REVIEW: The Status Revolution by Chuck Thompson

Nonfiction. 288 pgs. Simon & Shuster. January 2023.  9781476764948.

“When a sitting U.S. president can defend the virtue of Nazis and Arbeit macht frei becomes a rallying cry in the American workplace, you know the social strata is undergoing intense disturbance.” So argues Chuck Thompson in his new book, The Status Revolution: The Improbable Story of How the Lowbrow Became the Highbrow. Thompson has an established habit of half-true observations that nimbly avoid the bigger picture and the nuances it demands. His troll-ish Better Off Without ‘Em: A Northern Manifesto for Southern Secession (2012), for example, is an illustration of a White savior complex not uncommon in his generation. At best it is cathartic to call intentionally engineered reactionism in the South pigheaded stupidity, though not distinguishing the ramifications of those attitudes across the racial divide in the Blackest region of the country belies the author’s unwillingness to recognize any agency in that group. It feeds the reactionary machinery of other sections of society – and increasingly resembles little more than a text version of Boston’s old Emancipation Memorial.

Thompson is definitely on to something in this new book, but it seems like he also can’t put his finger on the big picture. This time it might not be his fault – the picture he is describing is still an emerging one. What we notice today, in many areas of society, is a move away from waste and conspicuous consumption as a sign of status. Our new forms of status imply other things, chief among which are statements of identity. Thompson starts with what James Bartholomew has coined “virtue signaling”, and how it has emerged as a manner of signaling status alongside the rise of pet adoption in the US. He connects this to Thorstein Veblen’s concept of the “status signal” in The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), but seems unsure of where to go from there. Describing Veblen as “an avid fan of Karl Marx” and “a blithe critic of capitalism”, Thompson decides to lean hard in another direction instead. He embraces a naive empiricism associated with so-called New Atheism, a term from the early 2000s which encompasses figures such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Panned for its biological reductionism, younger parts of it evolved into the alt-right while those of Thompson’s age were still busy watching Bill Maher. Yet true to form, Thompson goes from poignant observations to dated interpretive framework by throwing us right into neurological research in consumerism.

That by itself wouldn’t be so bad. He mentions Greg Burns’ research into the power of group thought and the correlation between likability and familiarity in music – definitely a point I’m keeping in mind for my next debate over “industry plants” in the rap scene. The author volunteers for an MRI scan to study how makeup affects perceptions of attractiveness. The results show that status is “real” neurologically, but the opportunity to link status to something external and more concrete than our cultural preferences for makeup is missed. In today’s world, where status signaling is so disconnected from the material world, it is not appropriate to dismiss the “real” behind our social interactions. This would imply class analysis. But instead of recognizing that status can reflect material inequality in the real world, the author leans hard into biological reductionism and chooses to participate in a study about cars and penis sizes.

To be clear, this chapter is referring to perceptions of penis size; it is a commentary on consumerist perspectives of masculinity. With the addition of a brief interjection noting that White men have historically dominated the study of status, Thompson makes it clear that despite his blithe choice of topic, he’s really one of the good ones… virtue signal much? We are then given a tantalizing chapter suggesting that it will discuss “status as social justice”, but only describes the author’s meeting with an Italian businessman who made a mark in the sports car industry. In a moment of lucidity Thompson describes regional prejudices between the North and South of Italy as “Hatfields-vs.-McCoys”, but overall this is just a rags-to-riches fairytale of capitalist meritocracy. While it could be fleshed out how social activism is commodified into a vote of consumer support within our new age of status, it isn’t. It seems like it’s really just included because of the cars. Subsequent chapters announcing an examination of another variety of status similarly miss the mark.

As Douglas Wolk has said, The Status Revolution doesn’t even mention “lowbrow” or “highbrow”, despite those words being featured in its title. Perhaps “low” and “high” have too many Marxist implications for Thompson. A recent piece that didn’t shy away from the real social implications of these changes in status signals was Guy Rundle’s “Necessity Has No Law” published in the Autumn 2022 edition of Meanjin. Rundle’s essay discusses emergent trends commonly referred to as “social justice” or “identity politics”, and argues that apart from dismissing them entirely as “virtue signaling”, they should be viewed as an expression of the (sometimes contradictory or self-defeating) values and interests of a specific socioeconomic group, the “knowledge class.” Paramount Global’s Simon & Schuster has yet to approach Rundle with a book deal, I suspect.

All in all, Thompson comes off as saying that the changes in values we notice are a kind of flattening of signifiers. I don’t believe they are. They more closely resemble the borrowing and innovation of an emerging class that is as capable of both causing harm and doing good and is searching for its larger social purpose. But even if there were flattening, where is the harm in that? I often recall a quote from Andy Warhol, which is worth repeating here:

What’s great about this country is America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you can know that the President drinks Coke, Liz Taylor drinks Coke, and just think, you can drink Coke, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better Coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good.

We may focus on the way that American blue jeans went from practical attire for farmers and industrial workers to symbols of rebellious youth with expendable incomes. More astonishing than this symbolic leveling, however, is how American blue jeans became a Cold War symbol for disgruntled youth behind the Iron Curtain. Capitalism, always held in high esteem by Marx for its revolutionizing potentials, was able to achieve what communism could not: it inspired the youth to symbolically champion the proletariat. Today American cultural egalitarianism ironically serves as a culturally segregating status symbol within the developing world, as brilliantly depicted in the Indian film White Tiger (2021). In Mexico, for example, a small, mostly white elite group of people, often with professional connections to the US, routinely use terms such as “latinx,” “gaslight,” and “narrative.” However, the vast majority of Mexicans still use terms such as “gringo,” “güero,” “gordo,” and “chino” regularly. These are the contours of an international “knowledge class” as described by Rundle, not a real flattening in any sense.

What Thompson appears to be upset about is that an earlier “status sign = class status” equation has lost its validity. As he is aware, we’ve been in such places before. Admittedly, his alarmism about the ascendancy of fascism feels played out. Though America has still barely addressed the fact that an attempted coup is really an attempted coup, seeing the Democrats lean so heavily on a strategy of backing Trumpist opponents has understandably led to skepticism about their sincerity in the face of such supposed threats. So maybe we should ask a “disgruntled Northwestern liberal” like Thompson to put his money where his mouth is about his faith in the symbolic order of American meritocracy and stop offering us his folksy “raw genius […] concealed beneath a prickly skin”. No, let’s not. I would say his lowbrow style is his best asset, as is mine. But to what end is it employed? All Thompson’s sports car talk reminded me of Biden’s Corvette protecting his home cache of classified documents, and how that somehow helped him ingratiate himself more to an element of his base for whom gold-gilded toilets were a step too far.

An inversion in our readings of status signals is certainly a dangerous thing, but its contours must be analyzed materially. Returning to Thompson’s suggestion that a president defending Nazis is a reflection of an “intense disturbance” in our social strata, one must recall on what side of such a historical analogy his reaction to “status signals” falls. True Nazi rhetoric depicted their enemies as cosmopolitan pseudo-egalitarians whose ideas of equality were antithetical to German nationalism, a cause that they associated with racial solidarity among ethnic Germans. Groups like the Swingjugend, youth identifying with Black music from America, duked it out in the streets with Hitler Youth in a way resembling BLM and the Proud Boys today. Nazis depicted themselves as a no-nonsense silent majority suspicious that an upset in the traditional status order was furtive malevolence designed to target them. Of course, the failings of the liberal Weimar Republic did nothing to assuage such concerns. Therefore, if history is any guide, isn’t the real danger not that a president eats fast food like the rest of us, but that a president can imply that protestors are paid actors and be received as though he read the minds of a large segment of the population?

Thompson seems to want to diagnose taco bowls in the oval office as the source of the problem. Maybe the problem here is not, as Thompson frames it, whether “status is real” or not. Maybe it also isn’t a matter of finding the “status gene” a la Richard Dawkins, either. The bigger obstacle today to our proper understanding of what is happening is the framework that says that status is merely symbolic and performative, but then implicitly urges you to take part in the performance of those symbols as though it was even a choice for you. As though you chose authenticity, social justice, or identity. Signaling is social, but the social is material (in the good old Marxist sense), and therefore concrete and real. That is where we can still see waste and conspicuous consumption organizing our society into strata: wherever status is bought and sold beyond the bargain bin.