Late in life, William F. Buckley made a confession to Corey Robin. Capitalism is "boring," said the founding father of the American right. "Devoting your life to it," as conservatives do, "is horrifying if only because it's so repetitious. It's like sex." With this unlikely conversation began Robin's decade-long foray into the conservative mind. What is conservatism, and what's truly at stake for its proponents? If capitalism bores them, what excites them? 

http://www.amazon.com/Reactionary-Mind-Conservatism-Edmund-Burke/dp/0199959110/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1429106518&sr=8-1&keywords=corey+robin

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In his analysis, Goldman miss the point made by Krugman: 

…modern liberalism is in some sense the obverse — it is about creating a society that is more fluid as well as fairer. We all like to laugh at the war-on-Christmas types, right-wing blowhards who fulminate about the liberal plot to destroy family values. We like to point out that a country like France, with maternity leave, aid to new mothers, and more, is a lot more family-friendly than rat-race America. But if “family values” actually means traditional structures of authority, then there’s a grain of truth in the accusation. Both social insurance and civil rights are solvents that dissolve some of the restraints that hold people in place, be they unhappy workers or unhappy spouses. And that’s part of why people like me support them.

Gus: The argument here proposed by Krugman is not that of non-hierarchical society but that of fluid society in which people can move about, on merit, not on who they sleep with or whom their friends are. nor by doing "favours", nor by inheritance of birth. It is also a society where the hierarchy does not exploit the bottom rungs but help improve their station, thus the "hierarchy" is there to serve the people rather the present reverse.

as Goldman points out:

The conservative position has never been simply that a hierarchical society is better than an egalitarian one. It’s that an egalitarian society is impossible. Every society includes rulers and ruled. The central question of politics, therefore, is not whether some will command while others obey. It’s who gives the orders.

Impossible? humbug... But it's not about who gives the orders. It is about the quality and social inspiration of the orders.  More to come but in the meantime: 

I note that :

ENA was Created by General de Gaulle in October 1945, the founding principles of the Ecole nationale d’administration are to broaden access to the highest executive levels of government service, and to provide professional training for senior civil servants.

Hence, the school’s principal responsibility is to recruit and train the men and women who will make public service a living institution and enable it to adapt to ever-changing times. At the same time, the school must pass on the ethics of government service to its graduates, based on the values of responsibility, political neutrality and selfless service.

Gus: of all the dictators ever to tread on this planet, General de Gaulle was the most egalitarian.