I am no great fan of Emerson, whose romanticism often snubbed or insulted the Enlightenment.
Still, as you might expect, I agree about feudalism. Look this way.
Everywhere (!) that humans discovered both metallurgy & agriculture, big men picked up metal implements and stole other men's women & wheat. Other, men, thinner but fast talkers, went along for the ride by becoming advisors, magicians, priests whose main job was to weave Heroic (Campbellian) tales justifying why the big guys should stay on top. ==> feudalism
Result -= pyramid shaped societies.
Ours is the 1st ever that's shaped like a diamond, with the well off outnumbering the poor. ANd a RISING diamond..
The will to cheat is still strong within us... and to justify OUR side's cheating as good. All ends of the political spectrum are rife with would be cheaters. Commisars and robber barons, criminals and smug-overbearing police. The only tool ever effective at this is accountability (see The Transparent Society )
The big diff tween two kinds of elites is not tween left and right, but tween satiable and insatiable. Astiable elites only want the BEST toys FIRST. They don't mind everybody else getting the same thing next year. These rich people are loyal to the diamond. They favor inheritance taxes and want the poor to raise smart children who are engineers who will make more toys.
Insatiable aristos hate the diamond, in which even Bill Gates must be polite to his servants. They yearn for a pyramidal social order in which they can REALLY be on top, even if the pyramid is poorer.
Now look at those rich people who give money to the democrats, Spielberg & such. They clearly WANT a world filled with people almost as rich as themselves.
Now look at Junior's pals. Their ONLY agenda (it is the surest predictor of policy) is to take half a trillion $ from our grandchildren and handing it to his 12,000 best friends... including 1,000 Saudi sheiks.
Yes, there is a theory that doing so will benefit the economy and thus the diamond. There is absoultely no sign of that happening. It was Clinton's fiscal conservatism and balanced budgets that did that. And since that fig leaf excuse has been exposed as a fraud, there is only one remaining explanation for the half trillion $ ...
...theft.
Nonetheless, the new conservatives see our democratic government as the enemy. And if they plan to destroy democracy, they must have something in mind to replace it with. (Yes, I know that "democracy" and "democratic" sound too much like "Democrat," and so the Republicans want us to say that we don't live in a democracy, but, rather, a republic, which sounds more like "Republican." It was one of Newt's efforts, along with replacing phrases like "Democratic Senator" with "Democrat Senator." But Republican political correctness can take a leap: we're talking here about the survival of democracy in our constitutional republic.)
What conservatives are really arguing for is a return to the three historic forms of tyranny that the Founders and Framers identified, declared war against, and fought and died to keep out of our land. Those tyrants were kings, theocrats, and noble feudal lords.
Amen.
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