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Notes -
I agree, but it’s different. In America, class is a two-tiered (arguably three-tiered, including the underclass) system. There’s the salt of the earth working class, and there’s the college-educated PMC. There are a few remaining “we’re 1640s, not 1880s darling” elderly WASPs in a handful of New England clubs, but they (and their Southern equivalents) are irrelevant. I grew up wealthy in NYC and I rarely encountered them, as almost all have intermarried with new money of the bourgeois PMC sort. People like Barack Obama and Bill Ackman are the American upper class. There is nobody above them socially. There is no hidden elite tier. Again, there are certainly people who think themselves above them, but they’re not in any real sense.
In America, there’s a clear delineation between old money and new. But that distinction is essentially one generation of wealth. Charles Kushner was a construction worker, son of immigrants. Jared Kushner is a member of the American upper class, his father paid his dues to Harvard, his son speaks and acts in the right way (his association with Trump aside). It is what it is. Trump is unique because Fred Trump only became super rich when Trump was already an adult or certainly a teenager, and because New York real estate in the outer boroughs was and arguably is a uniquely trashy and plebeian business dominated by people with minimal class status. So Trump could be the son of a rich man and go to Wharton and, perhaps almost uniquely, remain kind of a pleb.
But in general, that’s not how American society operates. Emerald Fennell, had she been born an American, would be a clear member of the American upper class. That she isn’t in Britain is the source of her angst, and perhaps of Saltburn.
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