Nothing Rots That Was Not Once Ripe

That's not a quote, I think I made it up. It's neat though, huh?

So, went and looked for some ALI PROJECT videos on YouTube; 'bout what you'd expect. Apparently their style is specifically "Elegant Gothic Aristocrat". The Wikipedia article identifies it with the late Victorian; maybe in men's clothes, but the women's stuff is Early Victorian, or even earlier—a lot of it seems to predate the First Empire, whalebone corsets and such.

Yes, I'm even a geek about clothes. Makes more sense than Late Victorian anyway, since you say "decadent aristocrat" and I say "Byron, Shelley, Goethe, which last gentleman fought at Valmy." So, yeah, early Victorian. Then again, Swinburne was late and pretty decadent (though not quite as aristocratic), but he didn't exactly take fashion by storm.

Ahem. My point in all this is that it reminded me, there seems to be this idea abroad in the land that aristocracies are born decadent. Essentially a lot of people seem to have this idea that aristocrats just somehow got this power, for no reason, and that their status was always based on bloodline. Of course even a cursory reading of history will show that's poppycock, but it's still fascinating: people honestly seem to think aristocratic systems spring up out of nowhere. Possibly it's because we've made a sort of lobotomized religion out of liberalism, and we need a lot of euhemeristic myths to account for the rise of the "heathen" political systems.

In actual fact, at least for the aristocracies one found in Europe in the early modern era, we know exactly how they arose. After the collapse of the Imperial government in the West, the people, the townsmen and the small farmers, turned for protection to the big landowners, who could afford to hire soldiers. In exchange, they gave them a share of their land's produce, or money equal to a percentage of the value of their city property. A landowner would also be getting customary dues from the serfs who worked his land, although generally only a portion of the harvest (and one he couldn't change without their consent). In exchange for all these dues, the landowners had to provide protection. There were probably other factors, remnants of Roman law and barbarian custom, but at base the medieval aristocracy originated in free, rational contracts.

But then it all went south. Of course; they don't call this crappy world the Valley of Tears because of the sea air. The late Middle Ages brought back Roman law, with charming things like slavery, absolutist government, and women being legal non-entities (some recent reading suggests I was understating the case when I said medieval women had a lot of rights—apparently, High Medieval women had every right men had with essentially no exceptions, at least in France). The failure of the Crusades and the loss of Byzantium broke Europe's morale as a society. Know what happens when your militocracy's officers are demoralized, have no enemy to fight, and have spent a century and a half resurrecting laws from an era when their class was actually considered spiritually better? Yeah, they turn into assholes.

The decadent aristocracies the Enlightenment liberals saw around them had outlived their usefulness, but they did have it, once. Nobles' pride in their bloodlines was precisely because their ancestors had done their jobs as nobles. But in fiction? Nope. Do any of the Death Eaters brag about the deeds of their ancestors, the mighty magics they wielded or earth-shaking dweomers they laid? Do any of them have the more powerful magic you'd expect from the heirs of ancient wizard families? Course not. Now, if Rowling were actually going to have them be like England's aristocrats—to whit, they haven't preserved any traditions, but are in fact mindless slaves to fashion and being up-to-date ("Generally speaking the aristocracy does not preserve either good or bad traditions; it does not preserve anything except game," as Chesterton said)—that would be all right, and impressively "subversive". But there's no sign Rowling actually knows about that aspect of the case; instead, all we get is these ex nihilo nobs, whose ancestors have always just been proud of their blood as such, even going back to when it was just like everyone else's.

It makes liberalism look weak, when its modern apologists don't even appear to know there are arguments for the alternatives. Pro tip, in this as in other fields: convince me your system is better, don't just say (or worse, indirectly demonstrate) that you can't conceive of why anyone would ever have chosen a different one. That just makes me think yours is the system of choice for unreflective dullards.