Aspirational snobbery, status anxiety and prole drift: Meditations on the deeply stupid cultural pathologies that are ruining our society and subverting our politics

Everybody knows that Europeans are horrible snobs.

That verbal diarrhoea multiplication platform known as Reddit abounds in this sentiment. “Why are Europeans so snobby and annoying?” asks one user. “I’m fucking tired of snobby Europeans,” says another. “I want to know if anyone else is sick of the snarky, snobby, ignorant Europeans that this website seems to be saturated with,” says still a third. “Europe isn’t better than the US and the way so many Europeans online act as if their continent is some utopia is SO annoying,” insists a fourth. The view is not exclusive to our New World brethren; Europeans themselves often agree, as for example this man who confesses that “I’m British and I hate my country” because “People are snobby, rude and elitist.”

There is nothing wrong with a little intercontinental sniping, but what’s going on here is much more significant than that. It relates to a theme we have confronted many times, namely – “what is wrong with Germany?” and by extension “what is wrong with Europe” and finally “what is wrong with our world?” I recklessly blend the problems of my country with the problems of yours, because we have seen that Germany is a key player in the most tiresome cultural and political pathologies of the West. We are the laboratory where your climate policies are given their trial run, we are the experimental soil where the noxious victim and perpetrator ethnicities were first cultivated. Europe in general and Germany specifically may have been reduced to provincial outposts of the Global American Empire, but for better or worse (and often I fear it is for the worse) we are still an important node in the cultural ecosystem.

From the outside, European culture may seem snobbish. From the inside, and particularly in the political arena, one experiences something much more intense – a screeching, grasping and really quite unhinged anxiety about what is right, what is good and above all what is presentable. On the evening talkshows, an unending parade of Very Serious Well-Coiffed People deplore the ignorant, low-status and backwards preferences of the unwashed masses, lest these impurities somehow rub off onto themselves. Euro snobbery is a minor vice in comparison, and one reserved primarily for foreigners. That which is not a part of you need not be so energetically disowned, and so it is sufficient merely to perform some passing contempt for the waywardness of the odd Australian.

Germans suffer from a chronic failure to take their own side in political debates, preferring policies of self-abnegation and debasement over those that advance their material interests. This is because generations of peace and prosperity have encouraged certain Germans to prioritise their social and cultural status over practical and economic advantages. They want to be thought better of, and they have developed an entire politics of moral signalling, rooted in an anxiousness about how other people see them. The AfD supporter casts his vote for parties he believes will solve his problems, while the Green casts her vote before an imagined audience of people who will find her choice laudable. The outsized cultural influence of the establishment left has a lot to do with the fact that their constituents will never stop talking about what high-minded cultural leftists they are. What is the point of voting for the Greens, after all, if nobody knows that you’re doing so?

Europeans, alas, do not have a monopoly on snobbery. American university professors are also incurable snobs, and also – not for nothing – often very bizarre Europhiles. Doctors and lawyers also tend towards snobbishness, and journalists are some of the worst snobs the world has known. Snobbery is particularly prevalent among people who live in ostentatious houses and who drive expensive cars. Because snobbery is about being perceived, snobs are found in all the most visible places – in cities rather than the countryside, in fancy restaurants and at the opera rather than in pubs and at the cinema.¹ The more energy a person invests in exhibiting an elevated status, the more likely they are to be a snob and also to have deeply obnoxious politics.

A popular misconception holds that snobbery is a vice of the upper classes, but that view is altogether too hopeful. Western society, being formally egalitarian, is distinguished by informal social hierarchies that are frequently misunderstood. A vast literature exists on this topic, but to unlock the problem you need only recognise a few things that will seem immediately obvious in retrospect. Once upon a time in the idealised past, there were only aristocrats at the top and peasants at the bottom. The former had little fear of losing their position, the latter no hope of improving it. Industrialisation complicated this simple structure by introducing a vast middle class, who enjoyed varying prospects of upward mobility and came in consequence to exhibit a chronic status anxiety. Social strivery in all its forms is a defining feature of the middle, and so is snobbery, which is merely a performed contempt for all those things one wishes to be thought of as better than:

Worried a lot about their own taste and about whether it’s working for or against them, members of the middle class try to arrest their natural tendency to sink downward by associating themselves, if ever so tenuously, with the imagined possessors of money, power, and taste. “Correctness” and doing the right thing become obsessions, prompting middle-class people to write thank-you notes after the most ordinary dinner parties, give excessively expensive or correct presents, and never allude to anyplace … that lacks known class. It will not surprise readers who have traveled extensively to hear that Neil Mackwood, a British authority on snobbery, finds the greatest snobs worldwide emanating from Belgium, which can also be considered world headquarters of the middle class.²

That passage is from Paul Fussell’s classic book on social class in America. It is now 40 years old, and I’m not sure that Belgium would still qualify as the foremost European bastion of middledom. Germany has surely outpaced them here, especially since the end of the Cold War. On the other hand, Belgium hosts the headquarters of the European Union, which is among the most quintessential middle-class institutions in the entire world, so this is not entirely wrong.³ And anyway, this is petty quibbling. The point is that Euros out-snob the New World not because we are higher class, but because we are more deeply middling and therefore subject to much greater status anxiety. This is the cultural reason that our politics are so retarded.

Industrialisation did not just create the striving middle classes. As it brought an end to primarily agricultural economies, it also spelled the demise of the landed aristocracy – paradoxically eliminating that towards which the middle classes would ordinarily strive. Improving conditions also made the lower classes wealthier, giving rise to new socialist ideologies of rising expectations. Lest they be expropriated and dispossessed, the upper classes further retreated from social influence. These are forces that affected the West very broadly, but the world wars have ushered German culture much further down this path than almost anybody else. The Germany that emerged on the other side of 1945 had no organic upper classes left at all, and so middling sensibilities enjoy a very extreme dominance here. In consequence, we have developed the vilest and most obnoxious system of cultural virtue signalling known to mankind.

As I said, there is a deep paradox at the heart of this phenomenon. The striving middles have extended their dominance precisely as those things they might strive towards – the nobility or the upper classes – have gone up in smoke or withdrawn from view. This leaves the lower reaches of the middle class to strive after upper middle-class affectations, and the upper-middle classes increasingly unmoored. Here is one reason that moral posturing has achieved great importance for the upper-middles of our press and our politics. They have few other ways to advertise their betterness.

To fill the great vacuum of influence, the upper-middles have also fixated upon that only other firm point of reference available in the social system, namely the lower ranks. Since middledom came to prominence, the lows have elaborated their own cultural rejections of middle-class striverism. Against the boring suburbanites who advertise their position with carefully calibrated consumption, the lows wear gold chains and enormous rings. Against the tiresome white-collar workers who sport sensible office attire, the lows wear torn jeans and t-shirts. They prefer things like punk rock and rap music, which intentionally shock middle sensibilities by extolling all of those things the middles find abhorrent – from sexual promiscuity to drugs to street violence. Over time, however, the upper-middles have come to perceive these rejections of their own culture as markers of authenticity and as some kind of inverted high status towards which it is worth striving. Now they wear torn jeans and t-shirts too (albeit expensive designer iterations of them), tattoos are all the rage, and they listen to radio stations that provide milder and less angry iterations of lower-class music (indie rock rather than punk).

Fussell calls this phenomenon “prole drift,” and its political significance is as enormous as it is unexplored.⁴ Among other things, prole drift appears to be an important mechanism underpinning the steady leftward drift of Western politics since the twentieth century. Leftism, popular among the lows for its redistributionist promises, achieves via prole drift a particular salience for the upper-middles. It is merely a cherry on top, that announcing your enthusiasm for ever higher taxes feels virtuous and provides a backhanded means of advertising your wealth. A general fascination with the alleged authenticity of low culture also explains the strange upper-middle mania for mass migration, which is prized for expanding culinary possibilities and for introducing “vibrancy” to neighbourhood streets. What precisely “vibrancy” might be is not always clear, but most often it seems to be a term for the noise and chaos that remind our upper-middles of their tasteful holidays to authentic destinations in the developing world.

Social class is inherited more than it is achieved. East Germany and the former Warsaw Pact countries have proved resistant to status leftism, because the communist legacy has left these places with a dearth of upper-middles desperate to act out their status anxieties on the political stage. They also have weaker economies, which limit the promise of upward mobility and reduce the appeal of striverism. Universities present a nearly opposite case. The meritocracy of the mid-twentieth-century and the preferential hiring programmes of more recent decades have filled these institutions with a vicious upwardly mobile breed that suffers from crippling status anxiety and is therefore susceptible to every last intellectual and social fad, however absurd.

To participate in shallow status games like these entails being unaware of the system as a whole. Almost nobody implicated in this social tragicomedy has any idea of where their preferences come from or what they’re doing. As a rule, the most violent emotions are stirred by those groups whose status is most immediately adjacent to your own. The countercultural tendencies of the lows target specifically the bottom middle ranks and lampoon their desperate grasping after respectability; they hardly see the upper-middles at all. The upper-middles, for their part, reject the painfully low-status “nativism” and provincialism of the lower middles as a means of differentiating themselves, and they express this rejection by favouring the far more palatable (because more distant) lows instead.

Say what you will about the vices and dissolutions of the traditional aristocracy; at least when we had them, the upper-middles had some concrete target for their aspirations. In the absence of aristocratic appeal, this most influential of social classes has entered a self-cannibalising downward spiral, and nobody can say where it will end.

1. Whenever one tries to discuss social class and status signalling, the same confusion recurs again and again, so let me dispel it here in the foontotes: There is nothing wrong with enjoying the opera (I go all the time), or driving expensive cars, or anything like that. I am addressing only the specific case wherein one’s choice of automobile or evening entertainment (or political party) is guided less by direct personal preference than by an elaborate if implicit and half-acknowledged programme of reputational management.

2. Paul Fussell, Class: A Guide through the American Status System (1983), p. 41

3. German snobbery – that of the stereotypical “Gutmensch” – is less apparent to foreigners, because it is fundamentally moral in nature; snobbery in Western Europe, being more directly aesthetic, is something the casual tourist is much more likely to run afoul of.

4. On prole drift see Fussell, from p. 172 – where, however, our author leaves the broader political implications mostly unexplored, in favour of shallower (if much more entertaining) cultural satire.