In one sentence
The professional-managerial class is selected and rewarded by bureaucratic systems that favor credentialism, conformity, framing, and status performance. Those habits produce a culture of “genre fiction”: familiar narratives that signal membership and legitimacy without necessarily describing reality. The resulting political and cultural exhaustion reflects not merely bad art or bad messaging, but a failure of elite formation.
Overview
McElroy begins with the perceived implausibility and repetitiveness of contemporary news, entertainment, and political narratives. He connects this decline in storytelling to the culture of the professional-managerial class—college-educated, white-collar workers whose careers depend on navigating organizations. The essay moves through education, corporate life, politics, and the rise of Trump, arguing that each domain rewards scripted performances and inherited tropes. The coronavirus pandemic, in his account, briefly exposes the gap between these stories and material reality, creating an opportunity for more courageous action.
Core ideas
Culture reflects how elites are selected
The traits rewarded by institutions shape the character of the ruling and professional classes, which in turn shape culture. McElroy uses a deliberately extreme analogy—selecting leaders through hand-to-hand combat—to show that different selection mechanisms would produce different manners, values, and stories.
The professional class is bureaucratic despite its self-image
Modern professionals may call themselves creatives, entrepreneurs, or innovators, but many coordinate people and resources through established administrative systems. Their apparent nonconformity often functions as a fashionable overlay on bureaucratic conformity.
Education teaches instrumental reading
Students are commonly trained to extract a theme, moral, or practical message from literature. McElroy argues that this reduces stories to propositions and weakens the capacity to experience them as forms of knowledge in themselves. Education consequently becomes credentialing rather than initiation into a shared cultural inheritance.
Genre fiction is the managerial class’s native language
Genre depends on recognizable conventions and audience familiarity. McElroy applies the idea beyond novels: résumés, corporate slogans, TED-talk narratives, “doing well by doing good,” and corporate feminism all use established scripts to signal status and belonging.
Bureaucratic language works through shared make-believe
Business jargon is often obviously artificial, yet it persists because participants understand its social function. Phrases such as “align,” “level-set,” and “circle back” provide a common framework for signaling competence and position. The point is less literal communication than participation in the institution’s accepted fiction.
Cynicism and earnestness are two responses to the same fiction
Some professionals recognize institutional nonsense and treat it as a necessary game; others believe the scripts and become anxious that they alone are faking competence. Both dispositions reinforce the system and encourage overconfidence about what elites understand.
Subversion can preserve exhausted systems
When a genre runs out of fresh possibilities, it inverts its familiar tropes. McElroy sees corporate “creativity,” wokeness, and many left-right political identities as inverted versions of older authority or counterculture narratives. Their apparent rebellion can therefore strengthen the institutions they claim to oppose.
Political polarization is mutually dependent storytelling
The Left and Right increasingly define themselves through opposition to caricatured enemies. Each side’s identity requires the other’s story to remain intact, making agreement threatening because it would weaken the narrative structure supporting group identity.
Practical takeaways
- When evaluating institutional language, ask what social function a phrase performs—not only whether it is literally true.
- Distinguish a story’s experiential or imaginative value from the message that can be extracted from it.
- Watch for “subversion” that merely reverses an established trope while preserving the same institutional framework.
- Treat résumés, mission statements, political branding, and corporate narratives as genre conventions: look for the expected plot, heroic role, villain, and omitted realities.
- A useful test for elite competence is whether leaders can recognize when an audience has stopped believing the script.
- Prefer narratives grounded in concrete responsibilities and consequences over narratives built primarily from status signals.
Caveats and counterpoints
- The essay is polemical and often relies on caricature, especially in its descriptions of universities, corporate culture, wokeness, and political groups. Its strongest insight is structural; its culture-war examples are less carefully demonstrated.
- McElroy treats the professional-managerial class as culturally unified despite acknowledging that it has fuzzy boundaries. Differences among professions, regions, institutions, and political commitments receive little attention.
- The argument that storytelling has broadly declined is asserted more than established. Familiarity, repetition, and cliché may reflect mass media economics or changing genres as much as elite selection.
- The essay’s account of Trump emphasizes his ability to expose political artifice, but it does not fully examine the costs of replacing conventional political performance with deliberate spectacle, nor whether breaking a script produces better governance.
- The pandemic is presented as a possible moment of civic renewal. That conclusion is aspirational rather than a demonstrated consequence of the essay’s analysis.
Questions worth revisiting
- Which parts of professional life genuinely require shared conventions, and when do those conventions become detached from reality?
- Can bureaucratic institutions select for competence and truthfulness without also rewarding résumé management and performative conformity?
- What would a non-instrumental education look like in practice, especially for students who need credentials for economic mobility?
- Are political audiences truly rejecting old narrative techniques, or are they simply adopting newer and more adversarial ones?
- What concrete institutions or leaders could produce the reality-based, action-oriented civic story the essay calls for?
Return to this when…
Return to this essay when thinking about résumé inflation, corporate jargon, elite credentialing, culture-war branding, or political communication that feels simultaneously scripted and unreal. Its central diagnostic question is useful: what institutional rewards cause people to repeat stories they no longer believe?