Roughing out a general view: The structures of industrial prosperity built after the world war were idiot-proofed (the greatest generation having some notion of their children), so the social forms of the present could be completely incompetent, and the trucks of frozen hamburgers would still roll in every week. These social forms degrade, then, and become something less than meritocratic, as the prosperity is on rather firm rails. There are still selection mechanisms, and signs of status, but they're increasingly centered on the social forms themselves, rather than the facility to actually do things in the world.
All well and good, but this industrial prosperity is based on the corporate form, so to invigorate itself it does more things, the companies build, and drill, and sell. This keeps the organizational form of the companies healthy and lean. But as a program for society, it poses a few problems, as we might realize over the next few years. The logic of the New-Netherlands traders can do things in the world (e.g., Goldman, Grey's Papaya), but it doesn't claim to be a basis for the organization of society as a whole.
So the social elites have become distracted with odd notions of liberty and governance, and the remedy at hand is the corporate form
Difficult days for the publicists, those old-fashioned folks who think of the state as something more than an idea and something less than a sentiment. The res publicae is now the rem, or perhaps the rem line of code, the other words being the operative ones.