The American Ruling Class
July 15, 2016
Lewis Lapham’s The American Ruling Class, is a devilish and illuminating “dramatic-documentary-musical satire” on our plutocratic power elite.
No one is better equipped to pull off this dark seriocomedic venture than the wry master of patrician sensibility himself, the author of Fortune’s Child, Money and Class in America: Notes and Observations On Our Civil Religion, and Imperial Masquerade.
Lapham is joined by a sterling cavalcade of establishment note-worthies playing themselves, as this sly Luciferian guides two befuddled innocents through the Oz-like, kaleidoscopic maze composing the elite corridors of power in America.
Lapham is the former editor of Harpers magazine, and America’s premier essayist.
He ranks with H. L. Mencken and Albert Jay Nock in his stylistic elegance and keen ability to dissect the bloated rotting corpse of the American body politic, exposing the frailties, pretentiousness, and rank imbecilities of what he aptly describes as its “equestrian class.” America, where the masses are born with saddles on their backs, for a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God, the GOP, and Donald Trump.
Dead Man Walking