The Current Aristocracy-Lite America

In their weekly The Conversation blog, Gail Collins and David Brooks discuss aristocracy and meritocracy in America. The discussion is spurred by this quote by Edmund Burke:

To be bred in a place of estimation; to see nothing low and sordid from one’s infancy; to be taught to respect one’s self; to be habituated to the censorial inspection of the public eye; to look early to public opinion; to stand upon such elevated ground as to be enabled to take a large view of the widespread and infinitely diversified combinations of men and affairs in a large society; to have leisure to read, to reflect, to converse; to be enabled to draw and court the attention of the wise and learned, wherever they are to be found; to be habituated in armies to command and to obey; to be taught to despise danger in the pursuit of honor and duty; to be formed to the greatest degree of vigilance, foresight, and circumspection, in a state of things in which no fault is committed with impunity and the slightest mistakes draw on the most ruinous consequences; to be led to a guarded and regulated conduct, from a sense that you are considered as an instructor of your fellow-citizens in their highest concerns, and that you act as a reconciler between God and man; to be employed as an administrator of law and justice, and to be thereby amongst the first benefactors to mankind; to be a professor of high science, or of liberal and ingenious art; to be amongst rich traders, who from their success are presumed to have sharp and vigorous understandings, and to possess the virtues of diligence, order, constancy, and regularity, and to have cultivated an habitual regard to commutative justice: these are the circumstances of men that form what I should call a natural aristocracy, without which there is no nation.

Brooks then says this:

Then finally there is our ruling class today: Ivy-League educated, meritocratic, circumspect, prudent and ambitious. Our ruling class has high SAT scores. It is tolerant and diverse. It is pleasant and it is produced by a system that is infinitely more fair and more just. I’d prefer to live under our meritocracy than under the aristocratic systems of the Wise Men or the Founders. And yet I don’t know about you, but something has been lost, some character formula, some aristocratic grandeur.

[Emphasis added mine] I suppose that’s true when you compare the early days of the Republic to the present but there’s still much to be desired, as Brooks says at the end. A lot of success on who you know, expensive schools, and money. It’s true that skill shines through better than it used to but it’s still very very hard for the smart but poor to rise above poverty or the middle class, despite talent equal or better than their peers.