Babbitt’s Revenge: How Snobbery Sinks Satire

by John-Michael Kuczynski

There’s a kind of falseness that great writing can’t survive. It isn’t vanity. It isn’t ego. It’s snobbery.

Snobbery isn’t just disdain. It’s performative disdain—a rejection of X in order to be seen favorably by Y and Z. You aren’t just saying, “That’s beneath me.” You’re saying, “That’s beneath me, and I want you to notice that I’ve noticed.”

You can be angry alone. You can be joyful alone. You can be bored, bitter, even contemptuous all by yourself. But you can’t be a snob alone. Snobbery is a group sport. It needs an audience. It needs a clique. It’s the emotion of someone who wants in—but wants in without seeming like they want in.

And when this social maneuvering gets into writing, it kills the work. Because it shifts the axis of truth: instead of writing from conviction, you’re writing to be approved of. You’re writing not to say something, but to signal that you know what not to say.

Take Sinclair Lewis and Babbitt. The novel is meant to be a satire of the bourgeois middle-American businessman—complacent, conformist, jingoistic. But Lewis's contempt is so thinly veiled, so obviously designed to keep his literary credentials intact, that the satire curdles. He wants us to laugh at Babbitt, to feel superior to him. But the joke doesn’t land—because Lewis doesn’t see Babbitt, not really. He’s too busy posturing. Too busy trying to make sure the right people nod along.

Compare that with Truman Capote. In life, Capote was a notorious snob—vain, flamboyant, hyper-conscious of status. But when he wrote In Cold Blood, all of that fell away. He wasn’t trying to impress the literary elite. He wasn’t writing to be accepted. He went to Kansas. He lived the material. He obsessed. The result is a book with problems, yes—but also a book with integrity. Because it came from fixation, not from performance.

The lesson is simple:

Great writing can be vain. But it cannot be obsequious.

You can write to be understood. You can write to be admired. You can even write to be feared.But if you write to be accepted, the work will not last.

Because writing, at its core, is about risk. And snobbery is about avoiding risk—about hiding behind the collective sneer. But readers can smell it. They may not name it. But they know when a writer is lying. And snobbery, however clever, is always a lie.

False notes betray the artist. And snobbery guarantees them.