Your recent magazine article “The deification of René Girard” (Spectrum, May 10) documented a curious development: the rising popularity of the French literary critic’s work among American conservatives, including Peter Thiel and JD Vance.
But to consider Girard alone does not tell the whole story. To understand why many of these figures — Vance included — are not true outsiders but alienated products of elite systems, we also need Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). The French sociologist studied how people who rise to surmount class boundaries often carry an invisible dissonance: they adopt the habits of the elite, but never feel fully at home.
Bourdieu’s idea of “cleft habitus” — a split between the world you come from and the one you enter — helps explain the resentment we see in Vance, who has written about feeling anxious over not knowing which fork to use at Yale (we’ve all had that moment), and about being silently judged by people who seem to belong in a world he only pretends to understand.
Bourdieu does not explain scapegoating, but he does explain the discomfort — perhaps the very discomfort that makes scapegoating feel so necessary.
It is hard to miss the irony: the American right’s loudest revolt against intellectual elitism is playing out almost perfectly within the frameworks of two French intellectual elites.
Apparently the Maga revolution will be theorised en français.
Nancy Kolff-Rodriguez
American Francophile and Writer Overveen, the Netherlands