You can already hear the pseudo-theories, justifying the differences for eternity. Blue blooded, of lazy blood, etc. Apply yourselfs and you will win.. adding insult to injury, when you can not win, you must in addition be lazy with only yourself to blame.
As I read through the distinctions between "class" and "caste" helpfully provided by search engine AI, a sensation that formal caste systems are more honest than inexplicit "class" systems grew in my mind.
The claims are that different outcomes in income, occupation, education, marriage, etc can result in changes in a person's "class." But even in the statistically insignificant number of Horatio Alger stories, did the person's class really change? Did Eliza from Pygmalion change classes or just learn how to "code switch?"
Except in the United States it is true. Something like 80% of new military recruits come from military families (parent, sibling, uncle/aunt, or grandparent).
Similarly over the last few decades the number of medical doctors who have immediate family who are also doctors has grown.
Social and economic class in the US is increasingly set in stone and hereditary.
Medical schools require a lot of volunteering and things like 'slinging hot dogs to pay tuition' don't count unless you grew up without clothes surviving on rabid dogs in the holler of W Virginia working the coal mines from age 8. We all know who has time to volunteer or do minimum wage healthcare instead of work the best paying shitty side job they can get: the rich.
It's set up heavily tilted so you have to be rich, or dirt poor enough for a sob story, or a desired minority. Even if you do volunteer a lot and are middle class, you probably didnt know anyone that could help you into the most prestigious positions. A middle class person of equal aptitude would likely go into something like engineering or law which have fewer class-signalling non-academic purity tests.
That gating on medical training has always been there (at least for 40 years, if not more). But the number of doctors from doctor families has increased.
And just generally, socioeconomic mobility has decreased in the US across the population.
Always been gated. But the slider has been dragged even further in the purity test direction. The intelligent un-pure now tend to become NP or PA, those programs still let you practice independently and slide more towards academics and less at whether a rich person set you up to be taken care of while you play mother Teresa until the switch flips the day you are accepted.
Because there are so many applicants that have good grades.
A more cynical view is that the governing boards want a way to pick and choose who they let in. So they create "holistic" application systems to get "360 degree view of the candidate".
No matter how many have good grades, you can always pick the top n by grades—unless there's a ceiling that the top m > n have all hit. Which, if you're talking about "grades" as in GPA, is plausible.
MCAT seems more relevant, though. According to Claude: "Roughly 0.1% or fewer of test-takers score a perfect 528 in any given year — typically only a few dozen individuals out of the ~120,000 or so who sit for the exam annually." So it should work fairly well for them to sort by MCAT and take however many they have (or expect to have) room for.
I wonder how much of this has to do with seeing someone you are close to work as a doctor makes being a doctor (or military recruit, SWE, etc.) seem real and achievable to you. When I was little I wanted to be a firefighter purely because my father was a firefighter; it wouldn’t surprise me if the same goes for a lot of other people.
I can't prove it, but I've heard more than one story of those with relatives in the military managing to get someone to pull rank and put them on better and upwards promoting assignments.
Military academies are not upper class at all, mostly middle class folks. Officers are generally of the same stock as any other white collar job in engineering, law, business, etc.
Obv not a great sample, but within my peer group, none have parents or siblings. I have an uncle. Grandparent is a weird one - for anybody born in the 70s as I was, it’s almost a given to have a grandparent or four who served. Being European, all of mine served at the tail end of WWII or immediate aftermath.
In the United States i suspect some portion of this is due to "legacy" admissions whereby some child is admitted to a competitive program or given very advantageous scholarships not because of their hard work and displayed competence, but because of their parents. I know that it will be very possible for my children to end up at ivy league if they take the legacy advantage I've given them, even though ivy league has been completely off the table for me my entire life. They'll start _much, much_ higher on the ladder than I could.
I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. They were not "removed", they were made to be disallowed if and only if the school wanted to receive a certain kind of government funding. Some schools have enough money that they can ignore this. Notably, Stanford said they would give up the funding to keep their policy of legacy admissions.
So the richest, most prestigious schools where legacy admissions are a gateway to the upper classes, will keep the policy.
> affirmative action being destroyed by the Trump administration.
Affirmative action was gutted by SCOTUS when Biden was president. Not that it was popular before. California of all places rejected it by 56-44 margin in 2020.
They are synonyms as that includes "nearly the same."
The only difference I can detect is that "class" allows members to move between groups and "castes" do not; however, all the outcomes are identical. So they are absolutely synonymous in most peoples eyes.
It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
The aristocrats' "power" is make-believe like the rest of their papers and numbers: The various psychological barriers which dissuade the gun-bearers from ever reaching the "want to" part.
Which is why power is much more complex than brute force. Sheer physical or military power is not the be-all and end-all, just a facet of the total picture (and in fact, social creatures that humans are, even just adversarial aspects of power are a subset of power).
> It's the people with the guns (and muscles) that have the literal physical power. They could shoot the aristocrats dead if they wanted to.
What matters is not raw power, it’s balance. The power of one guy with guns is kept in check by the power of other guys with guns who stand to benefit from the status quo. The aristocracy’s game is to play with this balance to make sure that no other rival force emerges. They do not need any actual physical power themselves to play it.
This is true up until it isn't. Their security is through obscurity. Being able to deflect the masses. Manipulating the balance, if you will. But they are not special. They are still unprotected sacks of flesh. And we've recently seen just how vulnerable they are. If that desire spread, you will see more.
Indeed. Then, there’s a revolution and heads start rolling. But again, this does not happen when power disappears; it happens when the balance changes, e.g. when a significant chunk of the army sides with a part of the people.
> Their security is through obscurity
Not at all. They can be very blatant about it. Look at Iran for example. Or Russia. Everyone knows who controls what, there is nothing obscure about it.
People with guns don't stand much of a chance against people with armies. Sure armies can turn on an individual, but that just means that particular individual has lost power, and that power has been transferred to whatever new individual commands the loyalty of the many. It's not imaginary, it's emergent.
And how are the people who shot these politicians doing now? How about the US and Japanese governments? Clearly shooting a politician doesn't mean either that you gain their power or that the power structure they led evaporates.
Reminds me of the riddle[1][2] from Game of Thrones / A Clash of Kings:
Lord Varys: Three great men sit in a room: a king, a priest, and a rich man. Between them stands a common sellsword. Each great man bids the sellsword kill the other two. Who lives, who dies?
Tyrion Lannister: Depends on the sellsword.
Lord Varys: Does it? He has neither crown, nor gold, nor favor with the gods.
Tyrion Lannister: He has a sword, the power of life and death.
Lord Varys: But if it's swordsmen who rule, why do we pretend kings hold all the power? When Ned Stark lost his head, who was truly responsible? Joffrey? The executioner? Or something else?
Tyrion Lannister: I've decided I don't like riddles.
[pause]
Lord Varys: Power resides where men believe it resides. It's a trick. A shadow on the wall. And a very small man can cast a very large shadow.
Historically aristocracy was the military class. Nowadays in authoritarian societies it looks like it's mostly matter of time before military takes the lead.
China dervies a ton of authority and Legitmacy from the PLA (peoples liberation army) and Russia is run by from Inteligence service members of the KGB low level ones to be sure but I don't see how China and Russia are counter examples. The US isn't their yet we will see if the backslide happens in the next two years but I think its of a different qualia than we see in the "typical" Authorithian State.
Ironically I was watching Nuremberg last not and is is schocking how close some of the leaders of this country are to characters like Hermann Göring, or Hitler himself in talking points. They are certainly populists but the language they used is MGGA (make german great again) so to speak. And factually that were not particular that good at it either most of Germans recovery is really due to the liberal government that pass laws that built the Autobahn were laws not by the Nazi party. They certain jumped on them and accelerate them but effective governence is not really for the populist
In fact, the current administration, not headed by someone from the military (and VP has military credibility but not leadership) is not at all aligned to the military except in that their base appreciates the imprimatur of honorable military service. In fact, Trump 1 was in many ways a huge refutation to Trump of the idea that the military guys were leaders he could count on. Their brain-trust positions had more left-alignment than he maybe imagined. His administration, in 2025, fired high-ranking officers in a way that suggested he entered with the reverse conclusion: not military leaders as high-competence straight-shooters, but as all being suspect for having risen unstoppably in a system pervaded by partisan platitudes and shibboleths. Fortunately, the administration didn't take the Soviet approach of purging all those under suspicion.
They just finally had to fire their SecNav because reality butted heads with their ideological conclusion was that business experience was more conducive to military success. Unfortunately for their very-much-not-military-led plan, SecNav probably needs a bit more user experience from time in Navy leadership to successfully work within that labrythine bureaucracy.
A military coup in the U.S. is imaginable, which probably explains some of the top brass purges (until recently, where it's probably an attempt to deflect blame for the massive Iran fuck up).
Putin did it better; he kept the military weak and aggressively managed the risk via the FSB.
I don't think it's plausible, but an authoritarian president invoking emergency powers and deploying military and paramilitary forces to exert control on the streets is, on the basis it's already going on at a limited scale. All it takes is for that scale to gradually dial up over time until the frog's cooked.
The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
>The problem you have is these elected kings. Not just any king, pretty specifically the majority of the powers enjoyed by George III in the 1790s. The fact that you still have this, unreformed over 200 years later and still think that somehow your constitutional system is modern, is a matter for despair. Get yourselves a proper parliamentary system, with maybe a head of state as a figurehead.
What a poorly thought out and questionably motivated take. It will no doubt be well received here.
In any case, reconstructing out legislature to copy european stuff isn't gonna change anything if the legislature still sees fit to vest so much power in the executive.
Your main point is valid, but I'd argue it's less the power of the President and more the two-party system and the weakness of Congress that is the root of many American governance problems. Executive power has grown in the vacuum of Congressional impotence.
As far as reforms, we need more to be sure, but there's at least the 22nd Amendment, formalizing the two-term tradition that Washington initiated and FDR abrogated into a hard limit, that means Trump can't legally keep power past 2028.
I think, despite all the furor whipped up and attempts by high-ranking officials to foment a coup, the military is actually very unlikely to disobey Presidential orders; this is based on my frequent interactions with military officers over the last ten years. Do you perceive some other, more likely, coup scenario?
A coup from the same military that happily deployed foot soldiers into American cities to perform law enforcement duties they were not trained to perform? And is happily killing boat-people in the Caribbean? And ran a covert operation to kidnap a foreign head of state? And ran another covert operation to assassinate political leaders in another sovereign state and are now bombing that same state into rubble for no publicly disclosed reason?
Yeah, no coup is happening here. Our military is built around civilian control via the White House. That ain't changing any time soon. Ignoring the various uses of force above, when the generals were called before Hegseth to bend the knee, all but one of them did.
That is exactly the type of pacificity that plays into their hand. Life is good and bad at the same time. It is important to hold those two at the same time.
The vast majority of people don't want to take the bet of a tiny chance of doubling their lot in life for the downside risk of literally being tortured and dying and probably ruining the life of any loved ones.
Most people aren't degenerate gamblers.
The workaround is organization. With sufficient organization, you can start to drag the tiny chance to a slightly bigger chance, and slightly reduce the downside risk maybe.
Some parts of American society are absurdly bad at organizing, and basically gave up 60 years ago.
Not at all. In a caste system a lower caste person will get attacked if he (or especially she) has any success at all. Whether or not what they did was legal or not does not factor into the equation. First priority is that the highest up dalit is lower than the worst drunkard brahmin, even if they have to kill them.
Tulsa once had what was known as Black Wall Street. There were too many successful black men, so 1921 in the whites massacred everybody. They even brought in planes and dropped bombs.
People died, yes. But there was no white supremacism. There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street. It was triggered by an attempted rape.
People were murdered and homes and businesses destroyed by a white mob because they were black. How is that anything but white supremacy?
> There was no Wall Street. It was just like any high street.
It was one of the wealthiest black communities in america at a time. “Black wall street” was a nickname, not a literal description of a stock exchange.
> It was triggered by an attempted rape.
No, it was triggered by an attempted lynching of a black man. Or if you want to be more specific, because the community there stood up to protect the arrested man. It was triggered by a black community stopping a lynching.
Your assertions are an ahistorical revisionist fantasy.
Are we now not at all allowed to reference problems in other societies? We can complain about western society, and complaints from 100 years ago, when even my grandfather wasn't born yet, are valid criticism of America/Europe/... but things that happen today in India, Pakistan, Turkey are off limits?
No one did of course, but it's a common tactic of distraction to try to focus the attention on something else.
That way people don't have to experience the discomfort thinking about the negative thing going on in their own society.
I think an important distinction is not really the class matter, it’s really more a jealousy and spite that the political and bureaucratic betters could not profit from it, not that he did so much.
If he had had the means of letting all or maybe just a relevant and important enough cadre of aristocrats know the inside information, he would have surely not been prosecuted. I know this from first hand knowledge.
It may seem the same or like a distinction without a difference to some, but that is really how things work and why he was prosecuted, not because he profited, but because he did not let others in on it and they really want to discourage that behavior, hence his flogging and his public flogging at that. And yes, if you get the sense that it’s like organized crime, then yes, that is and long has been how the US government and many other governments have functioned for a long time now. It’s what also makes them so easily controlled by the US. It could have easily also been swept under the rug while still sending a signal within the system, but it wasn’t and we were all told about it.
And that is how the ruling parasites really get rich, none of that hard work and smarts stuff; those are the stories told to keep the peasant cattle voting for the slaughterhouse, dreaming of the wide open pastures of also becoming rich by working hard.
Fraud, cheating, lying, manipulation … that’s the name of the American dream game.
I again apologize to anyone who feels what and how I say things is “flame bait” or a personal attack, it’s simply just how I speak and like to challenge people’s comfortable assumptions. Feel free to dismiss what I say of you disagree with me. No offense intended and no flaming or whatever necessary, it’s just people speaking to each other or not. We’ll all be fine if we keep talking, even if you don’t like what others have to say or want to control how they say things.
Not so much class or caste, but a dual-state where an elite have a normative or lawless state, and specific or arbitrary others suffer a parallel prerogative or punitive state. This is the essence of corrupt authoritarianism.
Most Americans share a delusion of perpetual glory days like a former star high school football quarterback with the refusal to accept factual reality that their country isn't uniformly excellent and is terrible in many ways including being extremely superficial, corrupt, dangerous, unhealthy, unhappy, paranoid, over-reacting, immature, selfish, unfair, disinformed, and unequal.
More like three. One class where you can do whatever you can pay for, another with a set of annoying but almost reasonable rules and the last one for whom any actions and their mere existence is illegal, but whose presence is very much relied upon to do things.
It's a simplified model to expose unseen hypocrisy and injustice that originated with the persecution of jews in the German Nazi justice system. In reality, 2 or 3 is too simplistic as the US values people differently in different contexts with numerous attribute privilege points. Don't be old, brown, short, homeless, and unattractive in America except to be constantly harassed.
Frank Wilhoit: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition …There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”
soldiers are disposable, they prolly threw him under the bus hoping that would be the end of the matter and they could walk away with the rest of the money.