The moment just one of the prominent billionaires isn’t on their side, they call him an oligarch. Their smears have me reevaluating all previous “oligarchs”. Maybe benevolent oligarchs are the closest we can get to benevolent kings in this day and age. Maybe men like Musk are the only way forward.
At no point in human history did we not have elders/lords/kings/oligarchs even if they called themselves politicians.
There has also always been a divide between them. The 'good times' have always been when the benevolent outweigh the malevolent, when those who wish to prosper at the top of the food chain outnumber those who wish to loot the treasury.
Not politiians, the modern aristocracy are the monied elites who hire lobbying firms to control politicians. And then they lie and tell us we're represented in the various legislatures, while the legislators keep voting against the interests of us ordinary taxpayers.
I think you are using the term aristocracy to broadly. The US is probably the first country in existence to actually massively reduce the power of the aristocracy to the point that most people don't really take it into consideration because it's not a massive blocking force in their lives and in the structure of society. America's Liberal experiment effectively destroyed the colonial and British aristocracy in the US, and ever since, the aristocratic class seems to massively swap out in less than 100 years. The ruling class of 1824 looks nothing like the ruling class of 1924, looks nothing like the ruling class of 2024.
The ruling class of 1824 looks nothing like the ruling class of 1924, looks nothing like the ruling class of 2024.
To be fair about specifically the ruling class of 1924, most of those people's descendants chose to fuck off, or are silently members of the 'own nothing and be happy' group. Some of them, like Henry Ford's relatives, just own sports teams, as IIRC, Henry had the Ford Foundation essentially stolen from him before his death.
That still counts. There are no "American Hapsburgs". The Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts are not what they once were. In fact, many of them have changed their names.
The vast majority of the "robber barons" donated so much money to charity that the organizations they founded are still going. Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, all of them.
The moment just one of the prominent billionaires isn’t on their side, they call him an oligarch. Their smears have me reevaluating all previous “oligarchs”. Maybe benevolent oligarchs are the closest we can get to benevolent kings in this day and age. Maybe men like Musk are the only way forward.
We have always had an aristocracy.
Always.
At no point in human history did we not have elders/lords/kings/oligarchs even if they called themselves politicians.
There has also always been a divide between them. The 'good times' have always been when the benevolent outweigh the malevolent, when those who wish to prosper at the top of the food chain outnumber those who wish to loot the treasury.
Not politiians, the modern aristocracy are the monied elites who hire lobbying firms to control politicians. And then they lie and tell us we're represented in the various legislatures, while the legislators keep voting against the interests of us ordinary taxpayers.
I think you are using the term aristocracy to broadly. The US is probably the first country in existence to actually massively reduce the power of the aristocracy to the point that most people don't really take it into consideration because it's not a massive blocking force in their lives and in the structure of society. America's Liberal experiment effectively destroyed the colonial and British aristocracy in the US, and ever since, the aristocratic class seems to massively swap out in less than 100 years. The ruling class of 1824 looks nothing like the ruling class of 1924, looks nothing like the ruling class of 2024.
To be fair about specifically the ruling class of 1924, most of those people's descendants chose to fuck off, or are silently members of the 'own nothing and be happy' group. Some of them, like Henry Ford's relatives, just own sports teams, as IIRC, Henry had the Ford Foundation essentially stolen from him before his death.
That still counts. There are no "American Hapsburgs". The Rockefellers, Carnegies, and Vanderbilts are not what they once were. In fact, many of them have changed their names.
The vast majority of the "robber barons" donated so much money to charity that the organizations they founded are still going. Carnegie, Mellon, Vanderbilt, all of them.