Hang on just one cotton-pickin' minute, folks! Let's mull this over with a bit more care, okay?
I recall there was a lovely article in one of the big influential magazines (maybe Time or Newsweek), published early In GHWB's presidency, probably the spring of 1989, telling the masses all about the grand old tradition of selfless public service that's part of the culture of America's ruling class—specifically the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite that used to dominate the Ivy League universities, and had a near-monopoly on the New England boarding schools that had just recently been the subject of the hilarious and expertly written "Preppy Handbook".
About that I have two points to make that I hope you might take to heart and ponder.
1. The Chinese Parallel & The Iron Heel
I recently read an excellent history of China (I'll find the title and authors if anyone is interested) in which there was much written about the amazing institutions of the imperial dynasties that managed to keep that massive country (about as huge, populous, complex and diverse as all of Europe) on an even keel for millennia despite colossal upheavals, endless border wars, and so forth... The bureaucracy that did all the actual management upheld Confucian values all through those crises, century after century—honoring traditions, enforcing honesty, checking the worst excesses of warlords and landed aristocrats, ensuring that China remained the most civilized country on the planet... until the mid-19th Century, when all that unravelled and the ruling class became unethical predators. From then on, the imperial palace indulged in ever more outrageous luxuries (e.g. a yacht carved from jade) as famines raged, rebellions erupted and European interlopers raped the country. The bureaucrats who had previously been legendary for their scrupulous honesty and self-discipline became more and more corrupt and careless.
As I read that chapter, I felt I was reading about the American ruling class in recent decades, and I felt a heartsick nostalgia for the old values I remembered my parents, grandparents, teachers, and others drumming into me. As in China, their loyalty was to a strict and rather rigid hierarchy, with themselves and their tribe always right at (or somewhere close to) the top level of state and federal governments, corporate boards, non-profit institutions, etc. But there was an awareness that this privilege—well, no, they really believed it was a right not a privilege—required an ethical system, and maintaining reasonably high standards of excellence in carrying out their responsibilities.
But before we leave this point, I should note that I read (well, skimmed) another important and timely book around the same time, earlier this year. That was Jack London's The Iron Heel. If you go to the link below, you can skip down to the long quote from the text*, about how the perverse sort-of-altruistic sense of responsibility drove the American fascist system put in by "the Oligarchs" to crush organized labor and quiet the agitation of the urban poor. https://www.dailykos.com/.../-Understanding-Fascism-Part...
*Here’s the prose quoted from London’s original text:
The oligarchs themselves were going through a remarkable and, it must be confessed, unexpected development. As a class, they disciplined themselves. Every member had his work to do in the world, and this work he was compelled to do. There were no more idle-rich young men. Their strength was used to give united strength to the Oligarchy. They served as leaders of troops and as lieutenants and captains of industry. They found careers in applied science, and many of them became great engineers. They went into the multitudinous divisions of the government, took service in the colonial possessions, and by tens of thousands went into the various secret services. They were, I may say, apprenticed to education, to art, to the church, to science, to literature; and in those fields they served the important function of moulding the thought-processes of the nation in the direction of the perpetuity of the Oligarchy.
They were taught, and later they in turn taught, that what they were doing was right. They assimilated the aristocratic idea from the moment they began, as children, to receive impressions of the world. The aristocratic idea was woven into the making of them until it became bone of them and flesh of them. They looked upon themselves as wild-animal trainers, rulers of beasts. From beneath their feet rose always the subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and bullet were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abysmal beast they must dominate if humanity were to persist. They were the saviours of humanity, and they regarded themselves as heroic and sacrificing laborers for the highest good.
They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained civilization. It was their belief that if ever they weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, anarchy would reign and humanity would drop backward into the primitive night out of which it had so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy was held always before their child's eyes until they, in turn, obsessed by this cultivated fear, held the picture of anarchy before the eyes of the children that followed them. This was the beast to be stamped upon, and the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon it. In short, they alone, by their unremitting toil and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly believed it.
I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to its system of reward and punishment. This is a mistake. Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of zeal in the religion of a fanatic; but for the great majority of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the right, unhappiness with anything less than the right—in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion. And so with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are all incidental. The great driving force of the oligarchs is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy today lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness.
But lest you think London harbors any secret admiration for the oligarchs or their new system, he goes on to describe the conditions of what we might call the 99%. I expect this could serve as an unvarnished picture of the America Trump would create if he could (or is actually creating right now); he doesn’t need illegal immigrants in his economy because there will soon be no practical difference between citizens and illegal immigrants in terms of wages and working conditions):
The condition of the people of the abyss was pitiable. Common school education, so far as they were concerned, had ceased. They lived like beasts in great squalid labor-ghettos, festering in misery and degradation. All their old liberties were gone. They were labor-slaves. Choice of work was denied them. Likewise was denied them the right to move from place to place, or the right to bear or possess arms. They were not land serfs like the farmers. They were machine-serfs and labor-serfs. When unusual needs arose for them, such as the building of the great highways and air-lines, of canals, tunnels, subways, and fortifications, levies were made on the labor-ghettos, and tens of thousands of serfs, willy-nilly, were transported to the scene of operations. Great armies of them are toiling now at the building of Ardis, housed in wretched barracks where family life cannot exist, and where decency is displaced by dull bestiality. In all truth, there in the labor-ghettos is the roaring abysmal beast the oligarchs fear so dreadfully—but it is the beast of their own making. In it they will not let the ape and tiger die.
2. Real Life Experience
I'm one of the relatively few people who had the experience of being sent "away to school" and then coming back home to public school (which I did a year and a half before my old class of 1966 graduated). I can assure you that the values we were indoctrinated into (while ‘away’) had elements of what Jack London described in The Iron Heel—and when you think about it, the Confucian value-system that girded the loins of the Chinese bureaucracy for over 2,000 years was undoubtedly bolstered and preserved from century to century by inculcating a sense of superiority among the educated classes. That's fine, you might think; educated folks are superior after all, right?
But the other side of it is that people below them in the hierarchy are regarded as subhuman, if my experience at boarding schools is any indication. I was in fact amazed to discover that my old classmates, most of whom I hadn't seen since 7th grade, were in fact more emotionally mature, tolerant, and good-hearted than the snotty, often sadistic spoiled brats I had been among for over three years. At the first of the two boarding school I was at, any kid with a physical or mental handicap would be ruthlessly tormented, sometimes literally driven mad, e.g. a boy with very poor eyesight was routinely flagellated in the showers with the snap-crackle-pop of wet towels whipped on his bare butt—painful as a hornet-sting, when delivered with expertise and élan. I believe the "masters" (as teachers were called) were fully aware of this going on, and declined to intervene because it was part of the training the school gave the future rulers of society. When my older brother went to the bathroom after lights-out he was forced by the dorm-master to do fifty push-ups over an open jack-knife. The same guy when I was there had a habit of jumping into our beds with us to squeeze and twist all the belly-fat he could grab. This ritual was called "The Claw" and we were expected to giggle delightedly in response. That was all at a reputable boarding school and there were more reputable schools where hazing and abuse was more severe.
It's worth noting, though, that my old home town classmates were intellectually a bit stunted, although it took me a while to put my finger on why this was, and how it happened. Eventually I realized that boarding schools teach their students how to grow up to give orders, to rule over other classes. Public schools, however, prepare kids for a lifetime of following orders. Preppy kids are taught to think, and taught how to think; public school kids are taught to not think, and trained in ways of not thinking (to stop asking why, to memorize correct answers, etc). (This is of course an extreme generalization that omits some notable exceptions; P--- C-------'s classroom comes to mind. But I also remember a 12th-grade chemistry teacher who told us, as a fact not to be disputed, that salt has no smell. This was taught in a seaside village where you know you're home when you smell salt in the air.)
In Conclusion—
Please remember that when George H. W. Bush & Sons come across as relatively civilized fellows, there is a lot else that's not so nice that's mixed in with that nice polite manner.
It would be fair to suggest that Trump and company are serving the same purpose served by the corrupt degenerate bureaucrats during the last days of the dying Chinese Empire—they're letting everyone know who they really are, after centuries of "Mr. Nice Guy" refinement and gentlemanly behavior. After this, the deluge. Would it be better if the gentlemanly preppies were still in charge? Of course it would. I briefly considered voting Libertarian because I remember William Weld (VP candidate) as just about the smartest as well as nicest of my preppy school-mates; his humor and frankness in interviews made me nostalgic for a time when America had an aristocracy who could be trusted to either do the right thing, or at least to know what the right thing was (even if they chose to do something else instead to promote a ruling class agenda). But times change, old values and old morals are just ghostly memories, like will-o'-the-wisps flitting above a blasted landscape for a moment before they disappear. The important thing now is know what our own values are and make sure they include the central importance of winning.
PS: I might add that my father (a lovably eccentric character) worked for a Wall Street firm called G.H. Walker & Co. The G.H. stood for George Herbert—the elder Pres. Bush's maternal grandfather, if I'm not mistaken. Some say Walker and Prescott Bush both had some kind of connection with Nazi Germany, and they say it's pretty thoroughly documented. Although my father volunteered to fight against Germany and Japan when the war started (he was overage and didn't have to go), he had some books he (and/or his own father) had owned since 1900-1930 on an old bookshelf in the basement that included The International Jew by Henry Ford (a Nazi sympathizer), and a little book called Eugenics, about how to reduce or eliminate inferior bloodlines from the population. (To be fair, there was also copy of The Souls of Black Folk by WEB DuBois, from about 1901.)
The ideology we now associate with Nazis and extremist thuggery is not so different from what was conventional wisdom among most of the better-off, educated Americans of the 20th Century. And yes, I'm afraid this is not at all incompatible with the Bushy virtues you list: Dignity, Honor, Respect for the Office, concerns for others, and the deep service to our country...
But what you wouldn't notice unless you see it up close and personal is that class comes before country—always. Sometimes class and country will both benefit from the same policies and priorities, but that has become less and less true with every passing decade since 1970. It was then that the ideas of globalism took root in elite circles. Bob Bartley, the editor of the Wall Street Journal, probably the most influential journalist in the country during the Reagan-Bush-Clinton years, shortly before his death privately opined that the day of the nation-state is over.
What would replace the nations that were waning away? I think we can see the answer plainly enough—the corpse of the nation is thrown to the angry mobs of displaced workers and alienated citizens to wave their little flags and stomp on immigrants and liberals, while the the real governance is reassigned to multinational corporations and financial institutions. Meanwhile, the governmental machinery of violence is transferred from a democratic army of (supposedly universal) conscription, to a paid army of volunteers (readily available when decent jobs are hard to find), and thence to Blackwater-style rootless killers-for-cash who don’t need to hear any of the old fairy tales about defending freedom or truth or justice,
Some of Bartley’s loyal readers expressed shock and disbelief at that quote. He’d always been a fierce advocate for resurgent Americanism. But the source was reliable. Class interest and national interest have decisively diverged, and the kind of nationalism the Trump faction of the elite is promoting is all about further enriching just their own class, using patriotic imagery to convince Americans to go along with further and faster undermining of labor unions and social services. Even as a kid at that boarding school in the early sixties, I could see how class solidarity trumps patriotism among the rich, but god forbid the laboring masses should ever be allowed to feel that way in post-WW2 America!
One last note—Way up above I said the WASP elite considered ruling the country (owning it and operating it) not a privilege but a right. I should have gone further and said they (should I say "we"?) regarded it as a duty. A duty to rule? Sure if you're convinced no one else can handle the responsibility... If Mayflower descendants don't do it, lord only knows what kind of riff-raff might crawl out of the woodwork and take over!
The Kennedys were seen as riff-raff. While lying in the sand at the waspiest of beach clubs one August day in 1962, I overheard a member of an elite, politically-connected uber-wasp family say to anyone who would listen, right after newborn Patrick Bouvier Kennedy died—"Well, I can't say I'm sorry. I can't wish those Kennedys enough hard luck." To their credit, the women he was addressing looked aghast and embarrassed at hearing him express those sentiments. But I don't think he noticed, and no one audibly dissented from the position he'd staked out.
Prep school kids are taught manners, and taught to use those manners even (or especially) when dealing with inferiors. But they’re also taught to be sadistic when it serves their status or their class, and free of moral scruples, as in the shower-room flagellation rituals. This has always been true, from the slave trade and the native American genocide into recent times. At age 14 or so I went with my father to a dinner meeting of The Society of Colonial Wars; it turned out we were eligible for membership because one or two of our direct ancestors helped immolate a camp of native women and children in 1675, setting fires around the periphery so none could escape. We were still celebrating, nine or ten generations later. Our family’s proud tradition of service to our country dates back a long war. My uncle in the CIA helped plan the Vietnam War; my father heard a radio news discussion of an operation bearing my uncle’s name—a plan to pull all the peasants out the countryside and into concentration camps to keep them from joining the commies, while soldiers take care over the rice harvest. That uncle, whom we all loved, raised three of my favorite cousins, truly delightful people with genuinely liberal values.
There's another dystopian novel worth mentioning here. I don't know if anyone else has ever noticed the core message that's conveyed in Orwell's Animal Farm. Sure we all know the pig stands for Stalin, the long-suffering horse stands for the loyal but confused rank-and-file party members, and so forth and so on. Every character but one is decoded and explained in classrooms year after year. But what about that nice old gentleman farmer those raucous ungrateful beasts deposed in their fanatical evil Animalist uprising? Who is he? Who or what does he stand for? And what about the fate of his animals (those he fed and looked after for generations), what did they have to look forward to under his benign rule? Think about it.