Old Establishment
Article
Old Establishment is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between December 01, 2022 and December 09, 2022. The archive places it in contexts such as “The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment”; “Then again, the dominance of the Old Establishment wasn’t eternal either”; “(the agrarian slaveholding elite, maybe corresponding to the ‘Cavaliers’)“. It most often appears alongside Bobos, Brooks, David Brooks.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: December 01, 2022
- Last seen: December 09, 2022
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Bobos (2 shared issues)
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- Brooks (2 shared issues)
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- David Brooks (2 shared issues)
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- Fussell (2 shared issues)
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- Harvard (2 shared issues)
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- High Modernism (2 shared issues)
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- Ivy League (2 shared issues)
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- WASP aristocracy (2 shared issues)
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- WASPs (2 shared issues)
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- Yale (2 shared issues)
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- 417th Marquess of Cornwallshireshire (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
The pre-1950s aristocracy went by various names; the Episcopacy, the Old Establishment, Boston Brahmins. David Brooks calls them WASPs, which is evocative but ambiguous. He doesn’t just mean Americans who happen to be white, Anglo-Saxon, and Protestant - there are tens of millions of those! He means old-money blue-blooded Great-Gatsby-villain WASPs who live in Connecticut, go sailing, play lacrosse, belong to country clubs, and have names like Thomas R. Newbury-Broxham III. Everyone in their family has gone to Yale for eight generations; if someone in the ninth generation got rejected, the family patriarch would invite the Chancellor of Yale to a nice game of golf and mention it in a very subtle way, and the Chancellor would very subtly apologize and say that of course a Newbury-Broxham must go to Yale, and whoever is responsible shall be very subtly fired forthwith.
The connection with political polarization, though, does seem like it may be related - if the same elites ran both parties, it makes sense that their policies weren't that different. Of course, polarization very much is a cycle. Then again, the dominance of the Old Establishment wasn't eternal either, and the late 19th century seems like very much a period that also followed a different elite (the agrarian slaveholding elite, maybe corresponding to the 'Cavaliers') losing much of their elite status. So maybe there's something there - cycles of elite competition and all that. (Though searching for cycles in history is generally a matter of finding patterns in random noise, and I'm not entirely convinced Turchin's work is different.)