2/14/2026

 Saturday, February 14, 2026

w3e

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In be at 9:15, up at 5:45.  30/42/29, mostly clear skies.

Morning meds at 10 a.m.  

Two years ago today, I wrote:        

Rules for the Ruling Class is a long essay in the January 29 print edition of The New Yorker by staff writer Even Osnos.  He discusses social class in America, elitism, status, and wealth inequality.  It reminds me of so many things, but primarily the lottery of birth and my favorite little poem of William Blake: ' Some are born to sweet delight, some are born to endless night. . . . 

Excerpts from the essay:

The class divide was widening once more, and the greatest gap was the one separating Americans who could protect themselves with money from those who could not. Fussell quoted the working-class father of a man killed in Vietnam: “You bet your goddam dollar I’m bitter. It’s people like us who give up our sons for the country."

The crux of [Peter Turchin's] findings: a nation that funnels too much money and opportunity upward gets so top-heavy that it can tip over. In the dispassionate tone of a scientist assessing an ant colony, Turchin writes, “In one-sixth of the cases, elite groups were targeted for extermination. The probability of ruler assassination was 40 percent.” 

Under Franklin D. Roosevelt (Groton, Harvard), the U.S. raised taxes, took steps to protect unions, and established a minimum wage. The costs, Turchin writes, “were borne by the American ruling class.” Between 1925 and 1950, the number of American millionaires fell—from sixteen hundred to fewer than nine hundred. Between the nineteen-thirties and the nineteen-seventies, a period that scholars call the Great Compression, economic inequality narrowed, except among Black Americans, who were largely excluded from those gains. 

But by the nineteen-eighties the Great Compression was over. As the rich grew richer than ever, they sought to turn their money into political power; spending on politics soared. The 2016 Republican Presidential primary involved seventeen contestants, the largest field in modern history.

Turchin ends his book [“End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration.”] with a sobering vision. Using data to model scenarios for the future, he concludes, “At some point during the 2020s, the model predicts, instability becomes so high that it starts cutting down the elite numbers.” He likens the present time to the run-up to the Civil War. America could still relearn the lessons of the Great Compression—“one of the exceptional, hopeful cases”—and act to prevent a top-heavy society from toppling. When that has happened in history, “elites eventually became alarmed by incessant violence and disorder,” he writes. “And we are not there—yet.” 

Left undisturbed, the most powerful among us will take steps to stay in place, a pattern that sociologists call the “iron law of oligarchy.”  . . . Democracy is meant to insure that the élite continue to circulate. But no democracy can function well if people are unwilling to lose power—if a generation of leaders, on both the right and the left, becomes so entrenched that it ages into gerontocracy; if one of two major parties denies the arithmetic of elections; if a cohort of the ruling class loses status that it once enjoyed and sets out to salvage it.