The Charmed Caste

Americans know that they discriminate against one another by race, sex, religion, looks, income, etc. Yet they’re unaware that the United States has a caste system every bit as rigid and objectively odd as India’s — and it’s so subtle that almost no one notices it.

None of this is to say that the forms of bigotry that journalists and lawmakers focus upon aren’t real. It’s easier to be able-bodied than not, college-educated rather than not, straight instead of gay, have a clean record as opposed to appearing in a police database of a “gang affiliate.” Those drags on equity form a race-based U.S. caste system, which is bad for human beings and ought to be redressed. But they’re not the whole picture.

Missing from every analysis of otherizing is the caste that walks among us unidentified while in plain sight: the Charmed Ones.

Take two people from the same socioeconomic cultural class. Outwardly, they seem to sit exactly at the same spot on the ladder of hierarchy. Both are, for example, 44-year-old white men with similar looks and hobbies and personalities from the same neighborhood in Akron, from middle-class families, graduated in the second quarter of their University of Pennsylvania class with MBAs and went to work in the same department at the same hedge fund. They probably consider themselves to enjoy the same level of privilege and social currency.

But they’re not the same. One is Charmed, the other is not. When the Charmed one makes a mistake, he is likely to be forgiven or see his transgression brushed aside. They’re allowed to screw up. If he commits a sin too egregious to ignore, the authorities issue him a slap on the wrist. He’s allowed to move on.

The Uncharmed get breaks too. But not as often. Not as consistently. Not as big. The Uncharmed person is likelier to suffer the full weight of consequence.

The Charmed-Uncharmed divide is everywhere. Alex Rodriguez was suspended for a year and remains eligible for the Hall of Fame; Pete Rose was banned from baseball and Cooperstown for 35 years — the rest of his life. R. Kelly got repeated passes while Kesha’s career was effectively frozen. David Petraeus’ star still soars on cable news, though his breach of national security was at least as serious as Hillary Clinton’s, yet she partly lost the presidency for mishandling her emails.

Journalism, the world I know best, is full of similar examples.

Mike Barnicle, canned by the Boston Globe in 1998 for plagiarism and lying to his editors, went straight to the bigger New York Daily News and has been a senior contributor at MSNBC/MS Now since 2007. Media owners and editors corruptly protect people who are useful to the local power structure. Barnicle was a mascot for Boston’s old-guard Democrats, so he was Charmed. Jayson Blair was not. Blair was middle class, Black and without patrons.

Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin, caught jerking off on a group Zoom call with other New Yorker colleagues — including women — in October 2020, got canned by the magazine but soon returned to CNN eight months later. He’s a regular guest on cable news and recently published another bestselling book. Slick, connected and contrite enough to spin humiliation into a redemption arc, Toobin belongs to the Charmed caste. Andrew Cuomo, on the other hand, lost his bid for the New York mayoralty in large part due to accusations that he liked to grab at women’s butts. A star of the pandemic, now he’s over and done.

When I was fighting the Los Angeles Times and its secret corporate owner, the Los Angeles Police Department pension fund, I learned that the paper had forgiven business columnist Mike Hiltzik and brought him back a mere six months after he was caught sock-puppeting fake online identities in his blog to defend his own work and attack his rivals. Hiltzik: guilty of a serious ethical breach, Charmed. Me, smeared and fired by the Times, and then vindicated: not so much.

A certain kind of East Coast media dork has been hate-reading the soon-to-be-long-running feud between Olivia Nuzzi — the 32-year-old political writer ingenue at New York magazine caught showrunning a ridiculous zipless f*ck with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who is married, four decades her senior and absurdly a high-ranking government official — and her ex-fiance Ryan Lizza, a political writer who at 51 is also too old for her but not that too old. Nuzzi fessed up in a contract-fulfilling tell-half book, the emotionally cucked Lizza lashed out on his Substack with the shocking revelations that Kennedy likes the Special K that is not a cereal and that Nuzzi actually hooked up with former South Carolina Gov. Mark “Appalachian Trail” Sanford. None of this is interesting beyond doomscrolling toward economic collapse, not even the incestuous relationship between D.C. political writers and the politicians they’re supposed to be covering, not screwing. So if this is the first you’ve heard of it, don’t feel compelled to dig deeper.

I bring up the four-Z story for two reasons. One, opinion essays tend to work better when they peg to current news. Two, it’s another illustration of hidden power of the Charmed caste.

If Nuzzi were an average schmoe — schmoa? schmoette? — her career in journalism would be deader than those of the tens of thousands of reporters and editors and feature writers who have lost their jobs over the last decade despite not having personified the expressions “conflict of interest” and “presstitute” and “corrupt skank.”

Nuzzi is not normal. Because she was born into the Charmed caste, she doesn’t have to wait the usual one-year timeout before beginning her comeback. With her dignity fully in tatters and the media scandal still blazing away, she has already been invited to write for Vanity Fair even as the New York Post declares her a “glamorous blonde.” (Beauty standards may be more flexible in Australia.)

I promise to suck up to privilege. Then, please God, let me be reborn as a member of the Charmed caste.

Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.