Class In America - Equality Is But A Chimera, And Without An Aristocracy The Nation Is Lost

Bradford Cabot was the last in a line of Cabots and Davenports, New England families who had come to America on the Mayflower, settled and populated Boston, Salem, and Gloucester, and made millions in shipbuilding, the Three Cornered Trade, and from canny investments on Wall Street. 

The Cabots had lived in the same Beacon Hill townhouse for two centuries.  In fact it had been built by Hiram Cabot in 1725 and had quickly become the center of Boston Anglo-American colonial society.  The Cabots were royalists of the first order, recognized and favored by the king, and protected and promoted by the Crown, prospered from their many enterprises, 

They hedged their bets during the Revolution and came out of the event intact - recognized this time by the new American authorities as instrumental to the prosperity of the region and the new nation.  Their allegiance to England was forgotten largely because Adalbert Cabot had been well-known to the Adams family and since they represented the same aristocratic values - honor, virtue, fidelity, courage, and compassion - the political divide was never an issue.

The Cabots were true to their word and were the captains of the new American industry.  Their shipbuilding, trading, and financial empires, now American instead of British, fostered wealth and prosperity from Boston to Charleston. 

This New England American aristocracy was at the center of the American class system long after the Revolution, and well into the Twentieth Century.  The Cabots, Lodges, Davenports, and Potters were all educated at Yale, had second and third homes on Nantucket and St. Moritz, and were the standard for sophisticated, cultured, European living.  Their homes were appointed with Chippendale, Townsend, and Goddard furniture, tables were set with English bone china and Revere silver, carpets were from Persia and Kashmir, and portraits were done by Copley and Gilbert Stuart. 

It wasn't until late mid-century that the class landscape began to change.  Yale in the mid-Sixties under the deanship of Inslee Clark opened its doors, and the thousands of Jews who had clamored to no avail to break through the ethnic glass ceiling, were now admitted.  Once the sluice gates were opened, the university became the diverse agglomeration it now is.  

The Old Guard, the Old Blues, the aged alumni still represented the old upper crust, but knew their time had come.  They fussed and fumed over the new and careless 'democratization' of Yale, withdrew their financial support, but in the end demurred, lived quietly in Aspen, on the Vineyard, and Palm Beach, and said little. 

Is class finally over and done with in America? sociologists asked.  Have we finally reached a flat, equal society?  Have the equity, diversity, and inclusivity efforts evened out the final rough edges?

Perhaps, and if one looks at American society through this particular progressive lens, then one sees inter-racial, inter-ethnic integration, the demission of heterosexuality and the emergence of socio-democratic gender fluidity, and the withering criticism of the capitalist state and promotion of a more socialist equitability. 

Look a bit further and this rosy vision is anything but accurate.  No society in the millennia of human settlements has ever been socially flat. Communities always find a way to hierarchically order themselves.  Flatness, equality, and similarity do not appeal. 

Dostoevsky's character Ivan Karamazov said it best when the challenged the gospel.  Jesus had sold the world a bill of goods during the Temptation in the Desert.  By announcing that man cannot live by bread alone, he set the stage for the creation of the Church, a self-arrogated, elitist, monarchist institution that ruled the duped faithful with the promise of salvation.  The masses want only Magic, Miracles, and Authority, said Ivan and the Vatican provided these simple vaudevillian tricks to keep the flock in line.

 

Christianity itself began as a flat religion.  Paul and his evangelist cadres met with the first believers in the homes of Ephesians, Colossians, and Romans; but within a century a hierarchy of priests, bishops, and archbishops had been established.  By the fourth century when Constantine put a stop to the doctrinal bickering within the church, the way was set for a Christian emperor, and then a series of popes. 

America is now a chaotic, disassembled, disorderly place.  Rather than become the harmonious, well-adjusted, tolerant, and communitarian place progressives had hoped, it is a divided, divisive, hostile, and rancorous place.  The old aristocracy which was the repository for high cultural values and which set the standard for the old Roman precepts of honor, courage, and patriotism set forth by the educator Cato the Elder has disappeared and with it the ethos it espoused.  There is no longer an ethical center to America.  It is no more than a grasping, inchoate rabble organized into identity groups of race, gender, and ethnicity, each grappling for power, influence and authority. 

 

When the aristocracy disappeared, the nation became rudderless, a ship of state foundering on unfamiliar seas. 

Emmanuel de Rochambeau-Poitiers, last Viscount of Tours, always claimed that without the aristocracy, France would fall apart, lose any sense of cultural and historical identity, and would become a jamboree of incidental citizens.  The aristocracy - any aristocracy - was there to set, uphold, and maintain the highest cultural standards.  There is no shame in being respectful and obedient to such cultural pre-eminence. 

To whom do Americans look for cultural, moral, and ethical guidance?  The secular institutions of the state?  Trust in Congress is at its lowest level in decades. Wall Street is suspect for its predatory, exploitative practices.  Evangelical churches have lost their Christian mission and become political shills.  The Catholic Church lost whatever moral standing it had in the worldwide sexual abuse scandals.  

Without an aristocracy, and without a solid, universally agreed upon ethos, it is not surprising that the country is foundering.  The strong, imperial-minded leaders of the world - Putin, Xi, and Erdogan - have created a socio-political aristocracy.  Putin looks to Russia's czarist empire for inspiration and meaning, and he intends to restore its glory, power, and universal reign.  Xi of China looks to its imperial past, a history of imperial dynasties, Confucianism, and moral certitude.  Erdogan of Turkey regards the Ottoman Empire as his inspiration - one of the world's most powerful and extensive reigns which brought order, culture, and political stability. 

These regimes are modern political aristocracies to which ordinary citizens look for guidance, insight, and education.  These countries are centered, confident, and forward looking.  America by comparison is a soulless, center-less, drifting society concerned more with individual identity, and the righteousness of race, gender, and ethnicity as the only guiding principles than with cohesion, ethos, and concentrated nationalism. 

Americans admire the likes of Gates, Jobs, Musk, Buffet, Bezos, and Zuckerberg - billionaires who have mined the American lode for all it is worth - and look up to the stars and starlets of Hollywood, the cultural center of the nation, but one of temporality, faux beauty, and pretention. 

Yet even that is not enough to give some cohesion and center.  Americans are still hollering with hatred of Donald Trump or for the impossibly Utopian, idealistic, and political dreams of the Left; or are sedate and settled - it is simply too much, all this chaos, so better let it pass.  Either a nation of St. Vitus' dancers, whirling dervishes, and political mountebanks, or a mired, hopeless, and fearful congregation. 

The old aristocracy is done, gone, buried, and forgotten and nothing is there to replace it.  There are no universal high standards to be followed, no cultural authenticity, no historical legacy, no sense of place and meaning. 

Alexander Hamilton had always been concerned about the chaotic, unformed nature of the American electorate and fought long and hard for an intermediary between the masses and the decision makers of government.  He won, and the Senate was created; but even he in his skepticism about popular democracy could never have imagined the raw, venal brutality of American society today. 

Bradford Cabot looked around his library, still the same comforting place of leather-bound books, sculptures, framed maps of early America, and vases of rhododendrons and azaleas, and decided to light a late Spring fire in the fireplace.