Why do people not punish useless status-seeking behavior?
They do, whenever such behavior seems like it's bound to fail. However, when it looks like it will succeed (and thus bring high status to whoever is practicing it), an attempt to punish would mean a declaration of war against someone of high status, which is usually not a smart move.
Do they assume that swaggerers might have social clout to match their personalities and are afraid of having them as enemies?
Often yes, as explained above, but it's usually not done consciously. Most status-related behaviors are instinctive, and the conscious mind only invents rationalizations for them (which can be of many different kinds).
The other day, someone did something I didn't expect. It was something many people have done before; something that I thought of as very normal, but that I in no way understood and had not predicted.
As I said, this had happened many time before, so I wrote it off as "me not understanding people" or "people are weird" for a second, like I usually do, before realizing that "bad at" really means "lacking basic knowledge", which I had never realized before.
And then I thought "I should ask someone who is different from me why people do that, and eventually someone will have an answer."
But many people will have many more questions like this. So, what have you observed people doing time and time again, but never understood? Or something that you only understood after a long time or asking someone about it?
And can Less Wrong tell us, not necessarily why (I for one can make up evolutionary psychology fairy tales all day if I want) but what conscious thought process occurs behind these events?