Earlier this month, right after the former President Bush's death, two editorials showed up in the New York Times which drew a fair bit of criticism for their views of what makes the ruling class in the US (such as it is) worthy of their positions in society.
I happen to agree with a lot of the criticism of the first one - I think it ignores a lot of the flaws of the old guard and doesn't acknowledge that sometimes people appear more trustworthy because they look more like us - but it still brings up a useful point, and the second one develops that point further. Specifically, they point out that an elite class ostensibly based on merit alone can still share many of the flaws of an aristocracy based on inheritance and privilege.
It's a useful reminder that designing a system with a specific goal in mind (in this case, to ensure that those at the top of our society are there because they deserve it) is often more difficult than it looks and vulnerable to any number of shortfalls and unintended consequences. In our case, we've hidden or willfully ignored many of the ways in which unearned advantages affect people's results even as we tried to focus on merit alone. And we're not willing to fix it, because the steps we'd need to take to even find the problem look like steps backward to any number of people.
I think the conclusion the second article ends on - that our elites should be aware of how they got there, rather than suffering from any illusions about their place in society - is a good one, even if I think it still paints an overly bright picture of the past. It certainly is a useful detail to remember as we keep trying to find a new way forward.
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