What the Bloody Hell Is Wrong with You Americans? By Alex Massie. Foreign Policy, December 4, 2012.
Massie:
There
is no novelty in observing that much of American culture thirsts for dynasties
and aristocracy to an extent and with a prominence that is sometimes hard to
find in the United Kingdom. To cite Mark Twain again: “We have to be despised
by somebody whom we regard as above us or we are not happy; we have to have
somebody to worship and envy or we cannot be content. In America we manifest
this in all the ancient and customary ways. In public we scoff at titles and
hereditary privilege but privately we hanker after them, and when we get a
chance we buy them for cash and a daughter.”
Can
anyone who has spent any time in Washington doubt the abundant good sense of
this? To say nothing of the celebrity of royalty, the drawbacks of an elected head of state have long since become apparent. The imperial presidency has been
a sorry fact of the American existence for decades now. How can it be otherwise
when the mere mortal elected to the presidency is treated – at least in terms
of the expectations with which the office is lumbered – as some kind of
priest-king?
Not
that it ends there in Washington. Congress has become a family business in
which promotion is based on genes more than ability. The British House of Lords
may be an anachronism, but at least it recognizes inherited power as, well, an
anachronism. From the Kennedys to the Pauls via the Udalls, the Murkowskis, the
Jacksons, and many others, political privilege in modern America often seems to
have become a matter of inheritance.
More
broadly, the elites are, in some respect, more completely isolated from the
American mainstream than at any point in the nation’s history. Witness, for
example, the widespread sense on Wall Street that President Barack Obama was
implacably hostile to America's super-rich. Witness too how much more ink is
spilled debating affirmative action than contemplating legacy admissions to
America’s greatest universities. Anything that inconveniences the elite is,
apparently, “class warfare” (albeit of a kind real class warriors might
struggle to recognize).
The
divide between the privileged and the rest has become disturbingly wide.
Whatever its other strengths, the rise of the “meritocracy” also fosters the
writing of rules and norms that sustain and protect those already happily
advantaged. It is a form of regulatory capture that, amid much else, downplays
the impact of dumb or otherwise unearned luck. As writers such as Ross Douthat
and David Brooks have argued, if elites convince themselves their advantages
are the product of nothing more than hard work, one might not expect them to be
animated by an excess of old-fashioned, aristocratic noblesse oblige.
One
need not be a hardcore leftist to sometimes wonder if the fascination for
foreign royalty (and other, lesser, homegrown celebrities such as the
Kardashians) is a means by which the common people may be distracted from
recognizing the reality of their own, depressingly humdrum lives. Never mind
any of that, look, there's a new and shiny royal baby on the way!
