The New Aristocracy

This chapter examines how the educational system, transformed into a tool of liberalism, also ultimately becomes the systemic creation of a new aristocracy of the strong over the weak. It describes the emergence of a two-tier system in which elite students are recruited from all over the world so that they may prepare for lives of deracinated vagabondage, majoring only in what Wendell Berry calls “upward mobility.” It argues that liberalism's success fosters the conditions of its failure: having claimed to bring about the downfall of aristocratic rule of the strong over the weak, it culminates in a new more powerful, even more permanent aristocracy that fights incessantly to maintain the structures of liberal injustice. The chapter also considers the economic liberalism of John Locke and the lifestyle liberalism of John Stuart Mill, the views of Charles Murray and Robert Putnam on generational inequality, and the liberalocracy's self-deception.