Steve Sailer's latest column considers why the black American elite is now turning against immigrant blacks and their children as far as affirmative action at elite universities goes, while neglecting to say a word about the allotment toward Hispanics. The short answer is that it doesn't help them out to reduce the Hispanic allotment, since their own is fixed at around 8%.

But what does this have to do with most of black America? It seems arguing over who gets into Harvard is beyond the pale of most black Americans as far as everyday experience, let alone most Americans. But it matters to the elites, and in this case, the black elite. I think what we are seeing is a heightening of the differences in priorities between the black elite, and the masses of African Americans they claim to represent.

It is a paradox of "mass movements" that they need leaders, and so birth their own elites. Senator Robert C. Byrd might be of working-class Appalachian antecedents, and those might be the folk he represents, but over the decades he has been given an education by those same people, and now waxes eloquently with the diction of America's elite. One might wonder if the descendents of Robert Byrd will have the same emotional attachment to their ancestor's working class origins, or whether they will join the "elite" that he so despised in his youth? In victory does the power of the masses drain away, suborned by the ambition toward advancement that lurks in the hearts of all men, most of all the "leaders" of the meek not born to power.

About 6 months ago I was reading the history of the Han dynasty, China's defining epoch, the dynasty which gave the majority Chinese their term of self-appellation. Near the end of the "Former Han," and during the interregnum of the "usurper" Wang Mang, a series of natural disasters let to a host of uprisings. Peasants and brigands roamed the country-side, and the great lords of the previous age fell from grace. But a time came when they needed to select a leader, and who did they choose? A variety of great men rose, and one of them was a distant scion of the old Han house. He went on to found the Latter Han, and that dynasty in the end recapitulated the fall of its predecessor.

I can give a host of similar examples cross-culturally. But in the end, the moral is the same. From the masses rise men and women who are fueled by their fury at injustice, wishing to make a better world, who wish to do good for the toiling common man, their own kith and kin, in words and deed if not their self-interested hearts. A new order rises, tight in execution and focused on higher moral purpose. As the generations progress, the initial ardor diminishes, and the Mandate of Heaven, the acclamation of the populous, fades. The made leaders of the first generation give way to the born leaders of the next, and so forth. The masses and those who they chose to lead them drift apart. And so another generation of made leaders is born, and the terminal generation of the last dispensation is tossed aside.

Between the cross-purposes of human nature we fabricate the abstract mental superstructure of ideologies and religions that give purpose and compel us toward the "greater good." But in the end, there is the foundation of our nature that drags us down as time works its so-called wonders. The traditional Chinese acknowledged both elements and fused it into a compound ideology, lionizing the atomic importance of family, but scaffolding it with the importance of public virtue, and reformulating non-kin relations as ones of familial import. The Mandate of Heaven was nothing more than a word, a force that encapsulated the entropic unwinding of the Chinese social order over a period of centuries and its resurrection with the rebirth of the Great Idea of the Son of Heaven and father of the nation.

As far as this nation is concerned, the black American elite seems to be complacent in its assured role, ignorant or contemptuous of the fates of elites who naturally over time betrayed their mandate. Clever with words, gifted with connections with a patronizing white companion class and rich accumulated social merit, they swim on the glory of past deeds. But memories fade, interests change, and there is always a new righteous elite ready to take on the mandate of the people and do "justice," unhesitant and brutal in their sense of purpose.

As they say, "Only the paranoid survive."

Update: Thanks to David Orland on some editing advice. Though I would ask for the indulgence of readers, this post was hacked out in 20 minutes.