Moral Capital

Social justice symbolism is the Prada handbag of the contemporary elite.

When I was coming up in the ‘80s and ‘90s, the word “Yuppie” was ubiquitous. “Yuppie” stands for “young, urban professional,” or “young, upwardly-mobile professional.” The dream of every yuppie, so the stereotype went, was for a comfortable, status-signaling suburban life with a Volvo in the driveway and a Montessori Day School decal on its rear window. Those of us who strove for lives of political, artistic and intellectual sophistication were expected to have deep disdain for the yuppie. The yuppie was shallow, vapid, materialistic, and profoundly inauthentic.

Of course, anyone who used the term “yuppie” with such sneering contempt were more likely than not themselves college-educated, middle class, and metropolitan. As with many classist pejoratives, the term served the primary purpose of loudly distinguishing oneself from those for whom one might easily be mistaken. It was a term of art for the narcissism of small differences, used by the yuppie-adjacent to transform their adjacency into a yawning cultural chasm.

The yuppie no longer exists as a cultural cliché, even though college-educated, young-ish urban professionals are, debatably, more culturally hegemonic than ever. The yuppie class, that is to say, is still objectively a thing, but its values have changed, and, along with them, its status markers. Outward displays of upper middle class affluence are no longer favored as a way to convey one’s bourgeois respectability. They’re gauche, if anything, in this era of stark inequality. Today, the way to flaunt your class affiliation is through your political moralism.

Back in June I wrote about Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of “cultural capital.” Briefly, cultural capital refers to the power one derives from having fluency in the cultural lexicon of a particular social world. If you’re a talent agent who lives in the Hamptons and you get your Athleisurewear from Balenciaga and know what’s currently showing at the Deitch Projects, you’re well-stocked in cultural capital. If you’re a punk anarchist panhandling on Venice Beach and you know what ACAB stands for and where to get cheap fentanyl, you’ve got a certain amount of cultural capital, too.

If the cultural capital of the ‘90s yuppie found its expression in conspicuous consumption, the modern American Professional Managerial Class displays its cultural capital through conspicuous moralism. The “Proud Parent of a Groton Honors Student” bumper sticker is now a Black Lives Matter lawn sign. The shiny red SUV is now a bland, beige Prius. The refrigerator Polaroids of the family vacation to Tuscany is now an Instagram snapshot of mom and dad and the kids in matching pussy hats at the Women’s March.

The problem with moralism as a class status marker, however, is that anyone can display it. The whole point of washing your Beamer in the driveway was to show your neighbors that you were able to obtain a lifestyle that few can afford. But how hard is it to get your hands on a Nasty Woman tote bag? You don’t have to have a Stanford MBA and an executive-level salary to make Notorious RBG your Facebook avatar. For virtue signaling to work as a status signifier, it has to be rarified.

And so it was. Like consumer goods, basic morality has taken on a stark class dimension, and been transformed into another fetish for in-group signaling.

Racism is the most obvious example. Everyone knows it’s bad to be racist, but only the moral elite know how to be “anti-racist.” Unlike ordinary non-racism, being anti-racist requires an entire instruction manual. It has its own special rules and lexicon. It has its self-help gurus, thought leaders and historical mythology. It has a syllabus and a pedagogy. You have to learn how to use obscure academic jargon like “centering,” “settler-colonialism,” “cultural appropriation” and “implicit bias.” You have to be trained in a complex etiquette, like a finishing school student at a five-course meal.

This is the opposite of the morality of common sense; it’s an esoteric morality that’s inculcated through specialized instruction and lengthy social conditioning. And the places where you’re most likely to receive this inculcation is in colleges and universities, elite cultural institutions and corporate work settings — in the social habitats, that is, of the Professional Managerial Class. And that’s exactly what you’re signaling.

Anti-racism and wokeness in general have been made into status markers. In the exact same way that a mature palate for Italian wines does, fluency in social justice speak conveys to others your affiliation with a certain social milieu. It signals urbanity, cosmopolitanism, enlightenment. It indicates your educational pedigree and your white collar professional or creative class membership. Name dropping Ta Nehisi Coates, casually referencing “white supremacy” and saying “black bodies” instead of “black people” are not the kinds of manners you pick up with a high school GED and a manual labor job, any more than knowing which utensil to reach for when your frisée salad is served, or having a favorite columnist at The New York Times are. Using this language, invoking these idols, inveighing against these particular injustices tells the people around you that you’ve had the right kind of upbringing, the right kind of education, and keep the right kind of company. It’s just another form of cultural capital — a subtype I’ll call “moral capital.”

Having the appropriate opinions on political issues and current events, having sympathy for the PMC’s favored victims and contempt for the disfavored ones, and knowing to avoid naïve expressions of basic values in favor of jaded, learned ones all attest to your wealth in moral capital. But unlike the big house, the tennis club membership and the Hermès pumps, even as they telegraph your class status, they reflect your compassion, your piety and your commitment to the downtrodden. Nobody was ever revered as a martyr for owning a Kate Spade handbag or flying business class. But with moral capital, you can have your same sex wedding cake and eat it, too.

This is why you can never convince a Swarthmore-educated wokelord that the average American isn’t as racist as they think, that on the whole the country is actually growing more tolerant, not less, and that we’re not, in fact, on the brink of a fascist coup. Those beliefs aren’t actual ideas about the world. They’re luxury accessories, and they don’t come cheap.