Ins't Societism a Aristocratic Internationalism? Essentially, it doesn't matter what nation or ethnicity you are from, but rather, what class you belong to....
I think Thande is partially making it up as we go along and partially lying back and tweaking it into something rather mind-bending.
However, as the UPSA is this timeline's analog of the OTL USA, I've been understanding Societism as something in some ways analogous to the "American" ideology I believe I recently sketched in my earlier response to you, and at much greater length way upthread somewhere. That is--it in some ways sees itself as revolutionary, in others as the mere refinement of common sense. It is basically pro-capitalist, in concept grounded in broadly democratic basis--but democracy readily boils down to the idea of the "aristocracy of merit." That is, a formally fluid class structure is a means of permitting the best talent to rise to prominence, but it's perfectly OK if one's formal institutions tend to operate without the actual, direct input of the actual majority of people day to day.
So, the USPA having been founded by a mass-based insurgency against Spanish rule, one that mobilized very broad sectors of society including Native American peoples, they don't (in this pre-Societist period) see themselves as continuous with the old European aristocratic system. In this stage very radical "Cobrist" notions tending toward being analogous with OTL socialism and communism are current and openly articulated as part of the USPA's spectrum of politics.
However...
Actually, I think that there was one mention of aristocracy being considered a "natural" part of human society, according to Societism. Can't remember the part number off-hand, though.
It could be that Societism sees a strict class system/hierarchy/caste system etc. as something inherrant in all cultures, and so utilises this as one of the cornerstones by which different cultures can be united and almagamted into one group, so that it's not necessarily that Societism views class as more important than race as it sees class as a unifying factor and so emphasises this as a consequence.
However...While I very much doubt that Societism will ever formally declare a
rigid class system as a good thing, I do suppose they might recognize the stratification as important to successful functioning of society. In their terms, the revolutionary success of the early UPSA would be that they broke the rigidity of the old Spanish system--but, while undergoing a period of dangerous ideological commitment to radical democratic concepts that might logically imply muddling up social operations with the interference of the uneducated and irresponsible mob in actual decisions, kept that "danger" at arm's length while capitalist business (that might not be recognized as such in terms familiar from OTL) developed, the nation (glorified, by the Societists, only as the embryo of the post-national world social order they champion) strengthened and sectors of leadership came forth.
Meanwhile, there are some major divergences between the UPSA and the OTL USA. The citizens of the USA OTL saw themselves as ethnically one people (of northwestern European, mostly British, extraction) with a range of culture that largely fit within the British context, and a huge preoccupation was daily confrontation with ethnically "Other" people--Native Americans, African-American slaves. The UPSA I believe came into being without slavery, the Spanish having either abolished it completely before the rebellion, or limited it paternalistically to the point that in the revolutionary enthusiasm with which the South American federal republic was founded, it was easily then abolished. And it came into being as the alliance of peoples more or less united by their opposition to Spanish hegemony, spanning a spectrum from liberal "Castillians" to entire Native nations. I guess these divergences are part of why the UPSA seemed so promisingly romantic to me!
But the resolution of interethnic tensions has apparently not always gone smoothly, and now they've bitten off a huge chunk of a different Iberian hegemony, one that relied on slavery on a massive scale.
Societism, as a vision of a world order based on freedom from ethnicity and national barriers, but one that rejects the more radical implications of democracy by asserting explicitly that social stratification is an eternally necessary and thus good thing, might have recommended itself to a broad coalition of the overextended UPSA's ruling classes, providing a framework in which ongoing slaveholding could be worked in and an open-ended strategy for absorbing ethnically diverse peoples worked out.
IIRC, Thande also mentioned that the Diversitarians are (officially at least) mostly classless, or don't view such things as important. Though most of that is probably just to seem contrary to the Societists.
I'm unimpressed with the Diversitarians as an ideology, so far--indeed as an ideology I do suspect it is nothing more than "What You Should Hate About Societism, and Why." In fact, I daresay most "Diversitarian" nations are functionally quite stratified.
And of course part of the logic of Diversitarianism, if any, is that people from one nation have nothing to say about how another organizes itself (as long as they don't organize themselves as Societists!) so the constellation is quite open to for instance racist apartheid.
But vice versa--while I've gotten disenchanted with the ENA and a bit contemptuous of it, we've seen how it edges toward abolition of slavery.
So, while avoiding the Societist declaration that society should and must be stratified, they keep the revolutionary tendencies of radical democracy at arm's length by compartmentalizing the world into nations, so that if conditions on the ground in one place tend toward egalitarianism, they can still be contained in the coalition by asserting that that is peculiar to that nation's special character, while accommodating other formulations that are quite stratified with the same formula, keeping them all in the same anti-Societist coalition. The ruling orders of each nation are protected from cross-national revolutionary or counter-revolutionary ideology and the worst features of Societism are held up as the boogeyman to be feared.
