On The Steward Class
Volume II in the Heartland Restoration Series
“He who does not rule himself will be ruled by others.” - Latin proverb
This essay is Volume II of the series “On the Heartland Straussian”.
Nature, Function, and Call
The soul of a republic is not its law but its people. You can write the best constitution on earth, balanced powers, elegant restraints, natural law woven into its preamble and none of it will hold if the citizenry is soft, self-interested, or fractured.
The Founders knew this. So did Aristotle. So did Burke, Tocqueville, and Solzhenitsyn.
The modern right obsesses over elections and legislation. The left obsesses over narrative and administration. But underneath both, a regime either stands or falls based on the health of its moral middle, the class of people who reproduce its values, uphold its structure, and resist its decay. We call this The Steward Class.
What Is the Steward Class?
They are not defined by income. You’ll find them making $60K in Idaho and $180K in Georgia. They are defined by three characteristics:
Moral Seriousness
They don’t chase virtue signaling trends or nihilistic irony. They live by duty:
to family
to God
to the past
to the unborn
They steward their time, their attention, their household. They live within limits and resist disordered desire.
Formation over Consumption
They believe in educating for character, not credentials. They prize memory over novelty. They train their children not just in phonics or Latin, but in how to live well: courageously, temperately, gratefully.
Partial Independence
They may not be rich, but they are resistant to control. They keep low debt, own productive tools, and orient their economic life around use, not display. They can say no to state coercion, elite capture, or cultural decay—because they are not fully dependent.
“What is the use of a fine house if you haven’t got a tolerable planet to put it on?” - Henry David Thoreau
What Is Their Function?
If the Heartland Straussian lays the blueprints, the Steward Class lays the bricks.
Their functions are civilizational:
Cultural preservation: They keep memory alive through practice, not performance.
Institutional resilience: They maintain the churches, schools, businesses, and fraternal orders that elites abandoned.
Human formation: They are the only class still producing children who can reason, sacrifice, and believe.
Political continuity: When the republic fails, they will be the ones who remain not rioting, not fleeing, but rebuilding.
They are the load-bearing structure of any regime that hopes to last.
What Is Their Call?
This is not a passive class. It is not a nostalgic ideal. They must now recognize themselves as a people, and act accordingly.
Not to start a movement. Not to draft a manifesto. But to fortify the good they already carry:
Double down on formation of children, apprentices, catechumens.
Build parallel institutions: schools, clinics, credit unions, guilds.
Cultivate economic resilience through saving, trading, producing, and owning.
Form trust networks across church, region, and trade, not just ideology.
Above all, they must remember: they are not alone.
“The true conservative is not the one who protects the ashes, but the one who tends the flame.” - Gustav Mahler (attrib.)
Why It Matters
The liberal order is dissolving. The regime is unsustainable. What replaces it will depend on who is morally and institutionally ready when it falls.
Not the activist. Not the billionaire. But the steward.
The man who governs his own household, who teaches his sons to pray, who can feed ten families from one field, who can read the Gospels and Augustine in the same sitting, this is the man who survives the fall. This is the man who rebuilds.
The Steward Class is not the middle class. It is not the managerial class. It is the civilizational class.
Next in the Series:
Volume III – Formation First: Raising Stewards in a Decaying Age
We’ll explore the practices, habits, and disciplines that produce this class: parenting, education, liturgy, and the architecture of virtue.