The Circulation of Elites and the American Revolution

The Frontier’s Crucible

By guest author Nicholas Sorokin.

Elite Overproduction is a theory which describes social change as effected by discontent, high-functioning individuals. Ordinarily, most such men will make their way into some elite circle or another — the landed gentry, the military, the priesthood, the merchants, and so on — and take their place within a society’s ruling structure. Those capable of wielding power receive it, ambitions are sated, and life in the empire moves on.

However, if this process is interrupted, friction will start to build within the upper echelons of a society. If men of an elite character are not allowed to enter the halls of power, or if they are relegated to the children’s table upon a token admission, they will begin to agitate. If this represents a persistent failure by the regime to match its demand for elites to the supply, the spurned aristocrats will find themselves in good company, and will agitate in concert. Agitation eventually percolates to action, and, as Pareto tells us, they will take it upon themselves to enact regime change. The American Revolution was an example of just such a process occurring.

The foremost evidence for this model may be found in how top-heavy Colonial America was. While precise estimates vary, historians agree that the American Colonists were a highly lettered people, boasting a literacy rate somewhere between 70–90% of the adult population. By contrast, the England of the mid-18th century had attained a mere 54% literacy rate. With the sole exception of the Netherlands, the rest of Western Europe was even less literate at this time.

Additionally, the primal New World afforded a rare opportunity to those men with the mettle to seize it: land ownership. The ownership and cultivation of private property has been the hallmark of nobility since time immemorial (hence the word landlord). While every square inch in Europe was largely accounted for, the Americas promised a wealth of new estates for homesteaders and would-be entrepreneurs. Land ownership skyrocketed in the Colonies, far more commonplace than on the Continent. Even to this day, property ownership is widely considered to be a staple of the American middle class (compare that to the ubiquity of rented flats in European markets), and its decline is seen by most Americans as a failure in our economy.

In this example, we see an indicator that is not merely correlative but causative. Taming the wild lands acted as both filter and crucible, weeding out those men who were incapable of the task, and transforming into miniature patricians those homesteaders who were. The nouveau riche planters who made up so many of the Founding Fathers emerged from a similar process. Thus, the New World bred potential blue-bloods at an unprecedented pace. These factors demonstrate why the Americas had an oversupply of elites, but why couldn’t the British Empire integrate them into the power structure?

Enter the Royal Proclamation of 1763, something most readers should remember from their American History courses. The finer points of the French and Indian War go beyond the scope of this article, but suffice it to say, thanks to the vagaries of geopolitics the Crown believed it necessary to restrict Americans from settling west of the Appalachians. By restricting access to new land, this decree interrupted the elite-formation process. Prospective elites could less reliably be absorbed into the power structure, and the existing cadre of new elites could not as readily expand their gains. Over the next decade, tensions began to brew, and every American citizen should know when and how they boiled over. The elites circulated, and established a new order.

The regime which the new American aristocracy established was, at least in the beginning, designed to address its unique concerns. As we discussed above, the Colonies were very top-heavy, with an overrepresentation of elite, high-functioning citizens. Years ago, Bronze Age Pervert made the very astute point that Athenian democracy could only function as such because every Athenian citizen stood with his brothers in the phalanx; he could trust his neighbor in the Assembly with his life, and very often he did. When this ceased to be the case for the Athenians, Athenian democracy crumbled. Likewise, American democracy could only function so long as the bulk of its citizenry were frontiersmen, or the close descendants of frontiersmen. As the frontier began to close, American democracy lost its essential character, and began to crumble.

It is because of this character that the nascent United States had to be founded as a democracy, and it is only because of this character that it could function as a democracy — it was not the mob that ruled, but a well-populated landed elite. Our Founders were not a rabble of proletarians who fought against oppression. They were the first generation of a new aristocracy, who seized power to protect the interests of them and theirs. Let us not forget our legacy as we move into the future.