Because the Ivies have strayed from the theism innate in their charters, elite opinion today is less likely to value religion than it once was. Because the very rich have stopped reproducing at replacement rates, such opinion is also less likely to consider posterity, especially since blood is thicker than water. Anyone of us would be more likely to mouth platitudes and enforce absurdities if we didn’t have children of their own who would be put at risk because of such behavior.

These and other changes to the makeup of America’s elite class have caused their influence to lose it’s connections with justice and tradition, but the answer to that is discourse and vigilance, not a stupid Jacobinism that makes the Founders out to be just like us, only more egalitarian.

Great piece . . . the idea that the founders built “elitism and democracy . . . into the system” is off the mark. Democracy was the last thing they had in mind — republican government, with its filtering effects on democracy, including separation of powers, multiple checks on each branch, the ‘extended republic,’ and federalism were all designed to mitigate the effects of the “tyranny of the majority.” It’s amazing what passes for ‘political thought’ these days….