Rediscovering E. Digby Baltzell’s Sociology of Elites

Aaron Renn writes:

* Baltzell defines an aristocratic upper class as one which justifies its status and privileges through service to the nation, both by assuming leadership roles and by being open to assimilating the families of new men of merit among the elite. An aristocratic upper class will also be a bearer of traditional values and authority.

* An upper class becomes a caste rather than an aristocracy when it retains its social status and privileges but ceases to either provide leadership or to assimilate new worthy men into its ranks, especially for reasons of race, religion, or ethnicity.

* Thus, beyond distinguishing between the elite, the wealthy, and the upper class, Balztell also provides a guide for distinguishing be­tween well-functioning (aristocratic) and poorly functioning (caste) upper classes, and between well-structured (establishment) and poorly structured (declassed) elites.

* This sense of community also created powerful mechanisms of social con­trol, including the threat of class ostracism, to enforce standards and norms of class behavior. Thus, a man who repeatedly violated the Anglo-American code of the gentleman (by, for example, cheating at sports) risked painful social exclusion. As a real-life example of the WASP social code, divorce was heavily frowned upon. Until the 1960s in Philadelphia, anyone who was divorced and remarried was automatically excluded from receiving an invitation to the socially exclusive Dancing Assembly, no matter who he or she was. In contrast to the upper class, the elite “is not a real group with normative standards of conduct . . . there is a code of honor among thieves and [Boston] Brahmins that does not exist among people listed in Who’s Who or Dun and Bradstreet’s Directory of Directors.”

* By 1970, Tom Wolfe could observe that “the Social Register’s annual shuffle, in which errant socialites, e.g., John Jacob Astor, are dropped from the Good Book, hardly even rates a yawn.”

* Baltzell would see the end of the establishment and the collapse of the upper class into an irrelevant rump as a significant underlying cause of many of today’s social maladies, such as the progressive collapse of norms in our political life. This is frequently bemoaned, often with a heavy dollop of blame heaped on one’s opponents, but it was an inevitable consequence of the destruction of an establishment whose values largely defined those norms and whose social cohesion allowed them to be enforced. As Baltzell observed, “What an establishment means is that a society is led by a class of men who act according to an agreed-upon code of manners. Certain things are not done.” Without an establishment, anything can, and ultimately will, be done in a country where “money talks, echoing in a moral vacuum.” Without class codes of conduct, only public scandal constrains, and often now not even that. He would see the loss of the establishment along with its class codes of behavior and social enforcement—not such presently popular notions as the weakening of strong political parties or the end of smoke-filled rooms—as decisive in the erosion of political norms. There is little prospect of recapturing a sense of political norms in the absence of the establishment that defined and enforced them.

This erosion of norms and standards goes beyond the political arena as well. Baltzell argued that “One of the major functions of an upper class is that of creating and perpetuating a set of traditional standards which carry authority and to which the rest of society as­pires.” In the absence of an upper-class establishment, those standards would inevitably decline. For instance, some conservatives bemoan the fact that men no longer behave as gentlemen. But our idea of a gentleman was defined by the Anglo-American upper class. When the values of this class were normative or aspirational in society, people sought to live up to them. With that class all but gone and now despised, their values are despised with them.

Many cultures, of course, have the concept of an upper-class gentleman. But our traditional American conception of the gentleman was quite different from, for instance, that of the French aristocracy that Tocqueville knew. One uniquely Anglo-American value was that of “fair play,” something that does not exist in the same sense in other cultures. In Sporting Gentlemen, a book on the history of tennis, Baltzell described how the French deliberately soaked their clay courts in Paris with water in order to disadvantage a British player, something an Englishman or American would have considered dis­honorable. Multiple other continental countries engaged in similar dodgy (to an American) practices.

Amateur and collegiate sport, Baltzell noted, in the past and even to some extent today, was a key transmitter of values like fair play. He told the story of a prisoner in England in the 1950s who informed on a fellow inmate who was plotting an escape because he planned to use a gun in the attempt, and using a firearm was “not cricket.” Baltzell wrote, “I have thought about how a class code of conduct, mythically developed on the playing fields of Eton before the Battle of Waterloo, could have penetrated the British social structure so deeply that it bound even an inmate of Britain’s maximum security prison in the second half of our increasingly anarchic century.”

While America was perhaps more freewheeling than England, the same codes once applied here as well. But that is less true, or perhaps not at all the case, today. The erosion of political norms is but one example of the decline of fair play, as people seek personal or partisan advantage wherever they can find it. America’s tradition of free speech, of letting everyone have his say in an open debate, was also in a sense a manifestation of that same value, and again is increasingly rejected. Cheating and gaming the system have always been present in America, but today they are practically an accepted way of life even at higher levels of society. For example, not only did seventy-three West Point students recently get caught cheating on exams, but they are largely being forgiven for doing so rather than expelled for violating the school’s honor code.

* The election of Donald Trump would not have surprised him. In the absence of an establishment, an atomized population falls easily under the spell of a charismatic populist. He wrote, “The absence of class authority inevitably leads to the rule of charismatic men on horsebacks, with their legions of personal followers.” The centrality of personal charisma, usually manifested through the mastery of TV and other media, has become part of our political landscape. But Trump represents a step beyond even this. He may be the first national figure in which his voters were followers of him personally, rather than of the standard bearer for a party or platform. There’s a good chance he won’t be the last such figure.

* The upper-class establishment was an intermediary institution that could check or resist the power of corporations, the state, or a would-be Caesar. Baltzell argued, “A powerful, wealthy, yet declassed elite may be one of the greatest threats to freedom in modern American society. At the higher levels of corporate control, perhaps the existence of an upper class is a protection against the dangers of corporate feudalism.” And of government excess, he wrote that “Tocqueville would see the possible usefulness of dynasties like the du Ponts, as ‘secondary powers’ and guardians of freedom, in an age that has gone far beyond the Roosevelt revolution on the road towards the omnipotent state.” And rather than a free press, which Baltzell thought could only provide a demagogue like Trump with free publicity, “The final protector of freedom may well be a unified establishment from within which the leaders of at least two parties are chosen, who, in turn, compete for the people’s votes of confidence, from differing points of view and differing standards of judgment, yet both assuming the absolute necessity of using fair means in accusing their legitimate opponents of fallibility rather than treason.”

Our new environment, characterized by precisely the sort of atomized society, and the wealthy and powerful but declassed elite, that Baltzell feared, has led to just such a decline in practical freedom in the United States. Rather than political norms or standards of personal behavior or morals, we instead have constantly shifting and ever more coercively enforced ideological and policy lines from which no dissent or freedom of conscience is allowed, not to mention an ever more intrusive communications and surveillance infrastructure from which even the president of the United States can be removed at the discretion of a private company.