Posted on 01/11/2016 9:14:09 AM PST by Kaslin
Every interwar novel set in the UK is focused, at least in part, in the changing of the relationship between the classes.
As we spend our Sunday nights glued to the final season of Downton Abbey on PBS, it appears the class system, in 1925, is breaking down far more quickly than those who have been at the top of the food chain can absorb.
That may have something to do with what we are witnessing in the surprising - astonishing - success of both Donald Trump (R-sort-of) and Bernie Sanders (D-sort-of) in this election cycle.
The shared fiction of an egalitarian America has never had any basis in fact. From our earliest days as colonies of the great European powers, there have been the upper classes made up of landowners, major merchants, scholars, diplomats, and others of similar caste.
The lower classes were an indefinite amalgam.
The American colonies did not have enough history to have generational royalty, but it was not long before the upper class divided itself between those who inherited their money and those who were nouveau riche.
The lower classes were still just the lower classes.
The upper classes - both in Europe and in the New World - used influence to evade, avoid, or ignore prosecution or to have the laws changed so that whatever they were doing became legal.
The lower classes were at the mercy of those very same lawgivers, and law breakers.
Fast forward to the 21st Century and we find that the division between very, very rich and very, very poor has become larger than ever. At least larger than ever in the past 200 years.
In fact, I believe that though the economic key has risen more than a few octaves - even the poorest in the 21st Century are not nearly as bad off as the poorest in, say, the Middle Ages - the wealth of the wealthiest would make the wealthiest 200 years ago quake with envy.
Stories abound of Wall Street hedge fund employees storming out of their employers' offices having opened their annual bonus check envelopes and finding, not the $10 million they had been expecting, but a paltry $7.5 million.
As former Pennsylvania Governor (and the first Secretary of Homeland Security) Tom Ridge has said: "We're rewarding wealth creation. We should be rewarding job creation."
In the current season of Downton Abbey (at least in the first two episodes) we have been witness to a growing lack of satisfaction with the status quo among the downstairs staff and a growing lack of understanding as to what is going on among those above stairs.
In one of the earliest episodes of Downton the Dowager Countess (the character played by Dame Maggie Smith), is told by someone they are going up to London for the weekend.
"What's a weekend?" she wonders aloud.
How does all that get us to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders?
They are both appealing to those for whom class warfare is an unfair fight.
Trump - like FDR, JFK, and the Bushes - is clearly a member of the upper class, but is successfully convincing the lower class that you must have been part of the enemy to understand how to defeat the enemy.
Sanders - like Truman, Johnson, Obama, and even Clinton back in the day - is convincing the lower class that he is one of them and so has a DNA-level understanding of their fears of, and frustrations with, the upper class.
After World War II, Winston Churchill and the Tories were tossed out of office and replaced by Clement Attlee, the head of the Labour Party.
That was a far gentler change of command than what had happened in 1918 when the Russian peasants assassinated Tsar Nicholas II, or 126 years earlier than that when the French Revolution resulted in the demise of the monarchy and the establishment of the Republic.
The history of humankind - at least in the Northern Hemisphere - over the past 200 years has been to topple the imbalance of the privileged over the disadvantaged.
I have no idea whether 2016 will be the year that voters move toward correcting that imbalance in the United States, but as a dues-paying member of the merchant class, I am watching with great interest.
We'll know a lot more in two weeks' time.
This is a really stupid article.
Huh?
I know there are a lot of people that can't stand to look at different life styles, thoughts, and I know America was born due to ‘taxation without representation’ and the English are today, have lost their ways, but so has America...
I love American history, not what is being taught in our schools today, but real American history, I love to read about our Presidents, Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt's...
The Civil War, how slavery was started and the way the slaves were treated, and have we changed that much? I used to think so, but since obuma has entered our scene, and what he and his wife could have done for the Black Community, obuma has ruined a lot of lives....
We are on a cliff right now, we can bring back America or we can go over the cliff and forget about how things were altogether, it's only up to us...
Egalitarianism resides with unicorns and leprechauns.
Agreed. This was a strange and pointless article.
Excellent point.
Those lousy "wealth creators" should be ashamed of themselves. They make money and then just stuff it in a matress.
At least if they bought gold bars they would be creating jobs for miners, smelters, and gold dealers.
But no, they just keep piling up the cash.
Those worthless jerks, Gates, Jobs, Zuckerberg, Bezos, and others just continue collecting their incomes and no jobs result.
Then there are all those worthless investors in the stock market. Buying and holding shares of companies with total disregard of whether or not such companies have any employees. It's an outrage.
And don't even get me started on all those tycoons purchasing government bonds, just to stuff their home safes with the paper. That money could have been doing some good, feeding the poor, supplying cell phones to the needy, or giving loans to deserving solar industry companies.
What a terrible world we live in. We should support a revolution in order to make things better. Just like the Russians did. They killed the royal family and created a utopia where everybody is entitled to stand in line to get government bread.
We need a revolution like that in Venezuela, though it might be a good idea to stock up on toilet paper first.
I look forward to the day when the fences and machine guns are removed and people are allowed to freely leave the U.S. Holding them as economic prisoners is the height of immorality. They would be so much better off somewhere else. Say, Syria... or Canada, ... or Mexico, or China. Anywhere but here.
I never heard of some myth of “American egalitarianism” except before the law. Of course no one should be so naive as to not think a rich person stands a better chance in court, but despite our flaws this country has never had the same sort of class distinctions of Europe and England.
Huh? File this article in the makes little sense bin.
Thought it was just me...this article makes no sense.
Klintons are worth north of 100 million.
The difference today is that instead of tyranny within a nation among competing empires, Britain, Germany, US, France etc., we have the emerging multi-national global tyranny.
Most of the candidates are compromised and represent globalist interests.
I’ve enjoyed seeing all the scenery, sets, costumes, etc.,
of “Downton Abbey” - keeping in mind all the while that the actors on that show DO NOT really live in that
humongous house. My guess is that most of them don’t live in
much fancier digs than most of us do. - The real couple that
lives there don’t have all that huge a bunch of servants &
even they can only live in one room at a time! - Same with
“Doc Martin”. Clunes is a total cutup compared to “Doc”.
Both he and Louisa are married to different folks. They
both have 14 or 15 yr. old kids. - Last night, Sherlock
was nutty; but I keep biting. :o(
Rich Galen obviously didn't see Season 1, Episode 2 where the new Downton heir, Matthew Crawley, explains at dinner that he has gotten a job as a lawyer in nearby Ripon, but that he can still be involved in running the estate in the other hours of the day, and "of course I'll have the weekend."
To which the Dowager Countess queries, "What is a weekend?"
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