Interesting. The more I learn, the more it becomes clear that there is a great pressure in the states to deny economic factors in explaining political and social structures. I think I implied before that the English class system is basically racist (poor anglo-saxon peasants and wealthy norman-french lords), so my contention about Baltzell stands (but see below with regards to racism). I'm not sufficently informed to comment on a crisis in american political leadership but from this side of the pond american pop cultural and economic leadership appears to have done fairly well. Having said this one of the aspects of the british aristocracy that I do admire was a wide spread belief in stewardship of the land (and stewardship more generally) - The belief that land must be cared for for future generations. This long term view is sadly lacking in much of todays leadership who's consideration is only for the next election.
On further consideration I have changed my opinion about Baltzell appreciation of language. He careful choose a term that would be adopted and have widespread use. He clearly appreciated how language works.
Why is it that so many new words are based on acronymes when older terms where much more interesting in their etymology?

I should say that I clearly differentiate between racism and bigotry - racism being a belief the dominate culture or race is superior, bigotry being an intolerence of others. Because of the strong social conditioning almost everyone is racist to some degree (this is clearly illustrated by those distressing experiments where black children pick out white dolls as beautiful and black dolls as ugly) I struggle hard to maintain an awareness of my racism to avoid being bigoted.
By the way it looks like the etymology of bigot might be of some interest.