There is no difference. We all just viewed a week long burial ceremony for a past president of the United States. Many of us, especially the media, treated George H.W. Bush like royalty. It should be important to note that the founding fathers of America abhorred the royalty of Great Britain. Terms like “your excellency” and “your highness” were specifically rejected by congress as words to be used in addressing the president of the United States. The title of “Mr. President” was decided to be sufficient.
Fareed Zakaria wrote an interesting opinion piece in the Washington Post about the things we all can learn from the WASP class that has managed the United States from its founding. In that article he pointed out that “the old WASP aristocracy did have a sense of modesty, humility and public-spiritedness that seems largely absent in today’s elite.”
For those of you not familiar with the term WASP. It is an abbreviation for White Anglo Saxon Protestant.
My answer is that in public America’s aristocracy (meaning the rich and powerful) takes the positon that they know what is the best for the rest of us mere mortals. Absence of that earlier more modest behavior does not make them royalty.
Zakaria did not grow up in the United States and is obviously blind to the fact that America’s aristocracy promised change for over 200 years but nothing changed. The rich stayed rich and the poor stayed poor. Non-white Americans continuously face discrimination as they have throughout the country’s history. That has not changed with the Trump presidency. The only thing that has changed is the names and faces.
The Bush family was and is still part of that WASP culture and so are the Clintons, the Bidens, the Newsoms (California’s next governor), the Garcettis (mayor of Los Angeles) and almost everyone else in leadership you can name.
Stupidly we, the proletariat, keep sending the same people to Washington and expecting a new outcome. Hillary Clinton seemed to think that just running for president would give her the job. Donald Trump simply saw the opportunity to convince voters that he would lead America to a new place.
Trump’s style has continued to convince Americans that their lives will be better under his leadership. He is just an outsider but is also among the rich that have no real concern for American lives or America’s place in the world. Trump is a WASP from a wealthy family who has done a better selling job of his brand of “he will be helping the rest of us.”
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