All Elites Are Not Created Equal

In Defense of the Old Order

Welcome back, and thanks for reading! Today’s article is something of a follow-up of my article on building dynasties, which was a book review that was timed alongside the release of Leaving a Legacy by my friend Johann Kurtz. This article answers a criticism I got in response to that article and the related podcast, with a defense of the old, gentlemanly elite compared to our current elite. Additionally, this post is primarily for paid subscribers. Paid subscribers: thank you so very much for your support and patience; all those who are not yet paid subscribers: while some of this article is free, please subscribe for just a few dollars a month to support this project, get access to audio episodes, and read this article in full. As always, please tap the heart to “like” this article if you get something out of it, as that is how Substack knows to promote it! Listen to the audio version of this article here:

[AUDIO] All Elites Are Not Created Equal

In the wake of my recent article and podcast on dynasty, one critique I received is that it was based on a false premise: in the view of he who (privately) responded negatively, the idea that the Old Elite (which I have previously written about and described as rule by gentlemen) was in any way more pro-social or societally a force for good was incorrect, and the landed elite of old was just as rapacious, predatory, and devoid of pro-social feeling as our present plutocrats and oligarchs.

Perhaps such a view is true if confined to Russia; the tsars’ aristocrats were, as David Spring shows quite well in European Landed Elites in the 19th Century, generally as awful and rapacious as most of its present oligarchs. So too were most of the French aristocrats in the years of the Sun King through the French Revolution, though those in the Vendée were the exception that prove the rule.¹

However, such counterexamples obscure much. For one, the old elite I praise is the Anglo-Norman elite and those in the Anglosphere who followed in its style. That is to say, a landed elite composed of those who had been ensconsed in their pre-eminent position for at least a couple of generations before being treated as part of the group. The Virginia gentry, the pre-Edward VII British peerage, and the gentry of roughly the same period are the prime examples.

The simple fact is that such a group (henceforth just called the “Old Elite") did behave much better than our present elite. It was generally much more involved in service to the nation, less rapacious, and of better character. Such made it, on the whole, a far better ruling elite. In this article, I’ll show as much.