The Three Paradigms

In a previous piece, I pointed out the sudden popularity of downwardly mobile sons of prominent families. This new trend speaks to a broader shift in mentality among America’s well-educated elite class. As soon as the United States was developed enough to have an elite class, its members developed an attitude of noblesse oblige, emphasizing duty to the less fortunate and to society as a whole. Intellectual, entrepreneurial, or other talent, and inherited family wealth or prestige, were viewed as gifts from God. Therefore, they were blessings that imposed duties on the gifted.

This sense of duty was often applied to existing institutions, as the wealthy built churches, libraries, and universities and volunteered for the military during wartime at rates equal to or above the lower classes. This was not a perfect system. The early American elites were not immune from pride and greed, often adopting a condescending attitude toward the lower classes, which reached its nadir in the pro-slavery apologetics before the Civil War and the eugenics movement of the early twentieth century. Still, at its best, the attitude of noblesse oblige instilled a duty to use the talents and inheritance of the elites to build on the work of previous generations and lift up the less fortunate.

After World War II, the paths to the elite class shifted and expanded. The children and grandchildren of the Ellis Island immigrants rose into the middle class, and the GI Bill made access to higher education more democratic. Perhaps more importantly, the spirit of the New Deal and the emerging civil rights movement made it impossible to justify family or class privileges. The age of meritocracy was ascendant, and the new “best and the brightest” would get their positions through hard work and talent, particularly intellectual talent. This, combined with rising secularism, meant that elite status was no longer a gift from God but the actualization of the self. Duty was de-emphasized. The first obligation of someone blessed with intellectual or financial gifts became the cultivation of his or her authentic self.

Aaron Renn put it best on his Substack: "Prep schools and elite colleges took people who were already destined to become leaders due to family background, and formed them with a particular ethos. Now those schools provide those who would not otherwise likely become top leaders with the credential that allows them to obtain those positions."

The long booms of the late 1940s to the early 1970s and from 1983 to 2008 provided plenty of opportunities for the talented to flourish. However, the Panic of 2008 and slow, uneven recovery in the 2010s showed its shortcomings. The meritocracy had not eliminated the advantages of the old elite. In fact, as the first generation under the democratized order had children of their own and sought to set them up, seemingly to the effect of merely creating a new hereditary aristocracy. The de-emphasis on the common good left younger generations cold, and the sluggish job market didn’t reward academic effort and achievement as much as promised.

A third paradigm had been growing in academia and on the far left, and the shortcomings of meritocracy gave it room to enter the mainstream. Where noblesse oblige had seen achievement as a duty and meritocracy had seen it as a personal accomplishment, the new paradigm of privilege saw it as participation in an unjust system. Noblesse oblige had seen past achievements and existing institutions as conferring legitimacy and obligations on today’s efforts, while meritocracy had seen them as optional ornaments for personal identity. The new privileged class sees them as relics of a racist, sexist, oppressive past that need to be dismantled.

In some ways, it was an idea that worked to excuse underachievement. A frustrated, college-educated class came to see the system not only as rigged against them, but as based in an unforgivably racist and patriarchal past. However, the privilege paradigm has not completely lost meritocracy’s emphasis on personal identity and competition, or even the moralism of noblesse oblige. By adopting an oppressed identity, usually a disability or some flavor of queerness, the privileged can atone for existing and join the righteous marginalized.

Thus, by signing up for disability accommodations on tests, students at elite universities can not only get an advantage on those tests, but claim to be oppressed by the white, male, able-bodied car mechanic in Zanesville, Ohio. If you don’t have an obvious label, there’s always bisexuality or long COVID. Being straight is no longer an obstacle to being queer.

Perhaps it just goes to show that the American competitive spirit cannot be suppressed. If marginalization and suffering are the way to attain status, we will suffer harder and be more marginalized than anyone else. The new paradigm may seem like a movement of losers and slackers, but if it endures, it will produce its own hierarchy — one based explicitly on the rejection of previous values.