“She Did the Most American Thing”: Eileen Gu, the professional-managerial class, and the collapse of American civic faith

Submission statement:

The largest victors of America’s modern deindustrialization have undoubtedly been the professional-managerial class. As manufacturing moved offshore, this class, defined by their credentials and networks, grew in size, income, and institutional power. They’ve monopolized the elite networks, credentials, and institutional signaling, steadily raising the ladder for any new aspirants. And in doing so, they’ve accumulated more wealth than any other non-capital owning class in history. It’s striking, then, how little allegiance they have to America—the only country that would have ever allowed them to expand as they did.

This detachment is exemplified by the curious case of Eileen Gu, an American-born American skier that chose to represent China, America’s principal rival, on the world’s largest stage. The general response by that professional class is captured in a remark I overhead: Gu “did the most American thing ever—she sold out.”

In this essay, I examine this worldview seriously and argue against it. I trace how it reimagines the concept of citizenship, and I contrast it with the older models from which America’s own civic tradition descends. I draw on C.S Lewis and his ideas of moral seriousness, the Roman Republic’s bundling of privileges and duties, and the original vision of our own Founding Fathers. I also contrast my own experience as a child of immigrants who took the American creed more seriously than most of those who were born to it.

America is, in a specific and unusual sense, a creedal nation, held together by belief renewed across generations. The question this essay asks is what happens when a creedal people surrender their own creed.