America & Class War: Conservatives Should Pursue Peace with the Coastal Meritocracy

In 1821, the 19th-century French intellectual Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugière, baron de Barante, wrote On the Communes and the Aristocracy. It does not recommend itself to an American readership at first glance. The social and political dynamics once at play between the kings, lords, and peasants of the Old World would seem to be of little relevance in the United States, where these hereditary castes were returned to sender by General Washington and his compatriots some time ago. Americans are now deprived of a sight familiar to those of us in the United Kingdom: that of some latter-day viscount or baron scrambling to justify the last vestigial remnants of an inherited dignity stripped of all rationale by the silent artilleries of time, usually by talking to a friendly journalist about polar bears or the gender pay gap. Nevertheless, conservatives should familiarize themselves with Barante’s work on class conflict in feudal Europe, because the United States is entering an era of class-driven politics for which the intellectual and rhetorical deposit of Buckley, Reagan, and Thatcher has not prepared us. Acknowledging this is a concession not to Marxist dialectics but to basic facts of geography.

The British political scientist David Goodhart has correctly identified the origin of this new geographically determined class politics in the huge pan-Atlantic post-war expansion of higher education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “in 1940, 5 percent of the population aged 25 and older held at least a bachelor’s degree or higher. By 2009, this percentage had increased more than five-fold to 30 percent.” Furthermore, by global standards, American higher education is marked by a comparatively large number of residential universities that encourage students to move away from home and on to campus to get the full “university experience.” The students who move away from home at the age of 18 into a (sometimes literally) cloistered environment with their cognitively adept peers do so by meritocratic mechanisms of advancement that disregard such factors as place of birth, family connections, or religious belief. These things are removed from the meritocratic equation by design so that nothing can taint the integrity of standards such as “top of the class” or “best for the job.”

About the Author

Cameron Hilditch

Cameron Hilditch was a 2020-2021 William F. Buckley Fellow in Political Journalism at National Review Institute.

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In 1821, the 19th-century French intellectual Amable Guillaume Prosper Brugière, baron de Barante, wrote On the Communes and the Aristocracy. It does not recommend itself to an American readership at first glance. The social and political dynamics once at play between the kings, lords, and peasants of the Old World would seem to be of little relevance in the United States, where these hereditary castes were returned to sender by General Washington and his compatriots some time ago. Americans are now deprived of a sight familiar to those of us in the United Kingdom: that of some latter-day viscount or baron scrambling to justify the last vestigial remnants of an inherited dignity stripped of all rationale by the silent artilleries of time, usually by talking to a friendly journalist about polar bears or the gender pay gap. Nevertheless, conservatives should familiarize themselves with Barante’s work on class conflict in feudal Europe, because the United States is entering an era of class-driven politics for which the intellectual and rhetorical deposit of Buckley, Reagan, and Thatcher has not prepared us. Acknowledging this is a concession not to Marxist dialectics but to basic facts of geography.

The British political scientist David Goodhart has correctly identified the origin of this new geographically determined class politics in the huge pan-Atlantic post-war expansion of higher education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, “in 1940, 5 percent of the population aged 25 and older held at least a bachelor’s degree or higher. By 2009, this percentage had increased more than five-fold to 30 percent.” Furthermore, by global standards, American higher education is marked by a comparatively large number of residential universities that encourage students to move away from home and on to campus to get the full “university experience.” The students who move away from home at the age of 18 into a (sometimes literally) cloistered environment with their cognitively adept peers do so by meritocratic mechanisms of advancement that disregard such factors as place of birth, family connections, or religious belief. These things are removed from the meritocratic equation by design so that nothing can taint the integrity of standards such as “top of the class” or “best for the job.”