Normative evaluations of how societies are changing have been found to be at the heart of explaining recent electoral transformations. Notably, supporters of radical right and left parties are characterized by a deep sense of pessimism about the future of society, beyond egotropic worries about their own position. However, we lack evidence on which specific developments are perceived as pointing in the wrong direction. In this paper, we argue that changes to the social status hierarchy are at the core of the pessimism underlying radical voting. If voters' perceptions of actual changes to the social order contrast with their normative beliefs on who deserves social status or recognition, this can explain their political disaffection. We use open-ended survey questions, fielded in an original survey in Germany, to assess people's normative evaluations of changes to the social hierarchy. Using word embeddings, we estimate the discrepancy between voters' ideal and their actually perceived notions of changing social orders. Descriptively, we find that some groups are quite universally deemed to deserve more (workers, women) or less recognition (politicians, the rich). However, we also detect clear differences between socially progressive and conservative voters on the deservingness of natives, migrants, sexual minorities or academics. Furthermore, regression analyses of our word embedding scores show that clear ideas of 'undeserving winners' tend to predict both radical right and left voting. In contrast, worries about 'more deserving losers' or underprivileged groups are aligned with radical left - but not right - voting.