At the moment Wall Street and Silicon Valley are disproportionately white and Asian American, but this reflects the relatively low socioeconomic status of many Black and Hispanic Americans, a status shared by the Scots Irish white poor in greater Appalachia (who are left out of “diversity and inclusion” efforts because of their “white privilege”). Elite banks and businesses are desperate to prove their commitment to diversity. As recently as the 1970s, an acquaintance of mine who worked for a major Northeastern bank had to disguise the fact of his Irish ancestry from the bank’s WASP partners. The good part is that, “Compared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias.” However, “ Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.” Here’s how he explains these cultural cues:Ĭompared with previous American elites, the emerging American oligarchy is open and meritocratic and free of most glaring forms of racial and ethnic bias. What’s new today is that these highly exclusive local urban patriciates are in the process of being absorbed into the first truly national ruling class in American history-which is a good thing in some ways, and a bad thing in others. While American society was not formally aristocratic it was hierarchical and class-ridden from the beginning-not to mention racist and ethnically biased. In short, a historical narrative which describes a fall from the yeoman democracy of an imagined American past to the plutocracy and technocracy of today is fundamentally wrong. This analysis pushes back against the myth of America’s egalitarianism in its earlier years and also revises the current wisdom about the nature of what he calls today’s “overclass.” If a listing in the Social Register was the badge of membership for the old elite, ownership of an advanced degrees from one of the Ivy + universities serves this role for the new elite. In contrast, the new elite is a cosmopolitan national entity with its own distinctive identity markers. They shared a white, P rotestant, and Anglo-Saxon (or at least Northern European) culture, but they often emphasized different components of this culture and worked hard to develop a distinctive local literary tradition and upper-class accent. The key to this story is that the elite used to be plural - a set of local elites in cities across the country. In this piece, Lind provides a rich analysis of the history of the American elite. This post is a lovely essay by Michael Lind, which was recently published in Tablet magazine.
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