bastille.
Shocking parallels to Jan. 6
I have heard that, yes. An interesting gloss on a historical cliche, thanks
Someone clearly has not read Meditations on Moloch...
I am not sure what to make of your comment. How did you get to "a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation" from this?
You think Nixon effectively _organizing_ a group of disaffected people to secure for them more power and status (as insignificant as it might ultimately be) to be a bad thing itself? Do you really think that other politicians are different? Are you basing that on what those other politicians say or write?
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that politicians are mostly the people that want political power and thus those that figure out how to secure that power, however it is they do so?
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.
That’s partially true, but the “mean girls” phenomenon is about entrenching social power through emotional manipulation. A nice, friendly person with desirable social qualities (attractive, athletic, engaging) can make friends, but a cutthroat person with those qualities can gain social dominance by making their rivals into pariahs. Your school might have functioned differently, but high school is often a training ground for young sociopaths learning how to manipulate their images and the social order.
The thing is, in real life, that's actually a terrible strategy outside of politics (and even in politics, it's a dangerous one, which is why people in primaries generally avoid angering their rivals too much - they have to work with them in the future AND that person might win anyway, in which case they're screwed).
You never know what the future holds, and its a big world. Having a lot of positive contacts means that there's a bunch of people who will happily hire you or work with you or shoot you a notice about there being job openings where they work or whatever; having a bunch of negative contacts will result in those not being available.
Doubly so because trying to attack everyone else usually ends up with them all ganging up on you, and if they're actually your peers, you're going to lose.
I think the problem here is the word enemies. Who really has enemies? Rivals maybe, bullies or victims certainly, but people you interact with who are actual enemies?
Mean girl types are bullies with a good social position to defend them, not schemers. Different dynamics than the Franklins Nixon encountered, in that they are using coercion to assert social dominance rather than asserting it through an existing social network. Their social pre-eminence is not entrenched and they have to performatively reassert it regularly. It's a striking example if Foucault's theories of how power is constructed spotted in the wild.
I wonder if there's a difference over time. I know my high school experience was nothing like that, but many older people experienced something similar. I'm tempted to suggest the internet as the cause, but that may be unwise.
The best strategy for the top tier kids is typically to do nice things for the sub top, but to be mean to the bottom tier, which in turn keeps the middle tier in check due to fear. Doing nice things for everyone is high cost and you typically don't need to.
You don't need to do nice things for people, just generally treat people reasonably well.
And really, people don't care about the dysfunctional kids very much to begin with, which means that "controlling via fear" doesn't really work well because they're not seen as part of their group to begin with.
Someone once told me essentially the opposite--that if you're nice to the people one tier below you, you become associated with them and risk being reduced to their tier. Thus, people one tier above you will either pick on you to show dominance or will ostracize you out of self-defense; meanwhile, top kids can afford to be nice to bottom kids because the top kids aren't at any risk of being mistaken for bottom-tier.
Some similar themes to this old Slate Star Codex post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
(On the other hand, I vaguely recall their being some more-recent post where Scott called the ideas from that post into question? Don't recall where.)
For my part, I really don't know what gears to put in my model here.
The entire model there is a model of fashion, it's not a model of actual human interaction.
Being nice to your subordinates is in fact almost always recommended in leadership. It is dangerous to get overly chummy, though this is more because sometimes you have to tell them to do something unpleasant and they need to understand that they actually need to do it (though if it is dumb, they should warn you beforehand and feel comfortable explaining why you are driving them all off a cliff if you do this thing) and also sometimes you need to fire someone.
Having a group of people who are "yours" is valuable, and setting them up to succeed is to also make them want you to succeed. And given that ranks are often quite close, particularly in the business world, it's possible that someday they might be your peer or above you, or vice-versa (and in fact, you should make especial care to befriend those who have a lot of talent/promise to rise, as those people are the most valuable friends to have down the road).
Indeed, if you look at real world groups, who they tend to exclude most harshly are those who are poor at socialization, because it makes everyone else around them uncomfortable. Excluding those who are bad at socializing and getting along with other people is beneficial to the group, and bringing in bad people reflects poorly on you and your judgement.
People who are bad at socializing aren't able to recognize that they're the problem (per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, their poor social skills also render them incapable of recognizing their own incompetence at it) and believe that people are picking on them for no reason, rather than that they're trying to make them go away because people don't want to be around them.
Indeed, you will often see very socially inept people repeatedly challenge the social order without having the slightest clue what they're doing. That's why the dregs (socialists, fascists, neo-confederates, gang members, ect.) constantly rant about the evil elites - because clearly, the reason why they're on the bottom is because of a conspiracy against them, and not because they're unlikable, incompetent, and antisocial.
I would think that the dynamics you get with *subordinates* might be pretty different from the dynamics you get from other status gradients.
@Dweomite
I think that being nice to the losers only works with very stable and clear 'classes.' In most situations, ignoring them is the smartest move (little to be gained by interacting with them and much to lose).
@Titanium Dragon
Companies are different than schools.
@Titanium Dragon: in a not-at-all-contentious spirit, and out of genuine sociological curiosity... would you mind saying what years you went to high school, and in what sort of setting?
1999-2003, public school in Corvallis, Oregon.
Also went to public high school in Oregon, 2001-2005 and can mostly echo what you wrote. Now living in California, I've found that my high school experience was far more inclusive and much less stereotypical than people who went to HS in CA.
Maybe it's an Oregon thing?
That's possible, but...
You might simply be better at socializing.
When I look at younger people, the ones who tend to be the worst at socializing also seem to have the worst high school experiences. This suggests to me that a lot of what are seen as "typical" power structures by some people are instead a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect - people who are bad at socializing see school as a means of pushing them down, of suppressing them, of exclusive cliques who don't want them as a member, of groups constantly vying for dominance.
The problem is, they don't actually understand what is really going on with the greater student body, so they create this bizarre alternate reality power structure that casts themselves in the role of a struggling picked-upon hero.
In reality, people who are bad at socializing are often excluded because they are uncomfortable to be around, because they are abrasive, because they bore other people and don't understand how to converse "normally", because they're bad at reading the room, or because they are constantly trying to challenge/confront people. They don't see what they're doing as dysfunctional social behavior because they don't understand how to socialize, so they cannot recognize what they're doing wrong.
This also matches what I'd call the "high school pattern" you see in biographical stories - stories told from the point of view of people who were good at socializing in high school don't show these stratified power dynamics, and instead show a totally different sort of "circles of overlapping friends" thing instead, sometimes with some random yappy jerks who are often very much on the periphery.
People who are dysfunctional at socialization are also the most vulnerable to predatory bullying because they are isolated and alone, so they will also tend to disproportionately be targeted by it.
Spot on. I was in student government and was an athlete. I've been told before that "maybe you didn't see rampant bullying because you were high-status". I was like, I dunno, I feel like, through knowing everyone, I had a pretty transparent view into the entire school...
Wonderful. Now you can follow up by explaining to all the Uhgyers in western China how they aren't Really being shipped off to concentration camps for forced labor. They merely failing to see how poor they are at being Chinese due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In my high school, jocks were frequently guilty of sexual assault and violence against unpopular kids. None of them ever suffered for it, the administration preferring to punish minor offenses by people who weren't star athletes.
The only way not to notice was to be stupid or willfully ignorant, and hardly any of the popular kids were stupid.
High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular. I'm the son of a star athlete...football quarterback no less. I was one of those "silent majority" players filling out the team. Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
You're confusing an authoritarian government for high school social dynamics. The two have basically nothing in common.
If you think they're the same, that might explain why you met with little social success.
>> Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
This I agree with, but you contradict yourself.
I suspect this is a https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ sort of thing, not a "High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular" sort of thing.
The popular kids at my school were violent and nasty. Same goes for a lot schools my friends went to.
The younger people I talk to seem to have better school experiences. Although many of those in deprived areas have even worse ones.
I'd definitely be cautious about dismissing a wide range of popular culture and human experience as "written by people who didn't understand social dynamics very well".
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.
I would add that Perlstein's book arguably has an application to the issue of trapped priors and partisan dialogue. I think Perlstein may be saying, with some justice, that right and left talk past each other, not so much because they are blinded by bias, as because each understands the other all too well.
I do think the past few years have flushed out real beliefs (as much as beliefs can be real) past their usual porticos of politeness. And what I've learned is that the core of the Right is genuinely disdainful and dismissive of democracy itself. This is just a fact of life in 2021 -- and if you want to say that that's just my trapped priors talking, I say you are simply gaslighting me.
Since, for now, we have recommitted to democracy, the way to move forward is for the anti-democrats to either admit they'd been on a destructive dopamine binge, or at the very least stop the gaslighting. You're not going to erase the last decade by pretending it didn't happen. If you continue to smirk about owning the libs and blowing things up you are simply not ready to again participate in civil democracy. So if you hate democracy THAT much, then your best choice now is to crawl back under a rock.
JKPaw, I'm wondering why you posted that in response to my comment. Do you see me as a rightist? I'm not! I've been a Dem voter all my life. I do appreciate Perlstein's (relative) evenhandedness though. He's very good at pointing out the flaws on "my" side in its 1965-72 incarnation. (Or perhaps by "you" you mean the impersonal you, not me?)
Yes, no, "you" was not intended to be directed at you, but at the anti-democrats.
I had no critique of your comments, even though I wasn't sure if you were of the sort who believed we're simply dealing with two competing visions for democracy -- and that we just disagree over the details. From my vantagepoint, we're dealing with one side who has demonstrated they are willing to throw democracy, truth, etc completely overboard in their quest for power (and they continue to gaslight us with their snickering denials and diversions). So I bristle at false equivalencies, but was agnostic about whether you were offering such.
Both sides are willing to throw truth over when convenient, and probably always have been.
I suppose we could place both-sider-ism in a trapped priors bucket, but it's also one of the many dishonorable tactics the Right has latched onto, especially in recent years -- but, admittedly, a pretty effective one, related somewhat to trump's strategy of stinking up the entire house with feces every day so casual voters had no way of knowing where the smell was actually coming from.
Just one example: the Fox echo-chamber specializes in existential -level outrage over anything and everything (like email servers or Benghazi) -- and after month after month and year after year of righteous repetition, casual voters could be excused for thinking the thousands of charges against trump were just more of the same mud-slinging from genetically corrupt, scandalous politicians.
They weren't, and they aren't. It's just a cynical strategy that trump was more than willing to shamelessly take advantage of.
Around that time I read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial" H.S. Thompson. About the '72 election. I can't recall details, but it had a big effect on me.
I've been wanting to read that for a while now. Thanks for the rec!
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.
Not only does it open up that period of US history, it makes a lot of the 90s and 00s make a lot more sense once you know how much of those periods involved not just rehashing the same conflicts he stoked, but involved *the same people* doing the rehashing that had participated in the conflicts in his time (Karl Rove vs John Kerry in 2004 being the outstanding example).
_Before the Storm_ is also amazing. Perlstein gives a genuinely fair-minded assessment of Goldwater despite obviously hating almost everything he stood for. It's remarkable as an examination of the kinds of self-deceiving narratives people tell about themselves and others: Goldwater's supporters and opponents *both* told themselves lies about what sort of person he was and what he supported in order to make themselves feel more righteous. It's also worthwhile as an examination of right-libertarian fusionism, the understandable sentiments that motivated it, and the ways in which it veered off into crankery and craziness.
_The Invisible Bridge_ is good for completists but really too long. I got through it only because it micro-analyzes the period of history just before I was born, and I knew almost nothing about that period before, which I think must be a common problem: after all, when you're growing up that period of history is too long ago to be current events and too recent to be taught in history classes.
I haven't read _Reaganland_ yet but probably will sometime in the next few years.
You're right about Nixonland making sense of decades that followed. The biggest thing I took away from it was how much the current political climate is a resurfacing of age-old grievances. There is a strange comfort knowing we're no more uniquely screwed than our predecessors, and by many measures are doing much better.
Um. We certainly came MUCH closer than we did in 1973 to losing our democracy. I think it's a false comfort to believe that our current political climate is simply cyclical. Like a stock being repeatedly tested at a resistance level, our country may well be poised to finally blow the lid off democracy. The Roger Stones of the world have learned a great deal about manipulating populism, so the next test could very well be the one that succeeds.
I would have said that we came closest to losing our democracy with FDR. He was the first president ever to run for, and win, a third term. If he hadn't died, I could see him becoming a permanent president and gradually establishing the substance of one man rule under the form of democracy. His moves towards packing the Supreme Court failed, but they did apparently intimidate the court sufficiently to get it to reverse its position on the limits of federal power in the context of the farm program. And he put a whole lot of US citizens in concentration camps with no form of trial and no claim that they had done anything wrong.
The current threat to democracy isn't Trump — he is only symptom. As things stand, I can see politics swinging in favor of one side or the other and never being allowed to swing back. It's not as if the other side is viewed as decent people with a reasonable, if somewhat mistaken, point of view — by either left or right.
By definition, there's really only ONE thing that ultimately binds us, politically, and that's American democracy. (We're specifically all playing football, not Calvinball.)
I am furious at the current state of our courts, and especially the Supreme Court -- thanks to Mitch McConnell's dishonorable behavior (for example). But that behavior, as flaggable as it was, did not constitute an actual attempt to sabotage the entire game's existence.
As for your premonition about politics failing to "swing back," you're certainly on to something: sadly for you Rightests, the state of the game is now such that you simply cannot win anymore in current conditions without foul play. Your collective fears of the welfare state, wokeness, baby-killing, whatever, have led you to (flaggable) unholy alliances with racists, voter suppression (flaggable and worse, including the cynical disembowelment of the Voting Rights Act), and of course they've led to a raging nonstop torrent of lies and corruption (flaggable and worse).
All of which leaves us on the precipice of the game's destruction -- because enough of you have decided your goals (like ending baby killing, etc) are simply more vital than any pointy headed devotion to rules and principles by a bunch of loser cucks.
In Nixon's day, Roger Stone was still a radical outlier. Nowadays, his anti-democratic heritage has blossomed into a recharged idea: maybe democracy as we know it is no longer as useful as we used to pretend. The (alternative) idea that the world is changing, and that new voices and perspectives (new players) are naturally rising in agency (along with safety nets that emerge from their experiences), is just too unacceptable for most of you to remain sanguine as such changes are implemented.
That's why y'all who cannot abide such change should either admit you are actively trying dismantle democracy (either directly, or by giving monsters like trump a pass), or just suck it up, play your golf, and wax nostalgic about how football just ain't the same game anymore. What you can't do is pretend you're still playing the game when you're really trying to end it. Those who have nothing left but their gaslighting prowess don't get to "debate" policy in polite company without first renouncing their part in trying to change the Constitution without the votes to do so legally.
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.
You nailed it. If the cool kids are cool only due to the inertia of social status, they're going to be much more vulnerable to an "upset" of the kind Scott proposes. The more that social status is built on/incorporates objectively cool traits, the more secure it is, which is why the upper crust in most societies is usually eager to promote the very best (and richest) of the lower classes into their number.
He may have been naturally introverted, and overcoming that. I agree that he certainly doesn't sound socially inept from that description.
He sounds like people that I know, and have known in the past. At first they can seem awkward and offputting, but they're so earnest and keen to be nice to you that they can eventually win you over.
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 feel like academic fields are often notable for having disjoint sets of "cool kids" that look down on each other, and are looked up to by different segments of the community.
I think you are absolutely right about this. Does this make it more difficult for the "silent majority" to organize? After all, colleges also have disjoint sets of "cool kids" though they probably lood less down on each other than the case is in academia.
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.
I would suggest, with respect to the Nixon example, that you're looking at a situation where the objective measures of social desirability underlying the dynamics at his college weren't very pronounced. If there's no strong "gradient" of cool (someone with a chemistry background help me out here), then it's easy to rearrange the rankings.
So, this article makes it seem like the cool kids at Nixon's college were cool more or less only due to their wealth. That's a powerful point of "cool" leverage, but it's a long way from the only objective measure of cool. So, if the wealthy kids at Nixon's college didn't have much else going for them, I have no trouble believing he'd be successful creating a new hierarchy of cool based around other traits. It doesn't surprise me in that sense that Nixon made allies of the athletes.
But even if you initially distribute coolness and uncoolness at random, the system could still perpetuate itself, if uncool kids are rewarded by the cool kids for putting down other uncool kids. It's a coordination problem, where they'd all be better off if they worked together to overturn the system, but they won't be able to work together without a politically gifted leader like Nixon.
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.
Sounds like the perfect person to sympathize with Nixon.
In Nixonland, the author described Planet of the Apes as "when the blacks take over". At which point I quit reading the book.
This disturbed me, so I did a keyword search on Google Books. The only reference I can find to Planet of the Apes is page 238. The exact wording is: "A new movie, Planet of the Apes, imagined what life would be like if whites suddenly found themselves a subject population." This sentence occurs within an extended discussion of the heightened racial tensions of the late 60s, and read in context, the claim does not seem to me racist or inappropriate. It's widely acknowledged by film critics that racial conflict was a theme of the Planet of the Apes series: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planet_of_the_Apes#Race
At best, you could censure the author for using the poorly-aged word "Negroes" in the sentence, "[The gang] called themselves the Up Against the Wall Motherf*ckers, after the command supposedly barked by Newark cops to Negroes under custody, transformed into a line of poetry by LeRoi Jones", which occurs in the same paragraph.
Your mistake here is to assume reading in context is required to take offence. Or, if you're right on the text being discussed, the ability to quote from the source text properly...
Why? What negative effects of continuing to read were you trying to avoid?
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.
The issue is, a population entirely made up of liars and swearers is *really* bad at solving coordination problems.
Well, you make an odd argument, considering both Lady Macduff and cheeky little Son to Macduff got slaughtered very efficiently by the traitors just minutes after his quip!
Well, yes, many things are easier to accomplish in fiction than in reality.
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 would tend to agree with that, subject to the proviso that Jimmy Carter may also be in that class -- Carter, too, was a very smart man.
Kind of interesting that the two smartest men to hold the office since 1950 or so ended up being among the least liked. Even Democrats don't like Carter very much, and even Republicans aren't very thrilled with Nixon, these days.
Add Herbert Hoover to this list.
Yes
To support your inclusion of Herbert Hoover, here's Scott's review of his biography: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/03/17/book-review-hoover/
"You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression. Maybe you shouldn’t. Maybe you should remember him as a bold explorer looking for silver in the jungles of Burma. Or as the heroic defender of Tientsin during the Boxer Rebellion. Or as a dashing pirate-philanthropist, gallivanting around the world, saving millions of lives wherever he went. Or as the temporary dictator of Europe. Or as a geologist, or a bank tycoon, or author of the premier 1900s textbook on metallurgy.
How did a backwards orphan son of a blacksmith, dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Midwest, grow up to be a captain of industry and a US President? How did he become such a towering figure in the history of philanthropy that biographer Kenneth Whyte claims “the number of lives Hoover saved through his various humanitarian campaigns might exceed 100 million, a record of benevolence unlike anything in human history”? To find out, I picked up Whyte’s Hoover: An Extraordinary Life In Extraordinary Times."
"You probably remember Herbert Hoover as the guy who bungled the Great Depression"
Only if you remember FDR the same way, as perhaps you should. Hoover followed essentially the same policy of sharply increasing federal spending while trying to persuade companies not to cut wages, although he didn't have as long to follow it for.
FDR ran and won 1932 as a State's Rights Democrat, fighting the spendy centralizer Hoover. Fired 100k R hacks when he took office in the name of small government.
Then, reversed himself, hired 500k D hacks by 1936 and of course the wild increased spending everyone knows him for.
Well someone has to be responsible for the length of the depression in the US. Most if Europe was out of it by 1932...
Amusing sidenote. A clear marker of US influence on UK politics is people referencing the Great Depression as something that affected the UK in a serious way (the UK devaluedits currencyand pulled out rapidly). It also tends to be a pretty good marker for people whose facts you really want to check...
The UK was significantly impacted by the Great Depression, but it also recovered quite quickly by getting rid of the gold standard.
According to Garry Wills' 'Nixon Agonistes' Nixon's parents always told him they'd help him get anything he wanted as long as they saw him trying. Then he deeply respected Eisenhower, an incredibly cunning administrative solder from the hard school of military politics where if you ain't cheating, you ain't trying. Like oysters and whisky, both good on their own, but but Nixon combined them.
From Dan Seligman's column in "Fortune" in 1991:
"Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 [I.Q.] when he was in Fullerton High School in California. Kennedy biographer Thomas C. Reeves tells us JFK tested at 119 just before entering Choate Academy."
https://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1991/07/15/75242/index.htm
Nixon (b. 1913) and Kennedy (b. 1917) were likely the top political talents of their cohort. JFK had everything except brains -- money, looks, sex appeal, wit -- and Nixon had nothing but brains and work ethic. As it turned out, they were very closely matched in 1960.
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.
My impression from highschool was that, contrary to depictions in pop culture, the popular kids acted nice toward everybody and felt secure in their popularity. Of course, I was an introvert mostly ignoring the rest of the student body, so others with their fingers on the pulse may have noticed things contrary to that image I was unaware of.
At my high school, the student body president was also the all-Southern California CIF second baseman and star of the high school musical.
And he was a great guy.
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.
Those seem to be plausibly describing the same events. Is there something you think is a contradiction?
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.
As a young man, Nixon was often described as handsome. De gustubus,....
A google image search for "Young Richard Nixon" is somewhat enlightening. In the pictures in his football uniform he looks downright handsome, but the pictures that show him in more formal clothing and poses look stiff, awkward, and... well, like a young Richard Nixon.
The picture of Nixon in his college football uniform has a definite Young Stalin with the Great Haircut vibe:
https://twitter.com/Steve_Sailer/status/811015401421185025/photo/1
You can compare Young Stalin's and Young Nixon's impressive heads of hair here:
https://twitter.com/davidgerard/status/1068449939808808960
Young Gerald Ford, an All-American football player, had a terrific mop of blond hair and cruelly handsome features:
https://www.google.com/search?q=young+gerald+ford&sxsrf=ALeKk020ncvP06cIkZTRnT21q5nB3j1GPg:1615617113827&source=lnms&tbm=isch&biw=1271&bih=540
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.
Coolidge is a fascinating character.
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?
And also what Bush then Trump after him did to the coastal elites
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.
Funny, I would have thought it was the opposite. Do you have any more info on this?
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.
Perhaps Nixon had what we would nowadays call "Impostor syndrome".
If he had been born eight decades later he'd have lots of encouraging internet articles on "Overcoming impostor syndrome" to fall back on, but he wasn't so he didn't.
That's a theme throughout the book. Both LBJ and Nixon felt intimidated by Ivy League types, both hating them and wanting their approval. Especially important here, of course, were the Kennedys.
That sounds a lot like Camelot apologia, of which there was a ton among historians after Kennedy's death. It's certainly the case that both LBJ and Nixon felt threatened by the rise of the Kennedys, and somewhat bewildered that any of them should be more than a flash in the pan -- and they were certainly irritated by the claim by the Kennedys and their fanbois that they were the smartest guys in the room* -- but neither LBJ nor Nixon were easily intimidated, and I while both hungered after the power that comes from tens of millions of votes, I really can't see either having a secret longing to be approved of by people they considered pretentious whippersnappers who hadn't paid their dues and were a lot less "street" smart.
------------
* And I must say the Bay of Pigs, Cuban missile crisis, and Kennedy's initiation of the intervention in Vietnam went a good way to demonstrate that they were not. Few Presidents have made as many serious foreign-policy mistakes in their first 3 years. Had Nixon won in 1960 it's hard to see him making any of them.
Nixonland is most definitely not an apology for the Kennedys, or for LBJ, or for Nixon. Perlstein's is more a realistic portrait of his characters and the period in its full complexity, with the contradictions and weaknesses of all sides on full view. Both LBJ and RN had very complex feelings about the Kennedys and the adulation they got from the "Franklins" of society; for Perlstein, the issue isn't who is more deserving of our praise, but trying to understand the psychology of LBJ and RN. Perlstein actually evinces little interest in JFK except in terms of how his successors felt about him.
Thanks for the response. I haven't read the book, so I can't really say much about it, and I appreciate your observations on it. I certainly agree Nixon and LBJ were both complex and driven men but, as I said, I just find it doubtful either was insecure or craved the admiration of the Kennedys. I don't remember LBJ very well, but I do remember Nixon, and it just doesn't fit with what I remember. Of course, I only knew his public personality, so there's that.
"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.
You must have not been a cool kid!
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).
Presumably the more hysterical critics of Clinton, Obama and now Biden are not deranged? Seems a rather lop-sided analysis to me.
I'm pretty certain Bill Clinton was subject to a similar process, albeit one that was disrupted by his wife running for president. Since Jummy Carter is in the senior Bush group of seemingly inconsequential presidents, there's a bit of a lack of data on earlier Democrat presidents to confirm this pattern, but my prediction is that in three years time Fox news will be comparing Obama's presidency positively with Biden's.
I do think you're applying good insight here but that your priors are affecting the way you frame this to the point of partisanship. From an outsider's point of view, both US political coalitions have their fair share of demonstrative idiots as you describe. From a cynical point of view I can't help but wonder if the party that wins is the one that shuts their own idiots down best.
I think this is the key difference between the two. Republicans tend to view the Democrats as a collective group who are all trying to destroy America. Democrats tend to view each individual Republican as a lone extremist trying to establish a fascist dictatorship (I remember at least one op-ed saying that Bush Jr was trying to do just this, with the sort of numbered checklist you used to get about Trump). Obviously they're both being melodramatic about people disagreeing with them, but it's fun to speculate about where the different manifestations come from...
Well, these wild accusations tend to come when each party is attempting to buck up its base, so it makes sense they would appeal to a caricature of the other side: the Republicans would suggest to their wavering loyalists that the Democrats are pretty much Communists, mindless collectivists who if they could would dispense with any shred of individual liberty. Democrats would suggest to their wavering loyalists that the Republicans are pretty much the party of Pinochet, and long for single-man dictatorship, and if they could would dispense with democracy entirely.
The caricatured end points goes right back to the founding of each party: Andy Jackson was nothing if not a raging populist and held profound disdain for money and title. The Party of Lincoln was founded on the rather anti-democratic principle that certain things (e.g. slavery) were Right or Wrong regardless of how many people might vote for or against them.
Reagan had the Iran-Contra Scandal. Bush Jr. had people tortured. Trump committed a long litany of crimes, from fraud, to tax fraud, to obstruction of justice, to misappropriation of federal funds.
Bush Sr. had far less of this because his administration was just far less "scandalous", and consequently, you left him off your list of people that the Democrats were "deranged" about.
Has it ever occurred to you that maybe the Republicans are just really corrupt, and that the Democrats are outraged over that?
Ahem. Quote from here: https://foreignpolicy.com/2018/12/02/how-george-h-w-bush-became-a-democrat/
"Ask a Democratic foreign-policy expert which presidents they most admire. They will likely answer Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy… and George H.W. Bush.
This is especially striking given that when Bush left office a quarter-century ago after only one term, liberals derided him both for caring too much about problems abroad instead of those at home and for being a wimp. In the 1992 presidential campaign, Bill Clinton—whom Bush and his team then considered a draft-dodger wholly unqualified to be commander in chief—criticized Bush for coddling the “butchers of Beijing” after the Tiananmen Square massacre and for a feckless response to the war in Bosnia. It may seem hard to imagine, but the Clinton team worked to bring neoconservatives, who had become similarly disillusioned with Bush, back into the Democratic Party fold with the aim of forging a new foreign-policy consensus."
Or here: https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/bensmith/george-hw-bush-moderate-republican
"Now George H.W. Bush, hated by Democrats with at least the required partisan loathing during his term in office, is their favorite Republican. ...The new nostalgia for the older Bush often revolved around pop psychology — the son was there to finish what his father had started, and was obsessed with avoiding his dad’s political mistakes, they said. But it also offered Democrats a response to a new, neoconservative chorus that compared the Iraq War to Bill Clinton’s bombing of Serbia, and Saddam Hussein’s human rights record to that of Balkan war criminals."
Back in 2018 Rolling Stone wasn't going to "De mortuis nihil nisi bonum" https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/george-h-w-bush-wimp-766076/
And Newsweek identified his problem as "The Wimp Factor" when he ran for president: https://www.newsweek.com/bush-battles-wimp-factor-207008
Oh yeah, I forgot to include the war criminal bit: https://theintercept.com/2018/12/05/george-h-w-bush-1924-2018-american-war-criminal/
"Bush Sr. had far less of this because his administration was just far less "scandalous" - not so much, I think!
I mean, you're citing an article which talks about "the US backed dictatorship of Saddam Hussein". You know, the guy who Bush beat down in a war, and imposed sanctions on?
The reality is that Saddam Hussein was a monster. The US made use of him in the same way that they made use of Stalin, who was another monster - they used him against their enemies, but never liked him, and wanted him gone.
This is a common part of real world international politics - we have to deal with bad people, because some countries are run by bad people, and we don't want to fight a war simultaneously against half the planet at the same time. We pick and choose our fights and play bad guys against each other while we gradually undermine them by planting the seeds of democracy and liberty so that people eventually get tired of their leaders and overthrow them.
It's widely agreed as fairly optimal foreign policy. We avoid some conflicts, smack down on people sometimes when we need to, and play bad guys against each other while we gradually push for democracy.
I mean, the other option is to suggest that the US invade every country run by a dictator, kill them and their followers, and impose democracy by force. We can do this, but it's expensive and difficult, and only really works in countries where most of the population is in favor of democratic pluralism.
I mean, you're citing an article which is citing a long discredited study about child mortality:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2017/08/04/saddam-hussein-said-sanctions-killed-500000-children-that-was-a-spectacular-lie/
Claiming that the sanctions killed massive numbers of children (subsequent studies suggest, whoops, not so much, that was just propaganda from Saddam's government to try and influence people to lift the sanctions - a lie you appear to have swallowed hook, line, and sinker).
How many of your beliefs are propaganda, do you think?
The same applies towards Panama - the US didn't really like Noriega, but made use of him when it was convenient to do so. When he got too nasty and rigged an election, we kicked him out by force, because keeping him around was worse.
Kicking over regimes in countries has consequences.
Complaining about the US "supporting" a dictator and then complaining about the US removing them is intrinsically contradictory, but the article there talks out of both sides of the mouth, complaining that both are bad.
It's standard propaganda pap.
That's not to say that Bush never was involved in anything shady ever, but his presidency was quite clean on the whole. The argument over the Gulf War was really over the Kuwaiti crisis actors, but in reality, the Iraqis had invaded and conquered Kuwait, and it has definitely been for the best that Kuwait has remained a free state in the middle east allied with the US.
Well, now! Somebody - or rather, two somebodies - are getting their knickers in a twist over this. Did I indicate anywhere my opinion of Bush the Elder or what the Democrats of the day were?
You postulated that nobody said nothing bad about Bush senior. I merely linked to show that in his day, there were people ready, willing and able to say bad things about him. Take up the cudgels against "Rolling Stone" for their characterisation of him as a war criminal, you don't know my views from that.
There are people who said bad things about everyone famous ever.
That's a meaningless argument.
Doubly so when you're citing sources that are generic anti-American propaganda.
You are attempting to mislead if you are suggesting there is any actual "nostalgia" for GW among Dems. If such a sentiment is expressed it is done so at least half-ironically, because it is rooted in comparative realities. Bush did bad shit, so we gave him shit for it. Now we "can't believe how good we had it back then," compared to living under a pathological monster! Why is this hard to understand?
Moreover Bush, post-presidency, has actively worked on his character to elevate his connection to humanity (via expressing empathy with his adversaries, humility, painting, whatever), while trump does absolutely nothing but forge on with his totally self-serving attempts to destroy our democracy.
"Well I keep getting richer, but I can't get my picture, on the cover of the Rolling Stone"
HW Bush was correct about foreign policy, by and large. People recognizing that they are wrong about something is not a bad thing.
Clinton ended up understanding the situation after he became president. Hillary Clinton understood things a lot better as a result as well.
It's just the reality of the situation. It's easy for people to whine about the president from every angle, but when you are president, the decisions you make can and do kill people. You need to use your resources wisely and try to do the best you can.
Clinton learned that lesson the hard way after Somalia. He didn't respond to the next African crisis because of whining from the public about that, and so two million people died in Rwanda.
That's why he intervened more aggressively later in his term against potential genocides.
And the idea that Democrats really hated HW is really questionable. HW had pretty high approval ratings apart from a short period of time (which ironically included the election) and left office well-regarded. He would have won re-election if he hadn't gotten shafted by the timing of the 1991 economic downturn - if it had happened three months sooner, his popularity would have likely recovered by the time of the election and he would have cruised to victory.
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/234971/george-bush-retrospective.aspx
My parents are Democrats and have been their whole lives, and while they badmouthed Reagan, and thought Dubya was a moron, and obviously strongly disliked Trump, I never heard them complaining about HW.
Heck, HW said that Reagan's policies were "voodoo economics".
The reality is that HW was a moderate who simply wasn't very hated.
Yes! And let's not forget the flip side. The Obama admin (for example) was probably the cleanest in modern history -- yet the GOP managed to freak out about him and his tan-suit or Dijon-mustard issues on a daily basis.
We're really talking here about apples and oranges -- and after the last four years of destructiveness the Right cannot get away with gaslighting as their primary strategy anymore (sorry). At some point, if they actually grow a desire to rejoin civilized democratic debate they are going to have to admit to the shit they've been supporting and promise to do better as human beings.
Sometimes the simplest explanation is the most accurate. But I guess it hasn't occurred to you that Trump's attempts to overthrow democracy with a nonstop torrent of lies and thuggish corruption was ACTUALLY worse than Bush lying to start a war that he believed his cuck father should have completed.
But if y'all nominate such a proven stand-up guy as Ted Cruz -- or maybe someone with the rugged authenticity of Trump Jr -- then I'm sure you'll have absolutely no trouble winning the overwhelming respect of our scrappy Dem coalition!
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.