Will Wilkinson links an interesting new study of how Germans of various political orientations differently value money and status. Jonah Goldberg, in passing, offers this:

Germans, it seems to me care more about status than Americans do.

I don’t know whether this is true or not, but it does seem a little odd to see Jonah saying it given how utterly, undisguisedly saturated in ressentiment contemporary conservative rhetoric is. Not toward the wealthy, mind you, so much as toward… well, toward people who use terms like ressentiment. There are strains of populist conservatism that sometimes seem like little more than an inferiority complex gussied up in ideological drag. Ironically, the prominent exponents of this rhetoric are themselves typically affluent folks with tony sheepskins, and its an open question how viscerally these urban elites really feel a deep, smoldering rage at… other urban elites. (I am willing to concede that Sean Hannity is probably perfectly sincere.) But they’re clearly playing to an audience that genuinely does feel this way, and gets something out of hearing the feeling articulated. In any event, this is such an overt and central part of modern conservatism that you’d think massive cognitive dissonance would afflict folks who in one breath rail against “class warfare” or “the politics of envy,” and in the next vent these very sentiments along a different dimension of status.