American Gentry
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Highlights
- Wherever they live, their wealth and connections make them influential forces within local society. In the aggregate, through their political donations and positions within their localities and regions, they wield a great deal of political influence. They’re the local gentry of the United States.
- Because their wealth is rooted in the ownership of physical assets, they tend to be more rooted in their places of origin than the cosmopolitan professionals and entrepreneurs of the major metro areas. Mobility between major metros, the characteristic jumping from Seattle to Los Angeles to New York to Austin that’s possible for younger lawyers and creatives and tech folks, is foreign to them.
- Gentry are, by definition, local elites. The extent to which they wield power in their localities, and how they do so, is dependent on the structure of their regime. In the early Roman Empire, for example, local civic elites were essential to the functioning of the state. They collected taxes in their home cities, administered justice, and competed with each other for local political offices and seats on the city councils. Their competition was a driving force behind the provision of benefits to the common folk in the form of festivals, games, public buildings, and more basic support, a practice called civic euergetism.
- Medieval Europe was notable for its general tolerance of private violence carried out not only by higher nobility but even local gentry, with their bands of men-at-arms and hired soldiers. That right to violence was part of what set them apart as a social group, and which they didn’t hesitate to employ in defense of their position in local society.
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The greater the level of social inequality, the more prominent the gentry class - the group that owns the resources - tends to become in economic and political life. In agrarian societies, where land and its produce form the primary source of wealth, it’s rural elites who dominate. In more urbanized societies, the local elites can be a bit more diverse.
- When we talk about inequality, we skew our perspective by looking at the most visible manifestations: penthouses in New York, mansions in Beverly Hills, the excesses of hedge fund billionaires or a misbehaving celebrity. But that’s not who most of the United States’ wealthy elite really are. They own $2 million houses on golf courses outside Orlando and a condo in the Bahamas, not an architecturally designed oceanfront villa in Miami. It’s not that those billionaires and excesses don’t exist; it’s that they’re not nearly as common as a less exalted kind of wealth that’s no less structurally formative to our economy and society.
- Equating wealth, especially generational wealth, with virtue and ability is a deeply American pathology. This country loves to believe that people get what they deserve, despite the abundant evidence to the contrary. Nowhere is this more obviously untrue than with our gentry class. They stand at the apex of the social order throughout huge swathes of the country, and shape our economic and political world thanks to their resources and comparatively large numbers, yet they’re practically invisible in our popular understanding of these things.