Progressives take lessons from "Downton Abbey"

It is fitting that PBS offers “Downton Abbey” to its disproportionately progressive audience. This series is a languid appreciation of a class structure supposedly tempered by the paternalism of the privileged. And if progressivism prevails, the United States will be Downton Abbey: Upstairs, the administrators of the regulatory state will, with a feudal sense of noblesse oblige, assume responsibility for the lower orders downstairs, gently protecting them from “substandard” health-insurance policies, school choice, gun ownership, large sodas and other decisions that experts consider naughty or calamitous.

Why, however, does a normally wise and lucid conservative such as Peter Augustine Lawler, professor of government at Berry College, celebrate the “astute nostalgia” of “Downton Abbey”? …

One reason Thomas Jefferson, a child of Virginia’s gentry, preferred an agricultural society to one in which people are “piled upon one another in large cities” (“let our workshops remain in Europe”) is that he valued social stasis, as the privileged are wont to do. One reason his rival Alexander Hamilton, an immigrant striver thriving in Manhattan, wanted a restless market society of ample and volatile capital was as a solvent for the entrenched hierarchies that impede upward mobility.