The Death of Duty at the Hands of Bobos
You have one, you know
“A hereditary member of the British House of Lords complained that Prime Minister Lloyd George had created new Lords solely because they were self-made millionaires who had only recently acquired large acreages. When asked, “How did your ancestor become a Lord?” he replied sternly, “With the battle-ax, sir, with the battle-ax!”1
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Human Capital and Leaders
One of the biggest problems we now have is a lack of leaders. Grifters, opportunists, and even donors to this or that cause are a dime a dozen. But leaders who care about traditional American positions, about building the long-term health and strength of the country? Those are about as rare as unicorns. Perhaps rarer.
Why is that?
Bobos
The answer has much to do with human capital and mindset. Many Americans are good men, good fathers, etc. But not leaders. Even at the top, we are, as David Brooks put it in his Bobos in Paradise, “Bouergouise Bohemians.” To him, that meant the new upper class blended the “bourgeois world of capitalist enterprise to the hippie values of the bohemian counterculture.” In other words, even the upper classes that used to be composed of aristocrats born and bred to lead are now, essentially, shopkeepers on a grand scale that have degenerate sexual proclivities.
While Brooks created that term to define a very different sort of person, one generally on the yuppie “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” side of things that dominated popular politics for the past few decades, it remains somewhat true of “the right’s” top people today.
Take Elon Musk: He’s a capitalist who has spent his life building a vast fortune but is also known for his unconventional relationships and being edgy online. Peter Thiel is a far more ruthless fortune-builder but also a homosexual recluse. Vivek Ramaswamy is a typical striver who obviously cares a great deal about money, as shown by his cancer drug scam,2 yet also tries to be edgy online.
Elon is by far the best leader of the bunch, but he’s still no George Washington; the ability to build, direct, and lead a movement toward a certain goal isn’t quite there yet.
Kulaks
And that is at the top. A central fact of the American middle class that composes most of the GOP’s base of consistent support is that it is 100% bourgeoisie in its actions and outlook. That is to say, including even the upper-middle class that would once have been known as the country-leading gentry,3 it is conventional (vaguely conservative), materialistic, and doesn’t ever want to rock the boat, even when it really ought do so.
Don’t believe me? Just think if this portrait of a man is someone you know, whether in the middle or upper-middle class:
He’s relatively well off, living in a two- or three-story house with a yard he used to mow, but a gaggle of Mexicans now do. He works hard at some white-collar job or another where he works hard but lives in fear of Karen in HR discovering that he voted for Trump and doesn’t think that the statue of General Lee in his hometown should have been torn down by black-masked radicals. Perhaps he even owns his own small company but lives in fear of a major client or supplier hearing him say he doesn’t want his daughter dating a black guy. On the weekend, he used to spend time in the field hunting, hiking, or shooting, but now he just plays a round of golf and watches football; he’s annoyed with the increasingly bizarre commercials but puts up with it because he finds reading boring. He’s a nullity in his community and even neighborhood, spending all his time at the office, on the course, or on the couch rather than getting involved. But, of course, he also remains frustrated by nearly every decision made by the local powers that be. His wife used to be a pleasant belle but found out she could get away with being a harridan, and now is; she’s also gaining weight, but he won’t say anything.
This is the class that Karl Marx famously, if ungenerously, called a “sack of potatoes.”4 That class, the “kulaks” in Russia and the amorphous “middle class” in America, then went on to prove him right. The kulaks stood by as Lenin and Stalin killed over 10 million of them in the Holodomor, doing nothing even as they and their children starved to death.5 Or, in America, doing little as the Civil Rights Movement and the resultant Act turned their neighborhoods into warzones, pushing them ever further into the expensive suburbs with long commutes.6 It pays its taxes, does its work, and causes little trouble even when it ought be bringing out the pitchforks.
That’s not to say it has no virtues: a society doesn’t function without a great deal of people who work hard, want to build relative prosperity for themselves without rocking the boat, and act as normal people rather than radicals.
The problem is not that normal people are normal—that’s a good thing.
The problem is that, as David Brooks noted decades ago, the upper class, which would be the leadership class, generally adopted their outlook and became a degenerate, somewhat wealthier bourgeoise. The upper-middle, meanwhile, did much the same thing, though with less degeneracy. Neither now think or care about duty or leading, and indeed those who would be leaders became perverted sacks of potatoes ruled by bureaucrats.7
The Death of Duty
This shift is easy to discern in language. Specifically, the use of the words “job” and “duty.” As I spoke about with Stormy Waters before a recent podcast,8 a fascinating aspect of Lee’s Lieutenants by Douglas Southall Freeman is that General Lee, the consummate southern gentleman who led the Army of Northern Virginia, never said his subordinates “did a good job” or “bad job” in a given engagement, as we now do. Rather, General Lee would write that a man either “did his duty” or “failed in his duty.” Lee’s gentlemen officers didn’t have jobs; they had duties that they were expected to fulfill.
That might seem like a small difference, but it’s actually quite momentous, for it signals the shift from an aristocratic society to a managerial one composed of bureaucrats, managers, and a vast bourgeoisie.9 Whatever Carnegie’s virtues, his subordinates were always described as having a job rather than a duty, for that is what they had. I have written a great deal about the reasons for and history of that shift before,10 so I won’t do so again here. But, happen it did, and now men are seen as having jobs rather than duties.
That shift in expectation is a major one because of what it means politically. In the days of the battleaxe the peer references, days that lasted into the late nineteenth century, the wealthy were seen as having duties to their inferiors across the social scale. Even in America, the upper class, when composed of men like Morgan, understood that duty.11 Skidelsky, describing what such a relationship looked like for the gentry in his biography of the infamous Oswald Mosley, noted, of Mosley’s grandfather, a wealthy and powerful landed gentleman:
Mosley's adored and adoring grandfather was clearly a paternalist of the old school, who took his obligations and his rights very scriously. He was not without enterprise: the diversification from arable to livestock farming to counter the North American grain invasions of the 1880s saved the Rolleston economy for another generation, As a young man, he worked with his labourers in the field from dawn to dusk. He raised a prize-winning shorthorn herd, placed his pedigree bulls at the disposal of his tenants for a nominal fee, and remitted a portion of their rents in hard times.
He built cottages and a recreation hall for his workpeople, maintained a school for their children, an almshouse for the aged, a church for their spiritual health, and threw open his grounds to fêtes and fairs for their entertainment. His solicitude on one occasion took a positively Tolstoyan turn when he started baking a special wholemeal bread at the stone mill of Rolleston: ‘Standard Bread' provided Northcliffe's Daily Mail with one of its carliest journalistic stunts, and Rolleston was deluged for samples of the health-giving loaves.
This relationship is described across the histories of the period, even if the elder Mosley did his domestic duty better than most. Those of land, wealth, and power were expected to use it for the benefit of not just themselves, but the land as a whole. So rents were remitted in hard times rather than farms foreclosed upon at the first opportunity. Quality housing was built for the local poor, the church and its parson well looked after, justice administered fairly, and the interests of the locals considered when making decisions. In other words, the wealth of the gentry and aristocracy, or upper-middle and upper classes, was used not just for maintaining the great country houses, but on being charitable to those in the community who needed it and on funding careers in Parliament or the armed services. Many failed in that duty, but it was still the expectation.
So, when Lee and his cavaliers, whether the laconic and hard Stonewall Jackson, the flowery beau ideal JEB Stuart, or modern-day lord Wade Hampton III described and acted upon their duty, they had that High Tory view of duty in mind, at least to some extent. Hence their deep care for personal honor, their willingness to call out and punish those who didn’t do their duty, and the immense hardships and sacrifices they went through when all seemed lost. Duty demanded it and they were still living in a world of the battleaxe.
But soon that was gone with the wind, as indeed it already was amongst those Confederates who stayed behind the lines and profited off of wartime suffering by hoarding needed goods and exploiting those in need of them, or of the peers in England who used their titles to commit corporate fraud.12
And so what do we have now? Those upper-middle and upper classes that would have lived lives of service and duty in yesteryear are now mainly focused on comfort and fraud, with no sense of duty.
This can be seen in every aspect of life.
Corporate fraud occurs on a grand scale, with oligarchs like Sam Bankman Fried seeing it as the point. Degenerate Bobos spend their time on Epstein’s island rather than doing their duty, and indeed see themselves as having no duty to the general population other than to profit off of it. So the soldiers are sent to war, and those like Dick Cheney, George W Bush, or Barack Obama who are doing the sending and profiting off of it never did the fighting, and still less expect their children to do so. When “philanthropy” happens it is generally money sent to some useless cause, generally far abroad, for reasons of tax avoidance and public acclaim rather than a desire to aid those in need of help.13 What positions of prominence and “leadership” are obtained are typically used for Nancy Pelosi and Dan Crenshaw-style insider trading and profiting,14 not public service.
Though many better people than Crenshaw and Pelosi, Cheney and Obama exist, they’re uninvolved. They might vote, but other than that they do very little. Even if quite wealthy, even if they have enough to never work again, they stay uninvolved out of fear or disinterest.
And that is the big problem with the bourgeousification of society. The tendency of those who would be leaders to instead act like a “sack of potatoes,” whether the upper middle class that does that directly or the bobos that pair it with degeneracy, is a quite dire issue at present. In fact, it means that 1) those who do have and would understand duties don’t know of or want to fulfill them, and 2) those who need such leaders in their lives don’t have them.
The consequences play out in every area of life.
The medical field is plagued, for example, by private equity-controlled doctors thinking about profit rather than patient outcomes.15 Whereas doctors were once seen as members of a noble profession that had a well-known duty — first, do no harm — now they harvest organs from living patients16 and take checks cut from demons like the Sacklers who refer to their misled and dying patients as “pillbillies.”17
Similarly, the military was once seen as led by gentlemen of the Lee and Patton mold. Men who were professionals, cared deeply for their country and troops, and fought for a noble mission. Now, the military is seen as a locus of critical Marxist thinking, has lost nearly every war it has fought for decades, and is generally seen as fighting to aid political class corruption around the globe.
Then there’s Congress. Once seen as an honorable occupation for men who wanted to guide America on the correct path into the future, now it’s seen mainly as a place for corrupt incompetents to make themselves rich while using taxpayer funds to cover up their crimes.18 When not insider trading,19 the antics from the floor of it prove Lord Salisbury right when he referred to the legislature as a mob for which he had a great distaste.
In each case, and many more, the situation could be mostly solved by good men standing up for what is right. For what they ought stand up for. Instead, the typical villains of our day, the managers, the bureaucrats, the corrupt oligarchs, do whatever they want. Meanwhile, those who would do better sit back as it happens, focusing instead on the bourgeoisie's constant of money-making above all else. The sack of potatoes remains sitting, particularly the classes that would have led the charge in yesteryear.
For our society to change for the better, that must change as well. The thing people like about Trump is that, like Tiberius Gracchus,20 he is at least trying to do his duty and aid the dispossessed common man.21 That “aristocratic populism,”22 that thought of both the common man and the long term health of the country, is what defines Trump as a politician.
He is imperfect, of course, but he has the old virtues. He has used his money for more than recreation, spending it on a monumental, extremely expensive campaign to retake America. Instead of being browbeaten into silence, he says what needs to be said, even when doing so is difficult and dangerous. He’s put his life on the line, being shot in the ear in Butler, and responded with charisma and bravery rather than fear. And he has gone on an all-out blitz against the enemies of civilization rather than responding with mercy and reconciliation. He, at least, understands he has a duty to stand up for traditional America and the common man and is doing so.
Imagine if every town had a man like that. If instead of letting lawyers and real estate developers turn once pleasant towns and counties into strip malls, nail shops, and apartments, the local men of note would stand up and stop it. If instead of letting teachers teach CRT, trans the kids, and subvert parents, local men of note acted as Trump and poured their resources into stopping it. If parks were free of junkies, street corners free of homeless panhandlers, and beautiful architecture demanded of those who would develop (it’s not for nothing that Trump signed an EO demanding federal buildings be built in the beautiful Neoclassical style).23
We would be in a better world if such things happened, and many more. Most of the crosses we bear are either self-inflicted or easily avoidable. They aren’t inexorable.24 They can and should be defeated. All that takes is a little courage and a bit of wealth.
So, we have to end this rule by bobos, command by sacks of potatoes. It ends horribly, as we’ve seen, is unnatural, and ensures what needs doing is consistently avoided. In its place, America, and indeed the West generally, needs a new gentry, a revival of the sort of men of the battleaxe that used to rule, and did so quite well. Men like Lee, Hampton, Jackson, and Washington.25 Fortunately, we’re getting glimmers of that.26 But we must ensure it happens, or else the bureaucratic tyranny will remain…and perhaps be cemented for good.
As a final note, that’s why I spend so much time on this project. It makes little money (though those who do pay to subscribe are greatly appreciated and I’d love if more did so), and is a black pit of time, given the research and editing involved. But it is important. Americans must know where their country is headed, with South Africa, Rhodesia, England, and even the Rome of the Gracchi as our guides, so that we can avoid similar catastrophes. I see that as my duty, and it must be fulfilled. I hope all those reading think also about their duty to their people and country, and how they can fulfill it. The America of our ancestors was a land where nearly everyone did so. Let’s return to that.
Thank you again for reading and, as always, I’ll see you next week!
This story is told in many a place, this rendition of the quote here comes from: https://www.unz.com/isteve/with-the-battle-axe-sir-with-the-battle-axe/
On the rise of bureaucracy:
Read about it here:
This is described by Cannadine in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy
What is it about our modern conditions that would discourage the corruption of wealthy leaders? It's rough to accept an endless cycle of goodwill overtaking corruption and back again. It reeks of an ideology that doesn't work.
By the way, I was looking to comment about this article on X and didn't find it on your account.
We are currently in a cycle of Pareto's "circulation of elites." Flawed as they are, they are preferable to the status quo of the last 50 years.
It's hard not to be a kulak when the culture dictates wage slavery. Graft at the top is seen as part of the deal. But I see many folks waking up.
Thought experiment: Imagine if the USAID fire spills into the IRS, healthcare, and entitlements. Revenues are returned to local agoras. Then working people have more disposable income and capital. Will they invest in their community or lifestyle creep?