There are still aristocrats in the US who follow the Windsor tradition, men born to privilege, wealth, private schools, and limitless opportunity who repay this debt of inherited fortune by serving their country. Men who graduate from an Ivy League School and enlist in the military. Men who go to war and come home to serve again, as prosecutors and Congressmen and Senators. (Women born to this privilege are expected to perform in different ways.) The last two Democratic presidential candidates before our current president, Al Gore and John Kerry—the men who ran against another great New American Aristocrat, George W. Bush—were men like this.

Men like this don’t mask their privilege, nor do they flaunt it. It simply is. But in our typical American way, pretending as we love to do that there is no aristocracy in America and hating the merest whiff of blue blood, we reject patricians and disdain their privilege, particularly when they have never sought to use it to their own advantage.

It’s a peculiar tendency, this, to hold in contempt a person who has no personal need to care about the trials and troubles of others and yet does so nonetheless, who recognizes his or her fortune as a fate as random as that of someone who struggles. It’s an odd inclination to prefer the charade of Romney’s self-made man to the nobility (in both its senses) of a Gore or a Kerry, considering it is the former who would most eagerly see the perpetuation of the divide we revile in the moments we are honest enough to admit it exists in the first place.