On the Rebirth of Aristocracy in the American Regime

post by shawkisukkar · 2025-02-17T16:18:17.117Z · LW · GW · 3 comments

This is a link post for https://shawkisukkar.substack.com/p/on-the-rebirth-of-aristocracy-in

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The Roman philosopher Cicero believed that a regime turns into an aristocracy when democracy “has been ruined by people who cannot think straight”. This has been the unanimous consensus for why President Trump won the 2016 election. That the American elites have driven the city into ruins, not only that they abandoned their duty to maintain the order of the city, but that they actively worked against it. They reversed the original American order of the Founders, and destroyed the country's original institutions and culture.

 

This has given rise to a new aristocracy. It began with the election of President Trump and became even more pronounced in the 2024 election. Men of virtue from both sides of the aisle recognized what the President had previously described as an American carnage was indeed happening. They believed that if they did not intervene, it would mark the end of the city. This theme—the rise of the few—was also evident in the President’s inaugural speech, in which he announced that the city would prioritize merit of the few over the progressive theme of equality that dominated American politics for the last few decades.

 

The Liberal myths paint the United States as a country solely designed to give a voice to the people but any more scrutiny to the Founders' intent shows that they believed the Republic would be an Aristocratic Republic. That it’s in the nature of a regime to be an aristocracy because of the natural differences between men. Nothing could be more descriptive of what the Founders really believed than Madison’s belief that“Democracy is the most vile form of government,”.

 

Madison in Federalist No. 10 views that a republic should “refine and enlarge” the will of the people through representatives of elevated character and that it would happen through a few wise representatives. That a virtuous few should guide public virtue, and that it’s in the American regime, that those most capable and committed to the common welfare emerge to lead. Again, in Federalist No. 57 he asserts that “The aim of every political constitution is, or ought to be, first to obtain for rulers men who possess most wisdom to discern, and most virtue to pursue, the common good of the society; and in the next place, to take the most effectual precautions for keeping them virtuous whilst they continue to hold their public trust.”. 

 

Roger Sherman and Elbridge Gerry following the classical tradition, had a deeper distrust of the people and wanted the House of Representatives to be like the Senate in that representatives are appointed by state lawmakers. Sherman believed that the people should have“as little to do as may be about the Government” and Gerry said that“The evils we experience flow from the excess of democracy. The people do not want virtue”.

 

The Founders wanted to suppress the madness of the crowds even more strongly, so they designed the Senate as an inherently aristocratic institution—a smaller, more enlightened legislative chamber meant to curb the passions of the people. Madison suggests that “A freehold or equivalent of a certain value may be annexed to the right of vot[in]g for Senators” intending to confine senatorial elections to those with substantial property. 

 

Madison made the case that landowners had higher virtues and should therefore have a greater say in its governance. He was concerned with keeping power away from those without property, arguing that “Landholders ought to have a share in the government, to support these invaluable interests and to balance and check the other. They ought to be so constituted as to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority.”.

 

Hamilton, too, endorsed the idea that the appointment of senators by state legislatures “promise[s] greater knowledge and more comprehensive information in the national councils,” largely because those legislatures would themselves be composed of wise citizens. Hamilton expected that they would in turn choose senators marked by “peculiar care and judgment.”. John Jay concurred, observing that “there is reason to presume” these legislators would select only those “distinguished by their abilities and virtue,” thus ensuring that the Senate remained a the selection of the elevated aristocracy within the regime. 

 

Thomas Jefferson states such a vision for the American regime much more directly. In a letter to Madison, he writes that the best regime is of “aristocracy of virtue and talent.”. That God had endowed certain individuals with wisdom and moral excellence, so that their “the most precious gift of nature” might guide the city. To Jefferson, these “natural aristoi” earned their distinction through genuine ability and uprightness. government by superior individuals endowed with natural merit giving them the right to exercise power. It’s an earned aristocracy, unlike an artificial aristocracy, but it’s still a result of fortune.

 

Hamilton had a deeper distrust of Democracy that he suggested an elective monarchy during the Constitutional Convention. He believed that a purely popular assembly, subject to yearly elections, would struggle to consistently uphold the public interest. He thought that only a permanent and separate institution could curb the impulsive tendencies of the majority. For Hamilton, representation would ultimately fail, as demagogues often prevail when power rests entirely with the masses. He suggested a permanent institution should serve as a check on democratic excess. He believed that societies inevitably split into “the few and the many”—with the first being “the rich and well-born” and the other “the mass of the people,” who are “turbulent and changing” and “seldom judge or determine right.”.

 

Hamilton, following Montesquieu, whose works we know the Founders deeply studied, suggested the establishment of a Magistrate. Montesquieu who once said that “There must be, for a time or forever, a magistrate to make the nobles tremble, like the ephors in Lacedaemonia and the state inquisitors in Venice, whose magistracies are subject to no formalities.” Similarly, Hamilton maintained that any upper house or aristocratic element must remain independent and enduring in order to foster wisdom and preserve the American order. He also wanted senators to serve for life as he feared that, without such a body, the people’s passion and shortsightedness would undermine the constitutional order they were creating. Madison, on the other hand, endorsed the idea of a seven-years term for senators.

 

The Founders aimed to embed the conservative English aristocratic tradition into the American regime. Burke on the English Aristocracy says that a true natural aristocracy is “an essential integrant part of any large body rightly constituted.” For Burke, this aristocracy was not simply inherited but “formed out of a class of legitimate presumptions, which taken as generalities, must be admitted for actual truths.” True aristocrats for him are those “bred in a place of estimation,” who from early childhood learn to “respect oneself” and are conditioned by the “censorial inspection of the public eye” to cultivate virtue, foresight, and a balanced judgment. This formation of the aristocrats, he argued, was necessary for men to ascend as prudent stewards of the public virtue, ensuring that the aristocracy is exercised by those who have the leisure to “read, to reflect, to converse” and the discipline to command and obey in equal measure. 

 

The American regime of course still differs from that of England in that it allows the rise of new aristocrats more explicitly in the regime because of being an Aristotelian aristocracy based on the regime's statement on the equality of man. Jefferson made this distinction clear by differentiating between artificial and natural aristocracy. We can find the same theme in Aristotle where he argued that rulers “should never wrong the ambitious in a matter of honor, or the common people in a matter of money; and they should treat one another and their fellow-citizens in a spirit of equality. The equality which the friends of democracy seek to establish for the multitude is not only just but likewise expedient among equals.” He says that rulers “should treat one another and their fellow-citizens in a spirit of equality” and should even take an oath with an express declaration: “I will do no wrong to the people.”.

 

Two centuries later, the radical changes infused by the rise of the Progressive regime have led to a decline in the aristocracy envisioned by the Founders, giving rise instead to an arbitrary Democratic aristocracy of the masses. By definition for the founders an aristocracy of the masses knows no moderation and the Republic would fall without moderation. Moderation by definition requires wisdom, and wisdom is unattainable to the many. Montesquieu believed that the Aristocracy of the regime is corrupted, when the power of the nobles becomes arbitrary, a very foundational property in the progressive aristocracy. He believed that when this happens “there can no longer be any virtue either in the governors or the governed”.

 

Although the Hamiltonian magistrate was never established as he intended and the Senate's original structure was weakened due to the passing 17th Amendment in 1912, the traditional way of life, deep sense of duty, and wise actions of the WASPs maintained that role. Since the end of the Second World War, the media and universities have assumed this role, along with massive numbers of immigrants, gave rise to an anti-American aristocracy that has actively worked to establish a new order and a few decades later the republic would be called a democracy. This transformation culminated in the establishment of a second order—the Civil Rights Act’s order. 

 

Leo Strauss in reaction to that moment reminds us that “Absolute tolerance is altogether impossible; the allegedly absolute tolerance turns into ferocious hatred of those who have stated clearly and most forcefully that there are unchangeable standards founded in the nature of man and the nature of things.”. This adoption of Enlightenment ideas to the American regime led to the dismantling of Natural Right and the distinction between the many and the few. It was the total destruction of the regime's foundational principles. It granted the bureaucrats the power to abolish the private sphere—a change that Strauss described as the “denial of the difference between the state and society” and, with it, the destruction of liberal society itself. 

 

To understand the task of the natural aristocrat to this moment, for an aristocracy that’s concerned with a return to the republic’s original order isn’t an aristocracy of ordinary times, there needs to be an understanding of the nature of the conservatism that’s rising today, which is a moral protest against a progressive aristocracy and its open society. For a few decades later, this election’s aristocracy may be seen as nothing more than a series of administrative reforms designed to open the way for a restoration of what the people by nature need. If the crisis of this time points us back to the ancient American regime and if the best regime depends on a particular way of life as in the Aristotelian tradition and the Founders believed, then the task of the natural aristocrat is to revive the cultural and religious preconditions that once made that made the ancient regime possible.

 

Peter Thiel was aware of the general issue in The Straussian Moment, where it seems he believed that the decline of great men in the West and the American regime can be traced to the disappearance of the important questions, for no courage could rise without the passions and religious education of the ancient mode. Thiel discusses this problem in the section where he discusses Strauss. It’s clear in that section Thiel’s attempt to wonder if this return is possible while maintaining the Anglo tradition of “not throwing the baby out with the bathwater”, because it’s also that any action or recommendation here is a dangerous matter. He says “the Straussian project sets out to preserve the katechon, but instead becomes a “hastener against its will. No new Alexander is in sight to cut the Gordian knot of our age.”. There’s no direct path here anymore as it has been prevented by America’s constitutional machinery and “Eventually, ambitious people would come to learn that there is little one can do in politics and that all merely political careers end in failure.” Thiel here distinguishes two American regimes, the old Republic of the Founders and our open system of government. 

 

Still, great men shouldn’t retreat. The modern mode offers more potential for action beyond the conventional legal or juridical system that might appear at first. He points specifically to Echelon—the secret coordination of global intelligence services—as the instrument to establish a real Pax Americana. Great men who are aware of the crisis through the great books may use the same path to resolve the crisis of the regime, “Instead of the United Nations, filled with interminable and inconclusive parliamentary debates that resemble Shakespearean tales told by idiots”. 

 

Still, “[e]spionage is impossible without a suspension of certain rules of natural right.”. Thiel here reminds us that the classical Natural Right offers the potential for exceptions. “For one also must consider the circumstances in which this machinery is built or created in the first place—and, by extension, where it might be threatened or modified and reconstructed”. Though, the Christian statesman must “never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account.”.

 

Thiel concludes the section by quoting Spengler: “for us, however—those whom fate has placed in this culture and at this moment of its becoming, in which money celebrates its final victories and its legacy, Caesarism, quietly and inexorably approaches—the direction of our will and our necessity is thus determined within a narrowly unwritten circle, without which life would not be worth living. We do not have the freedom to achieve this or that, but only the freedom either to do what is necessary or to do nothing at all. And a task imposed by the necessity of history is laid upon the individual, either with him or against him.”. 

 

Thiel, the armed prophet, though cautious, practices what he preaches. A decade later he reminds us that conspiracies are still possible through Hogan v. Gawker. To understand how nascent and insignificant the current aristocracy truly is, one only need compare Thiel’s seriousness of thought and actions that are changing the soul of history with the chaotic nature of this aristocracy, they are mere actors for what the serious has thought and what history is unfolding. They’re the “aristocracy” of the end of liberalism and bear no resemblance to the once glorious aristocracy of the English. One shouldn’t blame them for they have been infected by the mass relativist culture that has conquered America’s soul. Strauss is aware, and he advises for a serious return to the hidden meanings of the great books as the path back to gentlemanship. For there is the greatest reminder of human excellence and human greatness.

The coming aristocracy must never forget what Thiel said at the end of his essay “For what doth it profit a man, if he gain the whole world, and suffer the loss of his own soul?”

 

“And so, in determining the correct mixture of violence and peace, the Christian statesman or stateswoman would be wise, in every close case, to side with peace. There is no formula to answer the critical question of what constitutes a “close case”; that must be decided in every specific instance. It may well be that the cumulative decisions made in all those close instances will determine the destiny of the postmodern world. For that world could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much better—the limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.”

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