The Emperor's New Overclass

A lot of people (okay, my wife) ask me how I can be such a staunch feudalist and believer in a hierarchical society, yet rant about how much I despise the elitists who dominate modern culture. I think that the best way to explain this seeming paradox is that it is not elites that I object to, but the false elites of government, media, entertainment and education that are self-appointed and claim their right to tell the rest of us what to do without any justification beyond their own sense of entitlement and superiority. This sort of Gattacan attitude was best summed by Fr. Richard John Neuhaus this way:

The fact is that we now find ourselves with two alienated classes. It is alienation that distinguishes today’s overclass from the ruling classes of the past. A ruling class that discreetly disguised its role in deference to democratic sensibilities was by most Americans thought to be bearable and even admirable, especially as its privileges were thought to be derived from breeding and achievement. The overclass is something else. As the word suggests, it is marked by an overbearing quality; it presents itself as being over and against the American people but is quite unable to give any good reasons for its pretensions to superiority.

In Britain the phenomenon is much further gone with the rise of what Peter Osborne called the New Political Class, which replaced the old Establishment with something far more self-serving and destructive:

Though the eclipse of the Establishment is well-documented, the Political Class which replaced it is so far poorly understood. This is regrettable because the Political Class has come to occupy the same public space that the Establishment was supposed to until the end of the 20th century. This new class now stands at the pinnacle of the British social and economic structure. It sets social conventions, and demarcates the boundaries against which both public and private behaviour are defined. Unlike the old Establishment, the Political Class depends directly or indirectly on the state for its special privileges, career structure and increasingly for its financial support. This visceral connection distinguishes it from all previous British governing elites, which were connected much more closely to civil society and were frequently hostile or indifferent to central government. Until recent times members of British ruling elites owed their status to the position they occupied outside Westminster. Today, in an important reversal, it is the position they occupy in Westminster that grants them their status in civil society.

The Political Class is distinguished from earlier governing elites by a lack of experience of and connection with other ways of life. Its members make government their exclusive study. This means they tend not to have significant knowledge of industry, commerce, or civil society, meaning their outlook is often metropolitan and London-based. This converts them into a separate, privileged elite, isolated from the aspirations and the problems of provincial, rural and suburban Britain.

I think it was G K Chesterton who said that the old aristocrats had a solid function in society and only became unbearable when they started acting like aristocrats, but at least the old Establishment had a real stake in the country and the well-being of the people, and however soft the current members of the House of Lords were, at least the twigs of the older families could say that their grandfathers stood with Marlborough and Wellington. The new lot haven't anything much to fall back on except that they had some really good arguments in the student union back in Poly about how people couldn't be trusted to live their own lives.

But the new lot, of course, could for them.