The Jock-Nerd Dialectic

Extremely online posters see the world through a Hollywood-influenced view of high school

An important idea in the history of philosophy is Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. This concept is shaped by two beings developing their respective identities through struggle. One being triumphs over the other, thus becoming the lord. The other, fearing death, submits to the now-lord and becomes the bondsman. Hegel thought this dynamic fundamentally shapes human society and character.

The online world has developed a similar dialectic to explain human society. But it doesn’t deal with lords and bondsmen. It’s instead centered on jocks and nerds. In this dialectic, man is shaped by whether he is the jock stuffing the nerd in a locker or the nerd suffering this indignity. Everyone online fashions themselves as the jock while their foes are envisioned as nerds. This is a bizarre outlook as very few people had this experience in high school. It owes more to Hollywood comedies from the 1980s than anyone’s teenage years. It’s also absurd that the internet would gravitate to this dynamic when the vast majority of extremely online people would count as nerds. Very few posters actually played varsity football. But in the dialectic, nearly everyone did while their enemies couldn’t catch a ball.

This framing is embraced by the Right, Left, Center, and even non-political parts of the internet. All these groups believe the nerds escaped from the lockers and now control the country. What we need is for the jocks to rise up and put the nerds back in their place.

While sometimes fitting for shitposting, the jock-nerd dialectic is pretty stupid. It doesn’t capture how America works, or even how high schools operate. Not everything in life can be explained by high school dynamics, especially not fake ones. The middle-aged guy still wearing his letterman jacket and still obsessing over his senior year is considered lame. It’s even lamer for a guy who spent his school days playing World of Warcraft to adopt that jock identity in middle age. The jock-nerd dialectic is more about promoting a false social status for posters than explaining real-world social dynamics. If we’re going to return to high school to illustrate modern America, front row vs. back row is far more fitting.

The jock-nerd dialectic kicked into high gear as a response to Vivek Ramaswamy’s late December post about “American mediocrity.” The Indian entrepreneur committed a huge error in online discourse. He celebrated the nerd in the internet’s favorite dialectic. The “jocks” from every corner of the online sphere tried to give Vivek a swirlie over the post.

Ramaswamy, who wants to be Ohio’s next governor, claimed that America celebrates jocks and prom queens instead of hard-working nerds. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers,” he wrote. “A culture that venerates Cory from ‘Boy Meets World,’ or Zach & Slater over Screech in ‘Saved by the Bell,’ or ‘Stefan’ over Steve Urkel in ‘Family Matters,’ will not produce the best engineers.”

This post was terrible for two reasons. One, it offered a delusional view of America shaped by TV shows rather than reality. Claiming America mediocrity is caused by Saved by the Bell is comical. Two, and far worse, the post was crafted to defend mass Asian immigration and tech companies hiring foreigners over Americans. According to Vivek, Big Tech is justified in laying off Americans because they had too many sleepovers as kids and had a good time at prom. The low-wage Indians are far superior in Vivek’s view.

The post did no favors for Ramaswamy’s position. It was widely mocked across the political spectrum and seemingly portrayed Indians as a race of Screeches.

The internet was right to jump down on Vivek here. However, the post was like waving a red flag in front of a bull to online people who obsess over the jock-nerd dialectic. It provided the opportunity for posters to indulge in it to their hearts’ content. Many began stressing random points to emphasize their favorite discourse. There were many complaints about nerd tyranny and how all the extremely online jocks need to do something about it. Others talked about how jocks were actually the good students and the nerds the bad students. (How the nerds established their dictatorship in America was not figured out.)

Vivek’s post still haunts the imaginations of extremely online people. When news reports outed DOGE staffers as extremely young men, X and other spaces lit up with enthusiastic posts about how they disprove Ramaswamy’s post. Those saying these kids show America has plenty of homegrown talent and we don’t need mass Indian immigration to solve our “mediocrity” were right. However, the internet could not stop itself from reverting to its jock-nerd obsession, and these nerdy teens were inevitably imagined to be jocks. I saw one post that superimposed their faces on a famous meme picture of Nebraska’s offensive line. Leftists who find the DOGE kids a threat to democracy took a different tack. They imagined that they are nerds who need to get shoved into a locker by jacked liberals.

On the internet, everyone you like is supposed to be a jock, while everyone you don’t like is supposed to be a nerd.

Some posters realized it was probably a stretch to imagine the DOGE kids were jocks, but they still wanted to appeal to the popular dialectic. X account Indian Bronson suggested that DOGE represents an alliance between jocks and good nerds against a more malevolent class of dorks. What’s happening in America is roughly equivalent to the yearbook committee and theater kid types getting rocked by a football team and chess club alliance,” IB tweeted. The post was endorsed by Elon Musk. It’s unclear who the football team is here.

Much of this is harmless, albeit cringe and bizarre. But there can be dark conclusions drawn from adherence to this dialectic. Leftist “comms boy” Isi Breen argued shortly after the election that we need to bully “antisocial and awkward teenage boys much, much worse than we are right now.” He deleted the tweet following the backlash towards it, but he continues to imply this is the proper solution to Trumpism. It’s odd for leftists like Breen–a very strange-looking dork–to demand we need more bullying. These people were the antisocial and awkward teenage boys. But the power of the jock-nerd dialectic makes them believe that they were the ones scoring touchdowns instead of getting shot down by prospective prom dates. The fantasy must be upheld to win debates in spaces filled with antisocial and awkward young men.

The jock vs. nerd dynamic isn’t even real. It’s a product of Hollywood and the experiences of older generations. This wasn’t the high school experience for millennials and zoomers. Sure, people on the football team would hang out with each other rather than with band and theater kids. But there wasn’t the conflict between these groups, at least not at my high school or that of anyone else I know. These groups lived in separate worlds. If you went to a suburban white school, like me, AP and honors classes segregated the smart kids from the dumb kids. You wouldn’t even know a large share of your own class, much less shove them into lockers. Different cliques kept to themselves.

There were jocks in the AP classes and “nerds” in the standard classes. However, the largest demographic in the AP classes were band and theater kids (for the record, I was neither), which would make them nerds in the internet’s social analysis. Most of the athletes in AP classes played soccer or did an individual sport like cross country. The largest demographics in the standard classes were football players (some football players were in AP classes though) and slackers involved in no extracurricular activities. Which classes you were in influenced your tastes and behavior. The AP kids were more likely to listen to indie rock, dress hipsterish, and obsess over college. The standard kids were more likely to listen to rap, dress wiggerish, and not think a whole lot about college. Most people I’ve met my age seem to have had similar dynamics at their own schools. (The ones who didn’t have that experience went to far more diverse schools where race, not jock vs. nerd, defined social divisions.)

Front row vs. back row is a far better description of high school dynamics and how they shape the country than the jock-nerd dialectic. First popularized by journalist Chris Arnade, front row vs. back row illustrates the prominent class divide within white America.

The front row, according to Arnade, includes:

anybody who comes from an elite school, Princeton, Harvard, the Ivies or has a postgraduate degree, Ph.D. They’re mobile, global, and well-educated. Their primary social network is via college and career. That’s how they define themselves, through their job. And within that world intellect is primary. They view the world through a framework of numbers and rational arguments. Faith is irrational, and they see themselves as beyond gender. You can describe this using other frameworks, like “the Acela corridor” types.

Meanwhile, the back row:

Mostly they don’t have an education beyond high school degree and if they do it’s kind of cobbled together through trade schools and community colleges and smaller state schools. Their primary social network is via institutions beyond work such as family. And their community is defined geographically, meaning they generally don’t leave where they grew up. They might leave for 5-6 years to go to the military, take jobs that bring them to Alaska for a few years, but they’ll come back.

There are problems with seeing everything through this prism, but it does capture a lot of what’s going on in our country–from politics to culture. How you end up in life is often determined by how well you did in school and how you make your money. The front row kids excelled in school and took the credentialed path to prosperity. The back row kids didn’t so well, and took a different path. Some back row kids, such as successful salesmen, end up making a lot more money than their front row peers. But where they live, their attitudes, culture, and other traits puts them solidly in the back row category.

This dynamic explains our country a whole lot more than Revenge of the Nerds. But no one relies on it for their posting. Why? Because it doesn’t indulge in anyone’s fantasies. Nobody wants to define themselves as either a front row or back row kid. Front row implies you’re a suck-up striver and potentially a dreaded nerd. Back row implies you’re a moron. It also doesn’t make for a great conflict to meme about. Being against the front row indicates resentment against smart, hard-working people. Being against the back row indicates unbearable snobbery

In contrast, being a jock signals you’re really cool, get tons of babes, and are really athletic. Being against nerds means you’re up against lame, ugly incels who can’t even run straight. It’s much more satisfying to see the world this way.

Much of the online sphere is people living out fantasies. Whether it’s imagining they’re about to be a right-wing dictator or a brave guerrilla eliminating fascists, social media offers opportunities for ordinary folks to be something they’re not. Think of it like an MMORPG. The difference is that no one playing an MMORPG thinks they’re actually an Orc mage. In contrast, online politics people posters insist you believe they are former varsity football players who adopted the most anti-social ideology imaginable. The desire for fantasy and social validation explains the popularity of the jock-nerd dialectic.

But it’s time to put the silliness away. We’re no longer in high school. We don’t have to let Hollywood shape how we view the world. There are other ways of seeing events than a nerd being shoved in a locker. If one wants to rely on high school metaphors, better to use front row vs. back row.

Unlike the jock-nerd dialectic, it’s actually based in fact.