The Three Estates of American Society

On American Regimes

Anyone who has scratched the surface of European history knows that just before the first French Revolution, society in Bourbon France was still following the Ancien Régime structure, with its three official groups. These three classifications were called the "first estate", consisting of the Catholic clergy; the "second estate", consisting of the titled nobility; and the "third estate", consisting of everyone not included in the first two groups. With all the skill of a man with too much time on his hands and with a dose of skewed circular logic, I have managed to find parallels to old France’s same system in none other than the United States of America. Understand first, that I am seeking to pinpoint official levels of society, not de facto socioeconomic classes based on income. In any democracy, money gives you supreme power, but you will not (at least on paper) receive dispensation as a separate member of society. In truth, the richest 1% of Americans owns a little over one-third of America’s total wealth. That group, along with the larger and wealthier banks and corporations, and the military industrial complex possess all of the real power in our country. However, this power is merely indirect. For this exercise, I am looking to analyze officially-perpetuated levels of American society that are recognized by the US government. There are few instances where we find groups of people officially set above others. But they do exist in our American culture.

The First Estate

The First Estate—the clergy, has an American equivalent. I am refer not to our confusing mass of increasingly-irrelevant pastors of any new sub-branch of Christianity that comes along. The estate is none other than our array of caretakers and administers of America’s only official religion: the law. The law saturates every facet of our society, protecting those who have the means to know it and destroying those who do not. Lawyers are our trained clerics that are equipped to unlock law’s mystical secrets. More importantly, one must possess a doctorate in the study of English Common Law in order to enter their sacred order. America is and always has been a country by and for lawyers. All of the famous republics of the past were protective and proud of their law codes. In ancient Rome, men of wealth and influence understood the civil law and it protected their way of life against suits. And like the clergy of France in 1789, our lawyers have their own hierarchical levels of power. At the bottom (instead of the poorest orders of friars and nuns) we see paralegals. The circuit court justices and numerous legal counsels within the federal government represent those more aristocratic bishops of influence. At the top, we have our own pope—Chief Justice of the United States, appointed by the highest nobility. Am I grasping at straws here? By my logic, one might be inclined to argue that any sort of doctoral professional in their respective field might be included in America’s First Estate. After all, is it not true that physicians possess their own profound understanding of the well-regulated discipline of medicine to which we laypeople are not privy? I would disagree and would argue that the two instances are not related. As I see it, the difference is that medicine has no true direct link to the very lifeblood of our government and constitution the way that the law code does. Our understanding of common law is the very basis for how we function as a society—just as Christianity and the nobility were the bases for society in Merovingian France. In the US, the government and the law go hand in hand and perpetuate one another’s power. The government creates and enforces the laws, while the legal profession both interprets those laws and provides a link to the rest of us for protection from and negotiation through the law’s tangled webs.

The Second Estate

In the US, only the federal bureaucracy and elected officials receive special treatment as citizens above other citizens. Our 21^st Century American government is far more decadent than that of our austere politicians of the 19^th Century. In 1801, the president received no staff other than the cabinet he appointed. He had no servants or expenses or travel budget. He paid his own bills. His salary had to cover his state dinners and even the décor of the White House. Presidents regularly left office penniless and died in massive debt with no pension. That was what it meant to rule a republic. There was a sacrifice in exchange for power. Naysayers will say that in the 1800s, presidents did not need large staffs or lavishness. I would argue that they needed it more than today. Lincoln presided over an army of 2 million union soldiers with no way to communicate to them other than with a telegraph. He had a staff of two young men to relieve some of his more mundane tasks. Besides that, he had to do most of his own work, which was long and tedious. He spent hours each day simply receiving well wishers seeking federal employment. Today, there are not as many as 2 million soldiers in the military, yet we have a vast network of voice and data communication resources available to the commander in chief. Electricity, computers, cell phones, and modern transportation have made it possible for the 21st-century chief executive to juggle many tasks at once. Yet he has a staff of over 1,500 civilians supporting him in the white house as well as an immense military command structure. This ballooning of staffs, so far as I can tell, exists so that the president does not have to do any work. He can play golf, attend ribbon-cutting ceremonies, and read speeches he didn’t write, all while his staff runs around answering emails and doing his work. One apparent difference between Lincoln’s modest structure and today’s decadence is that presidents used to win wars, while our contemporary presidents lose all of their wars. Today, even the lowliest congressman of the House of Representatives need only serve a 2-year term to receive a full-time staff, massive expense budget; travel, and housing allowances, great pay, and the best healthcare plan in the country. To be a politician in the US is to have the best job in the world.

So why do I consider this class of Americans to be our nobility as opposed to them simply being place-holders in critical job positions? The fact that they all receive lifetime pensions makes them our nobility. Our rulers and former rulers’ lives are funded by the state—that is, the taxpayer. They receive amazing retirement pay and all but free healthcare—yes, even the republicans receive government-paid healthcare. Their children receive free college tuition and they are afforded low fixed-interest rate loans. Former presidents receive bodyguards for life. But like the ancient nobility, our contemporary overlords have their own multi-tiered organization that only they understand. Just as our former rulers in Europe still acknowledge that emperors outrank kings and kings outrank archdukes, we have Secretaries of Defense over directors of policy and chiefs of staff and postmasters. The perks trickle down to every level. Hanging near the bottom of this food chain are the simple commission-holders, who reign just above the hard-working, yet endless train of federal employees. They are our non-hereditary knights of varying orders. Below them--the lowest federal employees on the totem pole can be categorized more as official retainers than they can as a noble class. Although these retainers are forced to render salutes and give verbal courtesies to those ambassadors and officers holding a presidential commission (with many being unable to leave their profession under their own free will) they are nevertheless compensated with a modest retirement pension, free college, and low fixed interest rates on home or small business loans. The president’s party of cronies is always within hair’s breadth of being officially above the law. Of course, most of the theoretical president’s men have been unofficially above the law almost since the inception of the federal government. If there is ever a full-blown revolution to overthrow the American aristocracy, it will be the federal government officials that face the guillotine. As a commissioned officer in the US Army Reserve and a veteran who was allowed to wet his beak on two VA home loans and free education up through a master’s degree, I can only say that I hope I am overlooked as a beneficiary of the public purse.

The Third Estate

Finally, we have the third estate; also known as everybody else—yes everybody. It does not matter if you are a Wall Street Billionaire, a CEO, a celebrity, a McDonald’s employee, security guard, a marketing analyst, a real estate mogul, a teacher, a farmer, a gardener, or even a poor student. We all have a few things in common: We are not allowed to cross the bar in a courtroom without being told to do so and we do not receive paychecks and benefits from the taxes of others. The two estates above us have bestowed mandatory civic duties with which we must all obey. First, we must obey the church—that is to say, the law. The English Common law that once protected us from others has expanded its role and now protects us from ourselves. Heavy fines are incurred for the failure to wear your seatbelt in a car or to not place your 4’10” child in a cumbersome booster seat. Harmless drugs like marijuana, which have medicinal characteristics, are illegal for an arbitrary reason. Prostitution has been deemed off limits to the masses by our sexually coy populations and our presumably virtuous rulers. Owning weapons is not even allowed in many states. I could go on and on, but the point is that one result of all these laws being created to protect us against ourselves is that the US has the single largest prison population in the world. To be sure, between 7% and 8% of the American male population is currently either imprisoned or on parole. This flies directly in the face of our constantly being told by television and educators that our nation is the freest in the world. I will try to remember that the next time I am pulled over by a city policeman. I remember it was less than a year ago that, while retrieving my dropped ID card from the floorboard, I was threatened by a policeman who had pulled me over (for changing lanes “incorrectly”) that he might be inclined to shoot anyone reaching under their seat on his approach. When I commented that I could either reach under the seat or get a citation for not producing a license, he simply said that the ID must already be available if I did not want a citation. Clearly he dabbled in the scripture of American law himself.

The second civic duty of the American third estate is to pay enormous taxes while receiving no benefits from those taxes. We are told by our nobility that our taxes mostly go to a social security trust fund to serve as our retirement pension, but the truth is that the second estate is spending our money every day as if it were their own escrow account. I fear we will never see that money again. The government will use our tax dollars to continue funding their vast establishment and give themselves greater and greater staffs with their fabulous lifestyles of work and travel. Our nobility taxes us and uses the money to give each other virtually free healthcare. And in an act of cruel severity, the nobility denies us all the same benefits that they enjoy. Aristocracies have not changed! They still have the temerity to deny commoners what they are willing to take from our own pockets. The purpose of income tax and social security tax is to allow our nobility the chance to thrive and perpetuate itself. Of course, the joke is that so great is their lavishness that their annual deficit still runs into the hundreds of billions of dollars.

The mandatory third civic duty of Americans is to serve the clergy as part of a jury. Here, we have the opportunity to fight back against the lawmakers by unanimously allowing those of our peers that committed irrelevant crimes to go free. Unfortunately, the Americans are a quarrelsome people who hate each other far more than they hate their own rulers. As a result, juries often convict and subject innocent men to imprisonment. Finally, the fourth mandatory civic duty is our selective service—the ancient right of the nobility to conscript us to fight and die for them. The tradeoff is that we are all allowed into a sub-category of their noble order, formerly known in medieval Europe as a retainer.

The wealthier members of the third estate, ironically, have more power in America than even the nobility. Many of them opt to enter into the noble orders and do so very easily. But those who choose not to gain official power for themselves can control the politicians through campaign financing in a long-established patronage system. In the American Revolution, which began in 1775, it was the upper middle class that led the uprising—the doctors, merchants, lawyers, and plantation-owners. The poor didn’t care who ruled them and the aristocrats were all pro-British. Within the third estate, we shall look at class structure as the blueprint for what could happen next in the US. The top 1% wealthiest Americans of the third estate control and benefit from the government currently in place. The bottom 20% of America's socio-economic classes subsists on welfare and its members play the role of docile serfs. 32% of America is made up of the poor who are working multiple jobs and are unable to take time to reflect upon their situation. Many of them also receive government welfare to some degree or another. The remaining 47% of the third estate constitutes what could be considered the middle class. The top one-third of this category is made up of the upper middle class—men and women with 6-figure salaries and net worth above $1 million. This group is currently in the crosshairs for tax rate increases in America today. The rich are always safe. But the upper middle class are trying to become rich on the one hand, but the tax code restrains on the other. In a hypothetical revolution, should it come, this will be the discontented group with enough power, money, and influence (if they unite) to lead it. This was the same group that led the American Revolution after all.

The Prospect of Revolution

So like France, could America experience a similar revolution? Everything has recently changed due to massive unemployment. The middle class, with no money at all, is no longer content. Corporations owned by equity groups and speculators will tolerate no hiring. I suspect the poorer end of the middle class will slink away and find solace in poverty as welfare recipients. The loan crisis has made starting small businesses difficult. That leaves a highly-discontented middle class that has given up on voting for one party or another. Could they forget their petty hatred of fellow Americans long enough to unite? Could they then unite with what’s left of the upper middle class and force the hand of the nobility toward change? The nobility controls a vast law-enforcement network that is above the law it protects by tapping into communications and shooting civilians indiscriminately. They have created NORTHCOM—an area of military jurisdiction with a ground commander within the US. The nobility has taken away many of the rights of us to own guns so that we could never fight them effectively. Should we have the audacity to rise against them, they have created a label for even a Christian or atheist who chooses to attack the government on any front: terrorist. The nobility need only invoke this word and apply it to an individual for the whole country to rally against him. Most likely, there will be slow societal shifts rather than a bread riot. Americans have been discontentedly leading uprisings for the better part of our history, but these seem to have ended in the 1990s. The US government got better and better at supressing them. A late act of ironic notoriety by the government occurred on the 200th anniversary year of a similar event. In 1770, British soldiers fired into a crowd of angry American protesters who resented the occupation of Boston. 200 years later in 1970, it was the US Army that fired into a crowd of angry American protesters who had rallied against serving in a colonial war. Five years after the Boston massacre, the Americans launched their revolution, declaring independence in 1776. Five years after the Kent State Massacre, South Vietnam fell. But there was no revolution in America. We celebrated our bicentennial.

A less costly form of revolution that might better suit the American people was practiced by the Roman Plebeians whenever the aristocracy got out of hand. It was called the secessio plebis, or “Plebeian Secession”. In this arrangement, the highly-organized rich, middle, and poor classes of Plebs simply threatened to emigrate from Rome and move elsewhere. This would leave the patricians to themselves in an empty hulk of a city state. Loathing the prospect of having no one over which to rule, the patricians always agreed to the concessions of the Plebes.

But if there were ever to be blood, our nobility will most certainly face ad hoc charges of corruption and tyranny. The law codes would be changed and the upper middle class would inherit control of the country as the Second American Republic. After 20 years, would our new republic prove to be any better than the first? Probably not…