In which radical theory helps in debunking the aristocracy we never had to begin with

In the early 70s there were people in literature departments who, influenced by Derrida, thought that Marxist concepts could be re-written with the insights of philology, based on the wide uses of poetic resources in the work of some French philosophers and theorists. What this amounted to was a trite revision of Marxism such that the problems of capitalism are reduced to those of theatrical subjectivities, patriarchal authoritarian and dominance, and, more generally, feudalism and aristocracy. This caught on a bit with many people because it actually fits the model of American left-liberal theory, in which:

The only remaining forms of social criticism are forms of the rejection of aristocracy.

This in the country that is more paradigmatically capitalist and bourgeois than any other. Our notions of liberty and equality are utterly bourgeois. We don't value (as a source of esteem, rather than mere advantage) the inheritance of privilege, and we believe that anyone can succeed, and we should all compete to do so.

The United States has never even had an aristocracy, which is outlawed by our Constitution. (Though its values were appropriated and approximated in the antebellum South, which in fact, just as in Greek and Roman antiquity, on the basis of slavery, there was a patrician class which enjoyed a certain idea of liberty that industrial and financial urban capitalism does not allow, requiring as it does a much larger, bureaucratic and often intrusive state, whose domination theoretically extends everywhere, a principle that the United States has applied internationally: it holds itself exempt from international law, and aims to promote its values everywhere, and by any means necessary, that is, without limit. Obviously, the Southern model was no alternative any more than Sicily's La Cosa Nostra was an alternative to the Italian nationalist and bourgeois Risorgimento, an event roughly contemporaneous with our Civil War: the Sicilian plantation lords opposed the national police state with something more violent, regulated by person whim more than law, and backward. The South had to lose; the North still has to find more effective forms of liberty, which still follows property and only opposes authority by asserting one's own. We need to find our own freedom from labor, not for a class, but universally; that is the dream that Lincoln's friend Karl Marx affirmed.)

Thus, people are always criticizing those who cop an attitude, think they are important, neglect to set aside their ego, are hypocritical, take advantage of others, do not recognize that a young person joins a professional like a military recruit who is subjected to the fiction of starting from zero (the 'Private' is only concerned about himself, and so must merely obey orders; his opposite extreme, the 'General', is concerned about the all or universal: particularity and universality are mutually exclusive and arranged in a hierarchy), and so also who fails to obey authority. College students in America, if they are liberals as most quickly become if they were not already, love to remind each other than they are Zeroes who are there to acquire slowly the lingua franca of life in bureaucratic capitalism.