>>101367710
The critique you raise of antebellum Europe's utterly sclerotic social stratification has some validity. Carlyle himself, for example, wasn't shy in proclaiming that the French elites of the Ancien Régime were decadent and incompetent and that a cleansing revolutionary fire was necessary to clear them out and replace them with something new - despite it ending in the Rousseauian Montagnards' Reign of Terror, Paris being engulfed in Weimar-tier degeneracy and proto-Redditor "Cult of Reason" madness, the War in the Vendee, etc. The Jeffersonian concept of "natural aristocracy" also comes to mind, as he observed exactly the same problems and considered the rigid preservation of the prerogatives of the old families against encroachment by those who proved themselves "the best" to be artificial and stifling.
However, what you miss is that what distinguishes true nobility is more than mere individual competence or meritocratic ability. What distinguishes the nobleman of the past from a modern technocrat or corporate oligarch is not how good they are at their job, but how they view the world and society itself. It isn't a lie to say that the status of nobility facilitates growing to view a culture and the people within it as "yours" and as your responsibility, the way a father views his child; it allows the individual the opportunity to focus on transcendental matters of aesthetic, religion, and culture - not just petty material concerns such as money or achieving status. Furthermore, cementing nobility as a hereditary status allows families to pass on that accumulated received wisdom to future generations - it incentivizes the elites to be concerned with the long-term good that extends beyond just their own personal lifetimes, let alone just the upcoming election cycle. It facilitates a sentimental view of society, rather than a transactional one.
For this reason, I would argue that where we truly went wrong was two-fold. One, we should have never created a wall of separation between the secular authorities and the church; the greatest of the Eastern Roman Emperors were those who counted bishops among their closest confidants and advisors, and spiritual enlightenment was something the elites of post-Enlightenment, progressive Europe as well as America lacked, to nearly the same degree as the officials and plutocrats of our modern, secular world. Two, we should never have abandoned the feudal system of the monarch granting peerages, knighthood, and landed titles based on displays of an individual's prowess, loyalty and valor on the field of war. War, for all its suffering and brutality, is a part of the human condition in this fallen world, and when undertaken properly and by godly peoples basically the way Whites fought wars with each other prior to WWI and especially before the Enlightenment, there is no better selection mechanism for ALL of the characteristics necessary for a high-quality elite, rather than a mere hive of cunning merchants, economists, bureaucrats, lawyers and social engineers.
These two things are what was missing, anon - and their removal is what heralded the transformation from "aristo"cracy into "kaki"stocracy, followed shortly afterwards by "klepto"cracy and "techno"cracy. In other words, "monarchy" on its own is insufficient; *feudal* monarchy, specifically, is the answer.
