51�Թ�

He explains that Tom Cruise’s Maverick represents the “more traditional American values of meritocracy over aristocracy amid what was supposed to be a cultural revolution intended to set up a new inverted aristocracy.”

We had, after all, explicitly rejected the idea of an aristocracy and built our entire national mythology around the idea that you could make something of yourself no matter what the circumstances of your birth.

During this era, known as the Gilded Age, the wealthiest families in America, such as the Rockefellers and Vanderbilts, formed a new social elite akin to European aristocracy.

As an American woman who married into the British aristocracy back in 2004, the countess knows firsthand the challenge of slipping between two cultures.

For decades, it was a popular party drug among the English aristocracy, who reveled in “laughing gas parties” before it was first used as an anesthetic and analgesic in medical settings.