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It is possible that the America of, say, 1870 to 1970 was an extraordinarily unique place in world history in which, for a great many reasons, three things were simultaneously true for ordinary people:
The rewards for ambition, competence, and conscientousness were extraordinarily great
The price for personal failure was still very high
It was possible for many to rise well above their station in life due to very rapid economic growth
I struggle to think of many other societies in which all three were simultaneously true. The few examples I can think of (the four 'Asian Tiger' economies from the 1960s to 1990s, maybe) were also temporary, and true for a much shorter period than the US.
But in such a society, propriety, boldness, ambition and self-respect would likely be more common among those who had great hopes of participating in that ongoing boom.
Don' be so epoch-parochial!
E.g. during the Yamnaya expansions into Europe, rewards for ambition & competence were extremely high, price for failure was absolute and it was certainly possible to rise well above your station by conquering and putting to service enough peasants.
I haven't heard of those people before and looked them up, given that they existed around 3500 BC, what firm evidence is there that they lived the way you claim?
It's a niche subject, and I don't expect to be able to track down much on the topic itself. I did at least bother to ask GPT-4, but it had little to share on the matter.
The wikipedia article ?
This isn't any secret or obscure history, save maybe in India where the local idiots-in-charge like to pretend Brahmins and other higher castes aren't a small remnant of northern conquerors but were actually indigenous to the region. (The genetic data is always a good way of riling up Hindu nationalists on twitter)
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I know that nationalism is passe, and anything resembling American exceptionalism especially so, but I do think that the US is exceptional or at least an extreme historical outlier in that it's founding was based on an adherence to a philosophy/culture rather than ties to a specific land, ancestry, language, or founding monarch. The closest historical examples that come to mind are late-republic/early-empire Rome and some of the Hellenic city-states, but even then only if you squint. Civis Romanus Sum and all that.
A common sentiment you'll encounter in more right-wing spaces is that we have allowed our culture to become infected with the disease of old-worldism and Europhilia. That is, a growing number of our professional and intellectual class seemed to be motivated by an explicit rejection of our nation's founding principles. They do not want to live in a world where...
"all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights" or "Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed."
...they want to live in a world "where the right sort of people" are put in charge and the lesser classes know their place and do not speak out of turn. They want to live in the old world of blood and soil, and might makes right, rather than embrace the new.
One of the reasons both the woke left and dissident right are held in similarly low regard by the mainstream right kind of ties into @FarNearEverywhere's post about "the problem of Susan". They've seen Aslan's kingdom, they've been shown that there is a better way, and yet still they lie to themselves. Still, they choose not to believe.
Neo-nazi's are regarded as particularly pathetic because their espoused philosophy has been shown to be a failure even by their own low standards. If we grant for the sake of argument the axioms of "racial interest" and "might makes right" then history has already shown us who the real "master-race" is and it is not the aristocratic nor5thern Europeans, it's the coalition of miscegenated hillbillies and mongrel sons of quakers that crushed the Prussian war machine not once but twice in 50 years. The Virgin Austrian Übermensch vs the Chad Audie Murphy and Curtis LeMay.
The woke left will not destroy the mainstream right's habitat and prospects any slower because you aim so much of your contempt at the dissident right. "No friends to the right" works for them, it will not work for you.
Aslan's kingdom is nothing more than death. If that's all you have to offer, your claim to be the inheritors of American exceptionalism is false. Yes, it was "Give me Liberty or give me Death", but the latter was the much inferior alternative.
They won't destroy it any faster either. the dissident right has made it clear that they wish to see us dead just as much as the woke do, so we would be fools to treat them as allies. Much like Hitler vs Stalin on the eastern front the best outcome is for us to let them fight, though ideally this time we won't make the mistake we did in 1945 by stopping before job was done.
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I wasn't aware there were that many Quakers in the Soviet Union, regarding the latter one.
There were a few but not as many as there were in Finland at the time.
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On the topic of American exceptionalism, I found Bret Devereaux's analysis last year to be quite compelling. The linked post is also one of the most emphatic exceptions to Betteridge's Law of Headlines that I've ever seen.
We don’t mean exceptional like that. It’s not just about being stronger and richer. We mean that we are better people than the world has seen before. Our culture is better. Our constitution is better. The freedom bit in that might get to the core. The rest of the world is free because we are free and sold them on it. Our mythos is better.
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On 3, it’s surely also a part of the story that a person who got rich became upper class, whereas in many societies a lower class person who gets rich is just a rich lower class person.
I’m thinking about someone I know in particular, who went from (literally)a drug addicted orphan to working as an HVAC tech to owning his own HVAC company. He is not elite today despite his very high income; in 1900 he would have been. It’s still possible he could become elite- spend his free time giving motivational speeches at private high schools, go to charity fundraisers at the opera instead of his church, etc- but in Victorian America he would already be there by virtue of his wealth, and in medieval Japan there’d be no hope of joining the elite no matter how wealthy and well mannered he became.
Perhaps not? He would have been "lower-class rich guy" but his son could get into the elite by going to the right schools and university, and his grandson would certainly have been included and now classed as a gentleman.
Hence all the historical jokes about the sons of guys who had made it responding to their fathers' attempts to discipline them with "You, the son of a farmer/peasant/merchant/whatever cannot speak so to me, the son of a gentleman/nobleman/king".
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To take it a step further: I happen to know someone who is either a billionaire or quite close to it (I believe he recently complained that his net worth had fallen just under the billion mark due to some supply chain issue) and is still absolutely not elite in any way. His money is in agriculture, and he is very 'country' in his mannerisms. I do think a world where he'd get to be 'in the room where it happens' would be a better one, but he doesn't act the part of the right sort of person, so he's just wealthy and subject to the whims of the worthless social-gamers.
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