SYDNEY WILLIAMS: “NOBLESSE OBLIGE”
The words noblesse oblige refer to a sense of responsibility of the privileged few to act with magnanimity toward the less privileged – to be responsible for their welfare, but not necessarily to let them into their living rooms. While the term was originally associated with French-speaking British nobility in their treatment of natives in their colonial empire and serfs on their vast estates, it can be said to reflect a conspicuous self-righteousness on the part of today’s Progressive elites who want to preserve their status, while using taxpayer money to keep happy an expanding body of welfare recipients.
Elitism, we are taught, is un-American, yet it is a natural phenomenon. Every society produces elites. Tsarist Russia had theirs and so did the Soviet Union. Nazi Germany had its elite and so does Communist China today. Colonial America had its planters in the south and its merchants in the north. The Industrial Revolution, in the United States, produced the “Gilded Age” in the second half of the 19th Century, giving the Nation New York’s “four hundred,” made famous through the novels of Edith Wharton.
Elitism is inequitable when it becomes entrenched, as it is in despotic countries, like China, North Korea, Cuba and Iran. The top of the economic, social and political ladder should never be comfortable: “Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown,” spoke Henry IV in Shakespeare’s eponymous play. A free and democratic country should be open to new ideas and allow free expression. It should praise individualism, independence and self-reliance. It must encourage debate and recognize universal truths; it must commend honesty and integrity. The elitist class should be fluid, not static.
Static elitism was endemic in 18th Century Britain and was a major cause of the American Revolution: Thomas Jefferson’s opening words in The Declaration of Independence that “…all men are created equal…” expressed a concept inconceivable to aristocratic Britain. A dozen years later, the Constitution created a government to be one, as Abraham Lincoln said at Gettysburg in 1863, “…of the people, by the people, for the people” – a message inconsistent to a country with a House of Lords. George Washington’s decision to limit his Presidency to two terms was a clear message that he wanted no part of royalty, an idea alien to a nation whose royal leader served for life.
Nevertheless, like all societies, America has always had an elitist class. Late 19th and early 20th Century elites were primarily white Anglo-Saxon Protestants (WASPs). For over a hundred years they dominated the wealth and culture of the U.S. Like Britain’s nobility, wealthy WASPs practiced a form of noblesse oblige, to justify and maintain their economic and social power, while limiting social and economic mobility. Blacks, Catholics and Jews were discriminated against. Immigrants from China, Ireland and Italy were treated abominably. During World War I, German-Americans suffered because of name association with the Kaiser. The reign of WASPs came to an end in the aftermath of the Great Depression and World War II, when merit and diligence, rather than family ties, determined financial and social success. Yet anti-Semitism persisted in Ivy League colleges into the early 1950s and Jim Crow remained in the south until the mid 1960s when the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 were enacted.
Our political world has turned upside down from sixty years ago. Today, despite accusations to the contrary, it is not race and gender that face discrimination, but economic class and ideas. In a real-life rendering of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, a new group of establishment elites control our schools, universities, Wall Street, big business, tech, the media, social media, entertainment, cultural institutions, unions and government bureaucracy. As Yale Professor David Bromwich wrote last August in The Nation, Democrats have become the party of the rich, in terms of household income and in representing the country’s ten wealthiest congressional districts. These progressive elites have altered history, as in the 1619 project, and, in cancelling college speakers, they have denied open discussion. They emphasize national faults, while ignoring the good America has done at home and abroad, including the generosity of its individuals and the sacrifice of men and women in foreign wars. Proponents of “Build Back Better” want government control of industries like energy, healthcare and banking, but fail to acknowledge the risk to a people enslaved by government.
The United States has a distinct heritage. Unlike other nations, we are composed of immigrants who sought opportunity. These émigrés vacated their native government-controlled, hierarchical countries, some of which, like Communist and Socialist countries, promise equity but deliver poverty and tyranny. They chose to be free, to pursue individual dreams, unimpeded by the constraint of an omnipresent government, a Nation where they could succeed based on aspiration, talent and hard work. Legal immigrants come to these shores, not for promises of welfare and free health, but because of the opportunity to scale the economic ladder. Assimilation has never been easy or quick, so most immigrants, like their colonial predecessors, looked upon success as generational – as opportunity for their children and grandchildren. There is no other country to which one could emigrate and in one, two or three generations rise to prominence. There is no other country whose amalgamated culture reflects peoples from virtually every country in the world. And we should never forget that these people come because they prefer our form of representative government, our system of capitalism and our culture.
To maintain power, today’s elites have chosen division over unity, cleaving the citizenry by race and gender, into oppressors and oppressed with acolytes and dissenters, and they have pitted the individual against the group. These divisions serve as red herrings, to divert attention from their personal accumulation of wealth and power. With those as guiding stars, these elites use taxpayer dollars to create a dependent constituency. In doing so, they have flaunted the Lincoln ideal as expressed in the rubric and assumed the mantle of noblesse oblige.
Comments are closed.
