http://www.nationalreview.com/node/437507/print The Bright Side of 2016
A catastrophe, sure, but also an opportunity
By Kevin D. Williamson — July 6, 2016
If you’ve studied the history of caste in India or nobility in Europe, or of hereditary royals anywhere, then you’ve probably asked yourself the same question I have: How in hell did they get away with it?
The is the year when the rest of the world gets to ask that about the United States.
One of the first things you’ll learn about caste if you look into it seriously is that it’s a lot less like a rigid top-ten list and a lot more like West Side Story: In terms of absolute social ranking, Tony and Bernardo might be just about equal, but that doesn’t really matter. Of course, you learn the same thing when looking into European nobility and aristocracy, and into the practical situations of “absolute” monarchs who were anything but. Reality is complicated. But the fact that these ruling elites were not absolute — that they had real economic, political, military, and social challenges — makes the length and breadth of their rule more surprising rather than less.
Ruling elites across time and cultures begin to look a little bit alike, at least in broad strokes. They generally are effectively hereditary, even when they are not formally so; imperial China maintained a rigorous civil-service examination system for more than 1,000 years (kéju) but standardized testing did no more to prevent the emergence of a partially hereditary class of bureaucrat-scholars in Luoyang than it has in the Harvard-to-Washington-to-Wall Street cursus honorum. Like our Clinton dynasty, they manage to acquire substantial wealth while rarely if ever engaging in anything that looks to ordinary people like work. (The ancient guidance for Brahmins is to avoid occupations that require “fatiguing the body,” but they were also expected to maintain themselves in respectable poverty.) They effectively operate under a different body of both civil and criminal law than do the peons who serve them.
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