Perhaps there's a nuanced debate to be had, but this article absolutely is not it. It's much more the modern style of defining sweeping generalizations and then trying to establish negative or positive associations by placing them next to descriptors, but without actually making the connection. Possibly it's just really aggressively summarized.

> Levelers object to any kind of hierarchy, however ancient and venerable: parents over children, priests over parishes, the gentry over the lower classes.

Well, yes. This is because this kind of arbitrary, unaccountable hierarchy facilitates abuse. I'd be surprised to see anyone defending this on HN. This all proceeds in a straightforward way from the Enlightenment.

> Populists focus instead on liberating natural communities from those who rule in the name of reason, science, expertise, or competence—managers, bureaucrats, and academics—as well as from large-scale organizations (government agencies, universities, multinational corporations) that embody the same spirit of abstract knowledge and procedure.

"The British public have had enough of experts"?

Again, I would be very surprised to see people on HN agreeing that people should be "liberated" from "reason, science, expertise, or competence" and let free rein to live in unvaccinated chaos.

> Levelers, including today’s liberals and cultural Marxists

Generally one should stop reading at "cultural Marxists" since this is a very ill-defined phrase with anti-semitic origins, but we can carry on a bit.

> levelers rely on an atomistic anthropology that ignores that human beings are formed by and within a social class. Class is essential to the individual, not merely adventitious and extrinsic to him.

Modern theory very much believes that people are formed by their environment; it's crucial to discussions of "structural racism" etc. I'm not clear what the second sentence means unless he's arguing that class is somehow genetic?

> Levelers argue that institutions that reward individual achievement, native talent, and moral character ensure long-term prosperity for all, while those that reward merely extrinsic characteristics, such as membership in a social class, do not.

Standard HN argument for startups here.

> In response, Eliot simply rejects the ideal of strict meritocracy and repeats the argument that a class hierarchy is indispensable for the creation and preservation of true culture.

This is .. not an argument, just a restatement.

> Eliot’s definition of culture as incarnate religion creates the possibility of anti-culture. A purely secular, nonreligious society would lack a culture in Eliot’s sense. So, too, would a society that had successfully privatized religion, so that its religion, insofar as it could be incarnate at all, was incarnate only at the level of individual lives. Finally, a society whose dominant religion is gnostic would also be anti-cultural. By “gnostic religion” I mean a religion or quasi-religion that rejects the very possibility of its being incarnate in this world and in this age. A philosophy such as Marxism or modern liberalism, which rejects existing social institutions and advocates their total replacement, is likewise anti-cultural, in Eliot’s sense (at least, until the eschaton is successfully immanentized).

Ah, now we've brought out the theological heavy guns! If you're not a Christian this paragraph will make little sense to you.

> We should fight for the abolition of inheritance and gift taxes, and for the exemption of family farms and businesses from capital gains taxes.

The conclusion: since meritocracy is bad and class is good, argue for the retention of hereditary wealth.