I think Kerry and Gore are proof positive of that.
Exactly the point Fussell was making. Gore Vidal has said something similar (not that I particularly appreciate what he has to say, as a rule).
Fussell intended his book as a warning, that the fabulous social mobility available to Americans in the past is beginning to dry up, as rentseekers and people who like to pull up ladders behind them start to do things like I've described company managements doing, such as embracing credentialism -- which was savagely and very effectively attacked in a Reagan-era essay by James Fallows, "The Case Against Credentialism", which appeared in the December, 1985, issue of The Atlantic (as The Atlantic Monthly was briefly called). Contents-page epitome: "America celebrates the entrepreneur but increasingly rewards the M.B.A. Yet business schools neglect the skills and outlook on which America's economic renaissance depends." One of the topics the essay dealt with, however, was the habit society had gotten into by that time, of topping out people's career trajectories early in life, in reliance on intelligence testing, which was used to gate educational opportunity and therefore work opportunity.
That's what we're talking about here. Fussell's thesis was simply that, as a sequel of what Fallows was observing, the country would build a permanent class system based on life expectations founded on early opportunities. Which sounds a lot like Dickens, and no doubt for very good reasons: lots of very clever people are beavering away in private life to ensure that things come out that way, pro bono their own offspring and the offspring of "People Like Us"; and when their wants intersect with government, they tend to become policy, often without asking anyone's permission.
"Fussell intended his book as a warning, that the fabulous social mobility available to Americans in the past is beginning to dry up, as rentseekers and people who like to pull up ladders behind them".......and the prime example of people like this are Bill and Hillary Clinton, who are pluperfect examples, along with Gore, Kerry, and Lamar Alexander, of people who enjoy scintillating careers full of wealth and power at the very top of American society -- without ever having contributed anything tangible to it. They are precisely the people that Noam Chomsky called "the New Mandarins", and a political typology that typed people by their public career paths used the same word -- "mandarins". They are people who never worked at a real job in their lives, and who have spent their whole lives living in an environment of power, ordering other people around.
People like that aren't America.