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| Visions & Revisions |
A Distant Mirror
Douglas McWhirter
08/02/2004
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Most societies, whether they will admit it or not, have aristocracies.
In the whole of human history, all societies have been unequal, and will
no doubt continue to be so, notwithstanding the sentiments of the Declaration of
Independence. The issue is: if all societies are unequal, what perception of the
people at the top does any society have? Sometimes it is a perception of them as
an aristocracy, as it developed in Europe. Sometimes it is an elite of party
functionaries, as was the case in communist Russia. Sometimes it is something
less clear than that, which I suppose is how it is in America.
It is
certainly true that before 1789, Europe had aristocracies. The history of Europe
since 1789 has been the survival and decay of those orders. It is also the case
that the United States was set up as a nation consciously rebelling against the
notion of an aristocratic social and political structure, although in the
fullness of time, there may have evolved something that some people might
consider an aristocracy. Another way of thinking about it might be to say that
all societies are unequal. It may be good, and it may be bad, but it is
incontrovertibly true. The American middle and working classes today view wealth and affluence the
same way their counterparts in 19th-century Britain did.
That is a difficult comparison to make. But certainly, American
working-class and middle-class people like to believe that if they work hard,
they can become the president or a millionaire. This is a society built around
the dream of upward social mobility. Describing it in those terms, one could say
that that same ethos existed in 19th-century Britain, when self-help was
certainly the prevailing ideology of the middle class, and to some degree, of
the working class. It is interesting that in the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher took
up what she called “Victorian values,” by which she meant perseverance, thrift,
hard work and ambition. Certainly as far as she was concerned, those virtues
were much more on display in the United States at that time than they were in
Britain.
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