My Year With Proust - Day 272

A grace and sweetness that were conditional, you may say, upon the meekness with which the arriving guest bent her knee. Very likely, and it would seem that in an egalitarian society social etiquette would vanish, not, as is generally supposed, from want to breeding, but because on the one side would disappear the deference due to a prestige which must be imaginary to be effective, and on the other, more completely still, the affability that is gracefully and generously dispenses when it is felt to be of infinite price to the recipient, a price which, in a world based on equality, would at once fall to nothing like everything that has only a fiduciary value.  But this disappearance of social distinctions in a reconstructed society is by no means a foregone conclusion, and we are at times too ready to believe that present circumstances are the only ones in which a state of things can survive.  People of first-rate intelligence believed that a republic could not have any diplomacy or foreign alliances, and that the peasant class would not tolerate the separation of Church and State.  After all, the survival of etiquette in an egalitarian society would be no more miraculous than the practical success of the railways or the use of the aeroplane in war.  Besides, even if politeness were to vanish, there is nothing to show that this would be a misfortune.  Finally, would not society become secretly more hierarchical as it became outwardly more democratic.  Very possibly.  The political power of the Popes has grown enormously since they ceased to possess either States or an army; our cathedrals meant far less to a devout Catholic in the seventeenth century than they mean to an atheist of the twentieth, and if the Princesse de Parme had been the sovereign ruler of a Sate, no doubt I should have felt moved to speak of her about as much as of a President of the Republic, that is to say not at all.

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way, p. 472

Once again, it feels as if Proust is, a century out and in relation to a different country, is giving us a glimpse at the America of today.  The cult of the celebrity has been growing for decades has been growing in the US, and we've now reached the point where an astonishingly, breathtakingly unqualified - by experience or temperament or intellect or vision or moral compass - man is dangerously close to being elected president, and solely because he is a rich celebrity.  I guess the true difference here is that a century ago Proust was commenting on a France that was becoming more democratic and more egalitarian, whereas, sadly, we are living in a US which is daily becoming less democratic and less egalitarian.