All Hail the Ruling Class!
(image credit: The American Spectator)
Rush Limbaugh took the better part of his second hour today reading from this enlightening and disturbing article in The American Spectator: “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution” by Angelo Codevilla, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. The author discusses both the Democrats and Republicans who to rule this nation more for the benefit of themselves than for their own bosses: the voters.
This has been an intermittent fixture of American politics for a long time, as Glenn Beck would remind us. The most recent flurry of rule not by the people but in spite of the people is not limited to the Obama regime. It began with Bush 43, the Democrat Congress, and an ill-fated effort to avert economic catastrophe.
As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.
When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.
The author explains with many examples the divisions between America’s ruling class — the relatively few in high places supported by a minority of the electorate — and a “country class” comprising the remaining two-thirds of the nation.
The ruling class’s appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side — especially the ruling class — embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.
In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century’s accretions of bad habits — taking care to preserve the good among them — is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.
[...]
In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.
You say you want a [Tea Party] revolution? Well, you know… We’d all want to change the world. Trouble is, the ruling class has already been imposing a revolution on us for some time.
How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class’s greatest difficulty — aside from being outnumbered — will be to argue, against the grain of reality, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class’s greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.
In other words: good luck, gang.
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Posted by The MaryHunter on July 19, 2010 4:48 pm
» Filed Under Democrats, Economy, Government, Government corruption, Government tyranny, Republicans, bailouts, progressivism
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4 Responses to “All Hail the Ruling Class!”
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I read the entire piece, and it answered a lot of questions for me. It’s a long, and difficult read, but I highly recommend it….
Yes, quite a read. Made me think of Arthur Gardner in Glenn Beck’s The Overton Window, which I just started.
BTW Great to read you again, TMH!
Rush Limbaugh may have put on his best radio show ever yesterday by bringing Professor Codevilla’s article to the attention of his audience. This article sums up just how big of a challenge we are up against because our elected officials in Washington DC are not looking out for our interests.
Just to pick one item out of the article, the Supreme Court Case, Baker versus Carr in 1962 demonstrates how gerrymandered Congressinal districts have been allowed to keep the Congress with virtually no turnover for years. No wonder our officials can stay there forever. Most seats in the Congress are not competitive.
I conclude from this article that we need a new political party in America that will represent the real people in America.
Thanks Rush. Good job.
From Bacon Bits through Moonbattery to Stop the ACLU, the MaryHunter rides again !!! Kudos my friend !
In this acutely political season, it stands out to me that It’s The Reading, (or be) Stupid. This Ruling Class article featured by Rush is a real winner, virtually a book. Other small booklets flow from Encounter Books as Broadsides, fourteen of them by now with authors like Fund, Moore, Hanson and more big hitters. For vacation reading there are the likes of Beck’s novel and Ingraham’s tee hee Diaries ditty. Out in cerebral field there are gobs of heady Conservative tomes just waiting for more serious dedication. Check out Human Events or Conservative Book Clubs for leads.
So much to read, so few eyes….