It's interesting, but not only true, but logical. Privilege will rise. The sense of privilege will rise.
   We'll say this more than once on this site, but everything has a logic. Just don't confuse this notion of logic with Logic, as suggested by Aristotle, or common sense, or Reason. Psychopaths have a logic, a very unique one, to be sure, but once you can understand their way of sorting out facts and turning them into responses, you have a good idea what they will do next. This is what profilers do. We do the same thing with bureaucracies all over the world. Kenyan bureaucracy in Mombasa is different than Romanian  bureaucracy in Timisoara, but they both do things in predictable fashion.
   It is from this sort of logic that privilege will rise, not fall, as socialism gets its grip over the next decade.
   But as terminology,  "privilege" itself is a moving target. The Leftists have railed against privilege for fifty years in this country, yet crave it more than any other possession. They hate the idea of some bigwig in some small town getting away with drunk driving, or his kid getting away with it, simply because he owns the local mill. Yet, in a way not at all dissimilar from how Muslim fascists want to force men to bow before Allah, with a sword at their necks, they want ordinary people to have to bow to their superior intellect, world view, whatever, but with the coercive power of the state rather than the persuasive power of their personalities, charm, or intellectual skill.
   This is part of the "logic" that drives the vast armies of the Left, and the State is more than willing to oblige, for in exchange for their services, almost freely given, in the end, they get a kind of life-time sinecure as card carrying party members, a title, a 5 x 5 box (we're thinking of adding Pete Seeger's classic song, "Little Boxes" to our website just so you can go and listen to what I mean. He was referring to corporate rats rather then commie rats, but it all comes out the same in the end.), a rubber stamp and a place to be every day from 9 to 5, a sense of being in charge of something although they never know just quite what, and a pay commensurate with what ordinary clerks earned in 1938...in Bulgaria.
   This of course, is privilege on the cheap, but, like fishes and loaves on the Mount, it can feed millions.
   As for real privilege, there are two views; one European, the other purely American. The European view of privilege for centuries was borne on the backs of the idea of nobility, which is predominantly French, so you can only imagine how deep the manure can get on this subject.
   Almost all left-wing politics in America is based on European notions and world views, most of which are completely unfounded since American political institutions are uniquely American for some very special and cogent reason. (Yes, this means left wing politics in America are built on factual, not just philosophical lies, but more on that later. Chumm has a piece in the works on that theme.) In short, left wing politics from Europe were anti-royalist and anti-imperialist (just as right wing politics are in America), even before Karl Marx. And they were aimed at the notion that certain classes were above the law. This didn't mean that aristocrats and royals just got away with it, or the police just looked the other way. They were legally recognized to be above or beyond the law in all but the most serious cases, and even in say murder, civil courts were not necessarily empowered to handle the case.
   As Europe spiraled toward the 20th Century, with the excesses of the French Revolution still only three generations old, Marx organizing the working classes and European capitalism (not to be confused with its American counterpart...and why we use "free market economy" here to define capitalism in America) moving toward industrialization under a full head of steam, the continent was still ruled by a few monarchies whose families or successors had ruled since the Dark Ages. There was extreme pressure on this system.  Bad things always die hard. The history of Europe from the Renaissance forward was of the struggle, and piece-by-piece relinquishment of royal power to the people.
   Privilege and their physical land holdings, on which their wealth, even today, is built were the last hold outs. After World War I a kind of deal was struck in which democracy, as they call it, was handed down...but not so much to the people as to a buffer establishment of bureaucracies in between aristocracy and the masses, called the state class. The royals retained their holdings and wealth, and most of their privileges, while nominally bowing to the overlordship of the newly-named democratic state (something the English had already been doing for 200 years), headed up by educated professional managers, the civil servant class. These managers protected the royals but also kept the people at bay by building roads, toilets (which they still haven't gotten round to finishing), schools, and stuff like that. The people elected officials to go to their legislatures, debate larger issues, then enact whatever this buffer zone of professionals said needed to be done. They did the all the heavy lifting, worked the long hours, wore the green eye shades...and got none of the perquisites.
   After a brief hiatus when the Euros, as they are wont to do every generation or so, rose up and tried to kill each other off, usually at the behest of the French and Germans, the Europeans learned, more from the fascist experiments in Italy and Germany than the Bolshevik goings-on in Russia, that government management can be quite lucrative and elegant...if you just put your whole mind to it.
   They've been slowly plucking that goose ever since. It's nearly ready for the oven.
   As the royals are dying out as a class now, the privileges they had owned have been slowing sliding over into the management class instead of just disappearing. This makes sense when you stop to think about it, but young socialists in America might find this troubling, if they only believed it to be true (and secretly didn't yearn for the same thing, as many truly do. But while it is true that socialism rarely creates much of anything of value, or enduring beauty, it sure can inherit a lot of it. The Nazis converted billions in confiscated art and jewels to their own personal collections....unlike the first generation of Bolsheviks, who merely stuck them away in The People's museums, which the people got to visit every once in a blue moon. The Hermitage was Stalin's own personal parlor, just as the Bolshoi was his personal studio. It would be the next generation of Communists who would start building dachas far, far way from prying eyes so they could begin to enjoy the better things in life. But in town, on the job, up til the very end, the communist nomenklatura lived just as simply as steel workers. I've been in their homes. Some American socialists would appreciate this price that bourgeois vice had paid to Marxist virtue, but the style and class-mad Euros would have none of it. They wanted it all, and they wanted it now. They have become pigs, feeding on the accumulations of others.

    America was born under an entirely different moon, so it is hard to say whether the new leaders of socialism here will adopt the austerity of a Lenin or the extravagance of a Mitterand.
    Privilege in American was born on the backs of wealth, the vast majority of it earned, and as Moses Sands reminds us, most of it frittered away within three generations. We clean our ponds of scum regularly. At the time of Constitution, America had little in the way of wealth such as was found in Europe. Had they not represented the colonies in an official capacity in France, neither Ben Franklin nor Thomas Jefferson could have gotten much further socially than a middle class coffee house in Paris.
    We had no born nobility, though our tireless efforts to create one, from early industrial barons to cinema stars in the 30s, speaks to a culture's need to have something like that around. It doesn't matter whether privilege is officially looked down upon or not, it will always inure to power. Trust me, Al Gore expects there to be privilege. In fact, privilege with him is a birthright. So does John Kerry. They wouldn't have signed up for the team if there wasn't privilege...with more to come. And certainly the brazillians of foul-mouthed members of the dailyCuss out there think there will be privilege, albeit little more than state-sanctioned superiority over their neighbors.
     It may not work out that way for them, we will see, but there will arise a new class of  "the privileged" that this society has never ever seen.
     Indeed, Ameican privilege has always been a local phenomenon. In Hollywood, a celeb might get busted, and his/her studio would rush in with lawyers, phone calls to friendly judges, and even with the paparazzi an inch away, pull a sleight of hand, get the story off page one and out of memory in short order. The same with athletes in their home venue.
     But in Omaha? Lafayette? Not so easy. Most cases with legs, since the rise of celebrity in America (we have a pending article on how this will change as well) have come from places the modern media call "fly over country".
     But even in fly-over-country, there are people of privilege. Only they can exert it in a very limited way. Although Tennessee Williams and Faulkner among others in the South, and arms-full of western novelists popularized the idea of the above-the-law town big shot who ran things through his gang (100's of B westerns were built on this theme), his ownership of the local factory, his land holdings (Big Daddy) or his connections to city government and banks...the fact is that very few characters ever existed who actually committed  real felonies and got away with them because of their social standing or power. And books have been written about most of those.
     Privilege, for the most part, was fixing traffic fines, or that phone call to the county sheriff when Junior got picked up with a six-pack, followed by a donation to the Policeman's Benevolent Fund. But this pales with the sort of privilege exercised in Georgetown or just off Central Park for much worse acts. But both pale with say, the Belgian cover-up of pedophiles in their own government in the 1990s.
     Even corporate privilege, which has helped justify, thus bring about, the current government takeover of much of the American private sector, is one more of style and class (or should I say, a crass lack of class) than real privilege. Corporate jets, when one congress lady from Texas takes a limo to work every day, exactly one-half a block? Sky boxes at LP Field in Nashville, when compared to a congressman who could allow the running of a (profitable) male brothel out of his home...sanction free?
     There is no question about where real privilege lies in America today, especially the beyond-the-reach-of-the-law variety. Just when will Charlie Wrangell be indicted?
     As we wrote some days back, there will be a contest in Washington between the hot-tub Socialist Lites and the socialists with a more austere, harder edge. The Ambers (No pun intended, since we don't know which way Obama will go yet.). How long that will last we can't say. Who will win, we can't say, but we are laying bets on the Ambers.
     The hot-tub socialists, like most of the old guard Left in Congress, plus Al Gore, see America much like Goering saw Germany, as just one big goose to be plucked. This is why we named Gore as the chief bandito of the American Left, (after Calvera from "The Magnifcient Seven."),  "If God had not intended them to be sheared, he would not have made them sheep." They all see that shining city on the hill gated with guards, "For Members Only". Sorry, President Reagan, wherever you are, that is how it is to be for awhile.
     But don't worry, a more austere socialism will only prolong this inevitable swing toward materialistic privilege by a generation or so. But above-the-law-privilege is already a done deal.
Vassar Bushmills