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| Visions & Revisions |
A Distant Mirror
Douglas McWhirter
08/02/2004
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Affluent Americans today hold some things in common with the British
aristocrats of the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Like their 19th-century
counterparts, the United States’ upper classes exert tremendous influence over a
global economic imperium, defined by shifting modes of wealth creation, war and
wealth-based political privilege.
As the author of the definitive historical
study, The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, David Cannadine, a
professor of British history at the Institute of Historical Research in London,
offers insights into the lives of the British imperial elite, from their
struggles to maintain affluence across generations to their philanthropic
activities.
The decline of the British aristocracy was inevitable.
Things like this cannot be determined in a rigidly iron way. That said,
the fact remains that it was fairly likely that an aristocratic order based on
deference, agriculture and a certain form of nondemocratic politics was not
going to flourish in a world where deference is undermined, where agriculture is
replaced by industry and where oligarchic politics are superseded by democratic
politics. So while I do not want to say that it was inevitable, I think that
from the 18th century onward, the going did get increasingly harder for the
aristocracy. As a result, they are much less powerful now than they were 300
years ago.
Affluent Americans today are a nontraditional aristocracy.
There has never been an aristocracy in the United States in the sense
that it existed in Europe. Most people in the United States today think of
themselves as middle class. I have never met anybody in this country who
described himself as upper class.
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