Overproduced Elites and the Luxury Welfare State

How America's professional-managerial class turned status anxiety into a political project—and why "normal" politics isn't coming back.

This is a guest post by Dr. Benjamin Mabry.

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One of the repeated refrains we hear from the chatterati is the wish that politics would return back to “normal.” They want American politics to be about budgets, managing the bureaucratic apparatus of state, and 1990s multilateral international institution-building.

Most of these kinds of people blame young folks. If those darn young people weren’t so extreme, understood the value of liberal institutions, and just pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps like the Boomers did, everything would be back to normal. Left-of-center and right-of-center establishment writers all grasp at their pearls every time some young person steps outside the range of acceptable political opinions. In their day, people didn’t say such things.

Things aren’t going back to normal, though. If anything, it’s going to get worse, quickly, because politics is always downstream of elite status competition and the competition is just getting warmed up.

What does it mean to be elite? One of the most common attacks against Elite Theory is the notion that there are no elites in American society and the main thrust of this argument is that Elite Theorists are vague with their definitions. Does elite mean expert? Certainly, elites have to be good at something in order to maintain their position, but not necessarily expertise in the sense most people mean. James Burnham argues that the American Technocracy are not elites but elite-adjacent; the political failures of Mark Zuckerburg and Elon Musk attest to this notion. Does elite mean rich? Those two men are very rich and yet failed to penetrate the American ruling class in any meaningful way, but it would be hard to conceive of an elite who lived in a 2800 square foot house in the suburbs.

Perhaps the best way to lock down the notion of elite-ness is to think of it a different way. To be elite is to have first claim on the positional goods in American society, and the elite-adjacents are those who monopolize what remains.

Middle-class people think of wealth as a kind of threshold. If you make over a certain number of dollars, you’re rich. Status doesn’t work that way, however. Status is explicitly ordinal. Rank-order is the only thing that matters. If someone attains more than you, and you remain the same, you decline. This is why positional goods, scarce objects that can be possessed and deprived to others, are the meaning of social status.

What are the things which denote high status and yet are only available to a small part of the public? One excellent answer would be housing in certain fashionable districts. Not all Manhattan neighborhoods are cast in the same mold. Another would be enrollment in elite private educational institutions. Lastly, and most importantly according to C. Wright Mills, to be elite means to be accepted by other elites. This is why Mills put so much emphasis on invitations to New York parties. An invitation is the ultimate positional good, even if it isn’t ultimately used, because of who is not on that guest list.

Rather than talk about the true elite, however, I’m more interested in the group of people one social class lower. The elite-adjacents, the New Class, the Professional-Managerial Class: the people who live vastly privileged lives serving and securing the power of the true elite are a topic given too little scrutiny.

The New Class are in the top 10% of incomes, live in major metropolitan cities in the neighborhoods that are just not quite it, and spend vast proportions of their already significant incomes on positional goods not available to the middle class, all in the hopes that their 1.5 children sustain their class position.

While the elites compete on positional goods that are truly exceptional, the positional goods of the New Class are frequently, to risk overusing a clever term, premium mediocre. Up to their eyeballs in mortgage debt to stay in the “right” county or borough, balancing the benefits of private high school versus elite public schools like Stuyvesant or TJHS, everything the New Class does is built around the terror of slipping down in the social hierarchy.

This is one of the reasons that middle-class people don’t understand the centrality of social mores as a key to the New Class’s neuroticism. Just as to be elite means to be accepted by the elite, to be a member of the New Class requires that one be accepted by the gatekeepers of the New Class. As we poor folk say, you’ve got to fake it to make it.

Unfortunately for the children of the New Class, there are just too many applicants and not enough slots. Status is ordinal, and one person moving up means another moves down. As Peter Turchin famously put it, elites are being overproduced in late-stage empires, leading to too many people demanding a status that by its nature demands a superfluity of losers.

These losers don’t go anywhere, as Turchin tells us.