Nearly every country in the world has an hereditary elite. The United States had one up until 1960.
The second world war saw the American military give officer rank to everyone who had graduated from college. At the time this was a small percentage of the population but it was a far more democratic cross-section than in most of the world because the United States had created public universities in the middle of the 19th century.
The consequence was that the officer class after the second world war promptly moved into the corporate world where the few extraordinary meritocratic managers rose to the top and displaced the hereditary elite who had been managing American corporations. By the end of the 1950's the top 50 American corporations and the top hundred most important people in the professions were disproportionately meritocratic not hereditary.
The consequence of this was that all of the private and secretive clubs in America could no longer get jobs for their members because of their hereditary lineage. The most important impact was that business grew rapidly and prospered as never before.
America has remained, for the past 50 years, free of an hereditary elite. I know that some people would suggest that we have hereditary processes in government which I do not deny. Government-politics is the oldest institutional structure extant and predates commerce. Talents that are effective in government and politics can be passed on from father to son. Such talents cannot be passed on in the realm of commerce.
It saddens me to see constant efforts in our society to re-create the hereditary elite. After the real debutante ball became meaningless new debutante balls have been formed around the country. They are just for show in every way but they are efforts to reestablish an elite. Rich people still send their children to prep schools and prep schools are still funnels to elite schools. Nevertheless elite schools are not particularly important to commerce and they do not interfere significantly with meritocracy in business. This is not true, of course, for government where meritocracy is largely absent.
Many clubs have been created to try and simulate the previous secret and elite clubs. Most of these are a farce because they are nothing more than the traditional networking structure of the Lions Club the Masonic order and the Rotary, none of which have been socially important since their imitation of the hereditary elite clubs evaporated in the 1950s.
Three cheers for meritocracy in our society. It's importance should not be ignored.