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Originally Posted By davik⏩

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Originally Posted By davik⏩

Originally Posted By katya422⏩

Originally Posted By backinthegymbro⏩

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Originally Posted By katya422⏩

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In feudal society, power was exercised primarily by two classes—what the French referred to as the First Estate, the clergy, and the Second Estate, comprised of the warrior-aristocratic elite. Everyone else, even successful merchants, resided in the Third Estate, and most were peasants living at subsistence levels. This was a society, noted historian Pierre Riché, composed of “those who prayed, those who fought, and those who labored.”1

Contemporary society may have little place for orthodox religion, and our military, however impressive, hardly constitutes an effective ruling class. But we are beginning to see the elevation of two very powerful classes—one dominant economically, the other culturally. Meanwhile, the power of today’s Third Estate inexorably weakens.

The ultrarich represent an emergent global aristocracy—or rather, a new oligarchy. Fewer than one hundred billionaires now own as much as 50 percent of the world’s assets—the same amount that around four hundred billionaires owned a little more than five years ago. In the United States, the richest four hundred U.S. citizens now have more wealth than 185 million of their fellow Americans com­bined. The shift has been dramatic: the top 1 percent in America captured just 4.9 percent of total U.S. income growth from 1945 to 1973, but in the following two decades the country’s richest classes gobbled up the majority of U.S. income growth.

Patterns of property ownership reflect the very same trends that anchored both the medieval aristocratic and ecclesiastical classes. The proportion of land owned by the nation’s hundred largest private landowners grew by nearly 50 percent between 2007 and 2017. In 2007, according to the Land Report, this group owned a combined twenty-seven million acres of land, equivalent to the area of Maine and New Hampshire combined. A decade later, the hundred largest landowners had holdings of over forty million acres. Their holdings are now larger than the entirety of New England. Even in much of the vast American West, where much of the land remains in public hands, billionaires have created expansive estates that many fear will make the rest of the local population land-poor.

Far larger and broader than the oligarchy, the clerisy spans an ever‑growing section of the workforce that largely works outside material capitalist enterprise—as teachers, consultants, lawyers, gov­ernment workers, and even doctors, more of whom now work as employees or contractors than owners. These professions have only grown, while those of the traditional middle class—small business owners, workers in basic industries and construction—have seen their share of the job market shrink.

Estimates of the size of the clerisy vary. Michael Lind estimates what he calls the “overclass” at some 15 percent of the American workforce, far larger than the membership of the old First Estate, which was closer to 1 percent of the French population. Charles Murray, on the other hand, offers a narrower estimate including only those at the top echelon in law, government, and universities—roughly 2.4 million people out of a country of over 320 million.5

At its apex, the clerisy today is dominated by what Daniel Bell would define as the “knowledge class.”6 Made up largely of the well-educated offspring of the affluent, this class has become increasingly hereditary in part because well-educated people marry each other. Between 1960 and 2005, the share of men with university degrees who married women with university degrees nearly doubled, from 25 to 48 percent. “After one generation,” as Bell noted, “a meritocracy simply becomes an enclaved class.”7