The meta topic sitting beneath the surface of Daniel Miller’s sprawling essay on revolution is a study on the nature of aristocracy and its role in an ordered self-governed society.

In the modern context, “aristocracy” is believed to be those possessing the earmarks of inherited wealth, unearned social privilege, and personal vanity. Classically understood however, aristocracy is simply “the rule of the excellent” (from the Greek aristo or “excellence,” and kratos or “rule”), where according to Plato, governance is entrusted to individuals deemed to be of superior virtue, wisdom, and merit.

Noticeably absent from Plato’s qualifications is property and material possessions, or reputation, i.e. “honor.” While the Greeks believed that inherent traits of strength and intelligence qualified one as an aristocrat, the Romans required more suitable measurements.

In his groundbreaking book, The Roman Elite and the End of the Republic, Henrik Mouritsen writes that in the Late Roman Republic (through the writings of Cicero especially), we see an aristocratic archetype emerge: the vir bonus, or “good man”—whom those in the civilized world inherited from Rome would come to call a “gentleman.”

The ambiguous relationship between wealth and morality had implications for the social and political role of the vir bonus. It took more than wealth to be a vir bonus; he also had to embody a number of other characteristics, including integrity and gravitas, and adhere to a particular dignified lifestyle.

These boni were not patricians, the uppermost echelon of the Nobili, who belonged to renowned families of long lineages and inherited fortunes and properties—but their political role in the Roman republican system was central as patricians knew that having the support of the boni was critical to political accomplishment in Rome and the coordination of action across Italy.

The majority of representatives in the legislative comitia were boni, often property owners from the rural Italian tribes who were held in reputation for good conduct and gentle demeanor.

In our modern times, the boni could be seen as an affluent upper class with private wealth and local influence. Yet, the primary measurement and “fundamental quality” of a Roman “good man”—honor—is noteworthy: wealth was required for social status, but not assured. This rested upon their honor—and this honor was earned. The Latin word “honor” quite literally means “reward.” A man might have the prerequisite of wealth, but he must earn the reward of honor by his deeds, primarily in war, commerce, and the betterment of his community. Through this, his reputation would be established among his neighbors, qualifying him to be called a gentleman.

Now concerning our own dilapidating republic, Miller states the need for America to “generate within itself a class of leaders” comparable to the men of our founding who were “grounded in their own localities” to carry out the counterrevolution that he has identified as a requirement to restore true liberty in our nation—and there he ends the essay abruptly.

There is a veritable famine of leadership plaguing America’s states today. Legitimacy of authority is evaporating as our institutions are increasingly revealed to be void of good men and women to hold up the legacies their forbearers had established by their quality work and noble behavior.

It is only natural that when one does not do well, esteem is lost. American elites are not doing well—and are rightly being rejected by the populace. Plagiarism, grade inflation, and admissions fraud plague our Ivy League universities. For mismanaged corporations, profits are privatized and losses socialized, even as they elevate public virtue signaling over a return for shareholders. Permanent, rotating positions of administrative and diplomatic power in the executive government for partisan insiders are never disrupted even by obvious, blatant failure at home and abroad. Who could respect the legitimacy of institutions populated by such dishonorable elites? Who could see them as truly the “best” that should rule us?

Miller describes this institutional decay not as a “destruction of a central authority” but a “vacuum of authority confronted by its pale reflection.” He is not alone in identifying this yawning void in America and the Western world in general. The idea of Nietzsche’s “aristocratic spirit” and its will to power has been revived among reactionaries through the writings, musings, and postings of Bronze Age Pervert, who told the hosts of the Red Scare podcast that he does not “pretend to be anything more than a popularizer of Nietzsche and shitposter.” BAP’s Bruce Wayne, Costin Alamariu, refers to himself as an “obscure reader of Plato.” If you arrange the Scrabble letters on BAP’s table in a certain order, they will spell A-R-I-S-T-O-C-R-A-C-Y. Strong bodies, high intelligence, indomitable will: this is his vision of excellence that qualifies one to rule.

The disciple not being above his master, BAP joins Nietzsche in often placing blame on the Christian religion for stultifying the aristocratic spirit of our civilization by prioritizing manners over merit, thus making conformity to social standards the highest virtue and seemingly the only path to power.

I would think it difficult for any honest observer to not award master and disciple points for diagnosing the symptoms, even if they believe (as I do) the cause of illness is incorrect. What are the merits whereby we judge who is the best and thus who is to rule?

Mouritsen draws a cross-cultural analogy between the vir bonus of ancient Roman civilization and the “gentleman” of Christian civilization.

The gentleman could therefore be defined as a member of the elite who, by conforming to a particular code of conduct, realized the full social esteem and potential to which his status entitled him.

Whether it was the French gentilhomme, the Italian gentiluomo, or the Spanish gentilhombre, this “combination of economic and social criteria” is what defined an honorable man as grounded in his own piece of earth.

But in England is where the gentlemen of the “landed gentry” flourished: a man’s property and his honor were localized, thus his reputation was confirmed. And from this good standing, a gentleman was prone to be elevated to authority as an effective cultural, military, or political leader by his peers and dependents. John Grove writes of Roger Scruton’s philosophy of politics which was shaped by experiencing this dynamic of locality that to a degree still exists to this day:

Scruton valued how, in England, “locality was deeply entrenched in the whole system of government,” with real authority that was not delegated from above, but cultivated organically from below. Such a structure enables individuals to defend local prerogatives against centralizing tendencies.

This is the civilizational context that the American colonials inherited and intentionally cultivated in the New World. George Washington himself set about the task of shaping himself into a gentleman with the manners of Europe in order to be an example to fellow “rough” Americans, keeping the golden thread begun by the boni and handed to the pioneers by the landed gentry intact.

These are the local leaders we must cultivate in America today. Not by sending them to the palace for credentialing and unearned reputation, nor by preaching to them a Nietszchean gospel of their own superior abilities, but by encouraging them to love their native land and its people.

With the rise of industrialization and the overthrow of the American South’s landowning aristocracy during Reconstruction, the “obvious precondition” of independent wealth no longer was required to count yourself among the ranks of the elite in America.

Thus, credentialing became the primary function of the institutions adjacent to and reliant upon the central authority, primarily the academy, the media, the military, and the administrative state. Throngs of elites-in-waiting are taught to despise their local identities, regional cultures, and mores. Being without property in their native provinces, and having been awarded no honor for meritorious deeds, they are completely dependent upon credentials which bestow qualifications upon them if they wish to have any true influence or authority in civic life beyond their vote. Credos and pledges of allegiance are coded into the credentialing system so that the elites may know that they can trust the new batch to not rock the boat and disturb the comfortable life they all lead in the invisible emperor’s ever-expanding palace.

But this does not—it will not—last forever. Miller describes how this centralization and subsequent deracination of a country’s aristocracy precipitates populist, revolutionary chaos:

The French Monarchy implemented a policy to systematically undermine both aristocratic power and urban democratic power in order to establish what Richelieu called “the royal monopoly of force.” The nobility were deracinated, bribed, and ensconced in the Palace of Versailles and their traditional functions of government were transferred to a new Royalist administration composed of bureaucrats dependent upon the regime for their position.

His parallel is explicit: as in France where the aristocrats were imported to Versailles and government functions were transferred to Royalist bureaucrats, so too did the United States. Rather than encouraging its most promising to care for their own lands, accrue wealth by their work, and win honor from their neighbors, the United States sends its would-be aristocrats to institutions to eat the lotus and forget their duties to their respective provinces and peoples. They opt to seek the rarified confines of New England colleges, New York offices, and Washington corridors, where attaining higher status by jockeying with fellow elites-in-waiting is imperative. The privileges of light work and heavy comforts within the walls of the palace take their toll. Luxury living begets luxury belief, while more and more governing is outsourced to the bureaucrats. With central authority now in the hands of a distant few rather than the local many, central planning becomes the norm, and small concerns are sandpapered over for the sake of the bigger picture to which the planners think they alone are privy. Extractive policies enacted from those hubristic central authorities only bewilder and eventually enrage the alienated provinces, who seek new singular figures of strength, talent, and intellect to lead a grand, winner-take-all assault against the crumbling imperial palace and the adjacent Bastille.

There may be those tempted to believe that a populist uprising is inevitable and even preferable. That it is the only way to install new, superior elites of strength and intellect—Platonic aristocrats and Nietzschean supermen who possess inherent traits that qualify them for leadership.

But this is not the story of Rome—or America. Neither were populist revolutions, but counterrevolutions of the boni and the gentry against the violation of the social contract. Namely: the protection of the property and the participation in civic affairs via the gravitas they had earned by their deeds.

Mouritsen’s book ends with a narration of the unfolding events that led to the collapse of the Republic via the rise of Caesar. The boni of Italy were willing to accept a fundamental change of regime that shifted the power balance away from the nobili after their private property was seized via proscription and their local concerns were disregarded by the patricians of Rome. As Trevor Luke summarizes in his review of the book, “the civil-war-era boni were not motivated by abstract ideologies but their otium, the safe enjoyment of their property. They cared little about the libertas of the nobiles if their otium was unprotected.”

The boni perhaps would no doubt have preferred to keep their representative system of assemblies, where their active participation was required—but in the face of their livelihood and way of life being jeopardized, their duty to the local outweighed the pain of dispensing with the historic procedural norms and structure of government.

This end of the strict Roman Republic was by no means the end of Rome. Quite the contrary. From this pivotal turn, the new Roman Empire was born and grew to encompass the known world, propelling itself to great achievements the likes of which the world has not seen since.

Similarly, the American founding generation was not driven by populist revolutionaries who fomented rebellion among their fellow colonists against a backwards, oppressive oligarchy of feudal privilege. They were the gentry, the boni, the budding aristocracy of the New World, whose forefathers had settled, tilled, and populated their lands, fought for its defense, conducted its commerce, and managed its affairs. And while they lacked the birth to qualify them as patrician lords or monarchs, they appealed to their fellow nobles in (and their acknowledged king of) Britain for redress of grievances against their property and representation in the imperial city. These local concerns went unaddressed by that distant, central authority who refused to hear them. The imperial seat of power had become calcified and believed it could disregard the social contract that the Americans believed themselves to be under as free Englishmen living in the colonies. Extractive policies and proscriptive measures became unbearable to the good men of America. Rather than surrender themselves and their neighbors who looked to them for representation, the gentlemen of America chose to assert their independence by forming a new, local government that would renew and expand upon the ancient social contract.

In doing so, they pacified the populist uprising that was already stirring in the cities of the colonies. Miller describes the brilliance and responsibility of those American revolutionary leaders:

By contrast, the American Revolution sought and succeeded in recovering political liberties usurped by a monarchy that extended itself beyond its natural authority. Tocqueville argues that the ancien regime in France succumbed on the day that the French people “permitted the king to impose a tax without their consent and the nobles showed so little public spirit as to connive at this, provided their own immunity was guaranteed.” This was precisely the fate which the American Revolution avoided.

Certain others would like to portray the American founding fathers as ideological visionaries who foresaw the vast nation or the “idea” that the United States would become. Not quite. The representative action they took before declaring independence shows the colonies’ majority preference for remaining Englishmen under the British Crown. But as with the boni of Italy, the pressing, urgent concerns of the rural locales and the inability or unwillingness of the distant palace to manage those issues were of the highest priority for the local gentry. In the face of this loss of livelihood and dignity, they took the risk of stepping into a great unknown future. To take up the reigns of even greater responsibility and not permit the outsourcing of their local governance to a far-off bureaucracy.

These are the local leaders we must cultivate in America today. Not by sending them to the palace for credentialing and unearned reputation, nor by preaching to them a Nietszchean gospel of their own superior abilities, but by encouraging them to love their native land and its people. To work and take pride in generating their own wealth and their community’s prosperity. To strengthen themselves, body, mind, and spirit, so that they may perform great deeds in war and peace, thereby earning the reward of honor from their fellow countrymen. To shape them to act, think, and live in such a manner that when they are tempted by the tribalist instincts to choose an anointed warlord, or the populist fantasies of engineering a socialist egalitarian utopia, they will have the courage and confidence to mutually pledge to each other their Lives, Fortunes and sacred Honor. So that these “good men,” these gentlemen, may, at best, rescue the American republic (and, at worst, salvage the American way of life) from the destructive revolution it now turns groaningly on the cosmic axis of history to face.