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I think you have this all completely backwards. There are rarely progressive "anointed groups" where the group is as narrowly defined as you say. There is only the hated group. The most central example of your examples is the "jocks". Jocks have always been progressives central enemy, because they represent successful (now white centrally in the prog mind) men, particularly those forming families. Successful men dont care for their policies.
Now, initially, Progressives tried to target this demo with their "working man" schtick. But it turned out quite quickly that men actually working and married to a girl from their hometown don't care much for the crazy stabby stabby guy on the corner. So they were quickly abandoned by the movement as "idiots" and "class traitors". In the end its always a movement of the outliers against the core. Because, why would the core ever vote to give their money to bums, criminals, and people sitting in ivory towers "thinking" for a living?
That is why much of progressive fiction is just complete fiction. Revenge of the Nerds, while a fine movie, does not represent high school nerds in any way. HS nerds can't assemble a computer from scratch, nor can they play an awesome concert. Heck, even the crowning achievement of that movie is rape by deception, which is out of the actual HS nerd's playbook. In real life, the jocks get with the prom queen, and get good on the SAT, then go to a way better college than "Adams" then marry a hot girl from there; whereas the nerd does like D&D, but he also ends up as a bedpan changer.
And, of course, this also reflects the anti-police sentiment that runs through now. These are successful men who are, in particular, doing it outside the progressive-approved system of success (college in a specific indoctrination area) which cannot be tolerated (see also engineers, for now). Its all the same.
Now, I think your post is a useful jumping off point for discussion, but I also think its wrong. Its all about who the enemy is, and what they think is the best weapon of the current day to wield against it. It being success and family formation.
I wasn't there to have a personal historical anecfote, but I think how we remember the canonical "jocks v. nerds" conflict is heavily skewed because, to a large extent, the nerds won in the huge financial jackpot of the tech industry starting in probably the late 80s.
Although I think the categories are also poorly defined (sometimes to sway arguments being made): at least in my experience most of the sharpest, most technical people I've worked with manage to find enough time to stay at least moderately physically fit, so I don't think it's as well-defined a boundary as is frequently presented.
I think in the 1980s nerds and geeks were rather undifferentiated in the public mind. Geeks would have had intellectual interests, but there were a couple of things that separated them from nerds. First, those interests were generally useful skills — building things, fixing things, useful intellectual skills like math and science and later computers. Second, that they actually became quite skilled and those things — they could actually build a rocket model, do a chemical synthesis, write a program or speak a language. Third, they were, while somewhat introverted and awkward, not completely inept at social relationships. Nerds were the ones hyper interested in useless trivia. They’d memorize the call numbers on starships, they’d learn all the lore of their favorite TV shows and movies, they’d be interested in medieval history or something. If those things required skill, they probably wouldn’t be all that good at it. There is a bit of a difference between a Nerd who can quote S2E5 of Babylon 5 from memory and a Geek who can speak Korean because he’s just into learning a language.
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The "nerds" that won those financial jackpots have little to do with fictional portrayals of nerds, because Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, etc were not unable to secure prom dates. Larry Ellison was a tennis player and popular at South Shore.
I don't know if it was true, but Gates has an anecdote about how it took him two weeks to work up the courage to ask a girl to prom, and she turned him down.
Jobs was more hippie than nerd; Wozniak was the nerd. I have no idea if either had a prom date.
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It's not about high school nerds; it's about college nerds. Doesn't represent them either, of course.
I uncharitably suspect that one is pure Hollywood.
LOL, no. The successful jock gets with the prom queen, marries a hot girl, and ends up a managing director at Morgan-Stanley (actual current job of one of the QBs in my high school), the successful nerd hires that guy (or at least one of his subordinates) to manage his money. The bedpan changers are drawn from the stoners and just regular dumb people.
Nerd != Smart
Successful nerd is just a smart jock that doesn't prioritize his sports too much most of the time.
No, there's plenty of other differences. The jock is likely to be extraverted while the nerd is likely to be introverted. Even if the nerd isn't either of the 1980s non-athletic nerd stereotypes (fat slob or very pale skinny dude), any sports he does are less likely to be team sports than the jock; a high-school jock, after all, is not a jock just because he engages in physical activity, but because he does it in the school teams. The successful jock is probably good at schoolwork; the nerd is probably actually interested in one or more academic subjects.
When you start going down from the top jocks, they meet the "dumb jock" stereotype more.
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This is like if you went to Beverly Hills High School or a school on the north side of Chicago.
The average QB becomes an electrician or pool repair guy. Which those jobs can pay well if independent. The average nerd has some middle office white collar job.
I went to school in semi-rural Frederick County, Maryland. (though it's not semi-rural any more)
Of course there are and were less successful jocks and nerds; before the tech booms, if you weren't in Silicon Valley, a middle class white collar job was indeed what a nerd could expect. That's way better than "bedpan changer" though. And the stereotypical ordinary jock job was sales, which has a rather large range.
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