This summer, our podcast series on Revolutionary America has welcomed Lewis Lapham’s voice back to the microphone of the present. We are today, in commemoration of the second anniversary of his death, adding sight to sound.
Twenty-odd years ago, at the dawn of the new millennium, Lewis Lapham made a movie, a “dramatic documentary musical” called The American Ruling Class, first released in 2005.
On August 1, 2026, The American Ruling Class is coming to the Criterion Channel.
Lewis wrote much of it, narrated much of it, and starred in much of it, playing himself, or a version of himself—a mirthful, sardonic mentor in pinstripes guiding a pair of greenhorn youths who set out to uncover the secrets of the American ruling class.
Here’s how Lapham himself explained the thinking behind the film:
Subsequent to the events of September 11th, 2001, I don’t know of any topic as relevant to the predicament in which the country now finds itself than the composition of the American leadership class. The headlines every morning speak to the rising surge of violence in the world, much of the anger directed at the United States, and on what ethical ground do we defend our American freedom and prosperity?
Nobody disputes the fact of our military predominance, but with what moral and intellectual force do we confront the hostility of people who don’t see much of a difference between the prospect of death by starvation, gunfire, or disease?
The questions bear on the character of the American elites, and the film examines the ways in which we establish those elites. What do we expect our leaders to know? What values do we require them to hold? Of whom does the American leadership class consist, where does it find its philosophy, and how does it differ from its Asian and European counterparts?
Define the American directorate as the few hundred thousand people who manage the government, coin the money, write the laws, administer the schools, own and operate the news media, and how do we know them when we see them? From whence do they come, and to whom or to what do they owe their positions of authority?
The documentary proceeds from the premise that no society can exist without some form of social hierarchy. The Roman Empire rested on a class system; so did medieval France and Victorian England. So does the United States—in 2005 as in 1805 and 1905. But being American, and therefore sworn at birth to the doctrine of egalitarianism, we don’t like to concede the existence of our own class system. We meet it every day in the street, but we pretend it isn’t there.
The word class comes armed with so much ambivalence and so many contradictions that its meaning shifts with the social setting and the tone of voice, with the height of the ceiling, the names of the other people on the guest list, the view (or lack thereof) of the mountains or the sea. Our political rhetoric dwells on what must be done for the democratic many; the vocabulary of our commercial advertising dwells on what can be made available to the privileged few. Once having proclaimed our loyalty to the idea that all men are created equal, we do everything possible to prove ourselves unequal.
Given the magnitude of the American presence in the world, the questions seem to me timely. They’re likely to shape the course of events, both at home and abroad, during the first quarter of the new century—and from whom else do we expect answers if not from the American leadership class?
After his death two years ago, Lapham’s principal collaborators on The American Ruling Class, director John Kirby and producer Libby Handros, with help from friends in film and television, assembled a video tribute to the Quarterly’s founding editor, screened at the 2024 memorial service held for him in New York City.
We are sharing it here, atop this newsletter, along with the new Criterion Channel trailer for The American Ruling Class and a short bonus episode of The World in Time.
The American Ruling Class, Criterion Channel Trailer
Bonus Audio from The World in Time
Today’s tribute in sight and sound concludes with a short film, The Astronaut Is Unimpressed, in which filmmaker Luke Poling recorded one of the last on-camera interviews Lapham gave. In it, Lapham tells anew a story he’d told previously in “Alms for Oblivion,” his Preamble to the Intoxication issue of Lapham’s Quarterly, published in Winter 2012.
“By no means certain who I was at the age of twenty-four,” Lapham wrote there, “I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause. Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each.”
The Astronaut Is Unimpressed, by Luke Poling, 2026.