The Way Back. F. H. Buckley
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explanation, but one which I nevertheless provide in Chapter 13. We are hard-wired to seek to pass on our genes, and this means that, like Deuteronomy, we distinguish between strangers and brothers.2 We’ll be willing to incur enormous sacrifices for children and near relatives, but for strangers to whom we are not related we have only a constrained sympathy. What that will leave us with is a world of family ties and the thick nepotism where sons succeed fathers in politics, business, Hollywood, art, and music.
The bequest motive is one of the strongest human impulses, stronger even than the instinct for self-preservation. We read of parents who give up their lives to save their children, and marvel at this. But would we have done anything else? We were told we were members of a “me” generation, but it’s not so. Instead, we sacrifice for our children, only dimly aware of the costs we incur in doing so, unless perhaps we recall how our parents sacrificed for us. If we should then want to see our children end up on top, in an aristocratic society, is that so very surprising?
The second needed thing, for an aristocracy, is relative preferences. We have absolute preferences when we want something, and relative preferences when we also want more of it than the other fellow. And as we wish well for our children, given the bequest motive, we would want them to fare better than other people’s children, given relative preferences. We would be willing to accept a poorer world, so long as our children end up on top. We might even prefer a world that leaves our children worse off, so long as everyone else fares worse still.
That’s enough to kick-start an aristocracy. But for an aristocracy to persist over time, its members must be able to identify each other and form an alliance against the new men who wish to rise. Through their schools, their neighborhoods, their politics, they must be able to recognize each other. And of course the members of America’s elite can do so. They’ll have gone to Harvard, not Podunk U. They’ll live in Wesley Heights D.C., and not Manassas VA. They’ll subscribe to liberal politics and abhor the Tea Party. In all of this they’ll recognize each other as members of a New Class that constitutes the country’s elite and frames its policies, and in this way a society of peers and peasants has replaced Horatio Alger’s country of equal opportunity.
Rising inequality in American has been blamed on the “one percent,” the people in the top income centile making more than $400,000 a year. For those making less than that, bumper stickers on cars proclaim their drivers to be members of the 99 percent. The distinction between the two groups is useful, since income tax data permits us to identify the one percent. We know what they earn, what their jobs are and how they came by their money. They can serve as proxies for inequality generally. In truth, however, the one percent includes a very disparate group of people, the entrepreneurial gazillionaire and the car dealer making just a bit more than $400,000 a year. But it also includes members of the New Class whose unearned privileges are more questionable, who were given an unjust head start.
What I would do, then, is direct attention away from the super-rich whose wealth is derived from their entrepreneurship, their energy, their ideas, their basketball skills, their Hollywood films. As members of the one percent, they were the villains of the Occupy Wall Street movement of several years back. Yet there is nothing intrinsically objectionable about a one percent. By definition, every society has one. Let us turn, then, from the risk-taking entrepreneurs who constitute the very wealthiest of Americans, the 0.1 or the 0.01 percent, to the risk-averse members of the New Class, the one, two or three percent, the professionals, academics, opinion leaders and politically connected executives who float above the storm and constitute an American aristocracy. They oppose reforms that would make America more mobile, and have become the enemies of promise.
Every society has its upper classes, richer and more powerful than the common herd. In America, however, they form a tighter group, with their distinctive set of jobs, neighborhoods and beliefs. By comparison, the House of Lords and Académie Française are more democratic. In our personal habits, there’s also a widening chasm between America’s New Class and those below it on the scale. Charles Murray and Robert Putnam tell us that America’s middle class increasingly mimics the underclass in its destructive vices, such as its high unwed birth and divorce rates, that are apt to condemn one to poverty.3 Crucially, America’s New Class wields a vastly disproportionate political power, almost unmatched in the First World, and supports policies that burden the Ragged Dicks. If we’re less mobile than we used to be, that’s importantly the reason. Technological change, globalization, genetic advantages, even greed, are to be found everywhere, and can’t explain why we are more immobile than the rest of the First World. What those countries lack, however, is an elite with the clout of America’s New Class.
The New Class is apt to think it has earned its privileges through its merits, that America is still the kind of meritocracy that it was in Ragged Dick’s day, where anyone could rise from the very bottom through his talents and efforts. Today’s meritocracy is very different, however. Meritocratic parents raise meritocratic children in a highly immobile country, and the Ragged Dicks are going to stay where they are. We are meritocratic in name only. What we’ve become is Legacy Nation, a society of inherited privilege and frozen classes.
I do not say that America’s aristocrats consciously seek to live in an immobile society, but only that they act so as to bring it about. Between our desires and our actions a curtain is demurely drawn, and to know ourselves requires what Alain Finkielkraut calls La Rochefoucauld’s pitiless ne ques.4 What we take for virtue is frequently nothing else but the concurrence of several actions which our own industry or fortune contrives to bring together. Humility is often nothing else but a false submission that we employ to dominate others. What men call friendship is often nothing else but a prudent reciprocity of interests. While he loudly decries immobility, the self-satisfied member of the New Class nevertheless supports policies that make us less mobile. That’s bad enough, but his self-deception only makes it worse.
With greater self-awareness, the American aristocrat might recognize that the barriers we have erected to income mobility are often unjust. The most obvious of these is a broken educational system. Our K–12 public schools perform poorly, relative to the rest of the First World. As for our universities, they’re great fun for the kids, but many students emerge on graduation no better educated than when they first walked in the classroom door. What should be an elevator to the upper class is stalled on the ground floor. Part of the fault for this may be laid at the feet of the system’s entrenched interests: the teachers’ unions and the professoriate of higher education. Our schools and universities are like the old Soviet department stores whose mission was to serve the interests of the sales clerks and not the customers. Why the sales clerks should want to keep things that way is perfectly understandable. The question, however, is why this is permitted to continue, why reform efforts meet with such opposition, especially from America’s elites. The answer is that aristocracy is society’s default position. For those who stand at America’s commanding heights, social and income mobility is precisely what must be opposed, and a broken educational system wonderfully serves the purpose.
America prides itself on being the country of immigrants. There’s a bit of puffery in this, since there’s a higher percent of foreign-born residents in Australia and Canada, and America ranks only a little ahead of Great Britain and France. Still, the country historically has been the principal haven for waves of immigrants (not to mention the 15 percent of people who were here already here as Native Americans or who were brought here as slaves). Before the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, the new arrivals added immeasurably to the country’s economy, culture, and well-being. Since then, however, the quality of the America’s immigrant intake has declined. We’re still admitting the stellar scientists of years gone by, but on average immigrants are less educated than they were in the past, or even than Americans are today (not the highest of bars). We’re also incurring the opportunity cost of a broken immigration system, in the high quality immigrants we don’t admit, and who either stay home or move to more immigrant-friendly countries. That burdens the country, but it’s very Heaven for an American aristocracy, which can hire cheap household labor without worrying about competition from high-skilled