Today's Republican Party cannot survive, 'The productive class vs the American Aristocracy,' Karnick

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"What is needed, then, is not conserving but reform."

7/25/10, "The productive class and the American Aristocracy," by S.T. Karnick, American Thinker

The author references the great Codevilla piece, citing Codevilla's terms ruling class vs country class. Karnick focuses on the aristocracy vs the productive class, believes the Republican Party will not survive.

Karnick: "The real motive for progressive politics is by no means any sense of altruism, as the aristocracy would have us believe. It is all of the usual selfish stuff: money, power, and ego. (Rush) Limbaugh observes:

• "When you get down to it, folks, it's all about money. Always follow the money. The left and the ruling class love to say that they do things out of altruism, out of compassion, big hearts, and these people are a bunch of lazy SOBs who have no business in the private sector 'cause they can't succeed there. The only way they can succeed is to be a bunch of brownnosers in the ruling class and try to move their way up that ladder and get whatever they can out of the public trough. The ruling class has gotten rich off of government."

As Dr. Ray Stantz (Dan Ackroyd) noted in Ghostbusters, "You don't know what it's like out there. I've worked in the private sector. They expect results!"

• An excellent example of how the aristocracy rules the realm is the global warming issue. All the money, profit, power, and prestige are on the side of the alarmists, and they wield their power ruthlessly,

blatantly throwing their weight around in silencing those who try to tell the truth about the science of climate change.

• Al Gore is a multimillionaire who knows nothing about science, whereas S. Fred Singer is a brilliant scientist who continually endures a firestorm of slanders and harassment for trying to uphold scientific standards. These two men encapsulate the opposing forces of the aristocracy and the productive class....

Naturally, the forcible disconnection of actions from consequences has led to a series of catastrophes and misadventures --

• bumbled intrusions in Iraq and Afghanistan while failing to bring Osama bin Laden to justice, a ghastly housing bubble and crash of financial markets followed by a nagging recession, horrifyingly irresponsible expansion of government debt,

a grotesque comedy of errors as the federal government and a multinational megabusiness fail to plug an oil leak in the Gulf of Mexico, children's academic achievement at a disastrously low level, entertainment and arts given over in great part to proselytizing for the aristocracy's pet political causes and

• character assassination of all who dare to question that agenda, and so on and on.

This spectacular litany of misrule has elicited a mass public distrust of the nation's leaders. An April 2010 study found that

• "Americans are more dissatisfied with the country's direction than at any time since the New York Times/CBS News poll began asking about the subject in the early 1990s." Other polls show similar results.

This is not a sustainable situation, and increasing conflict appears to be inevitable. With the productive class pressing for self-governance -- which its members see as both their inherent right and as necessary to their productivity -- and the progressive aristocracy threatened with the loss of everything,

• compromise is impossible.

It's too late, moreover, for conservatism to provide a remedy. Codevilla writes:

• "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."

Traditional conservatism is a woefully inadequate response to the rule of the progressive aristocracy because conserving the changes of the past few decades would be disastrous: the vast increase in the welfare state, the Sexual Revolution and its antinomian devaluation of all values, the nation's catastrophically bad education system,

• a culture promoting license and irresponsibility, and other such atrocities are necessary to the maintenance of a corrupt aristocracy which relies on the output of a productive class
  
• forced into peasant-like docility so that its goods can be extracted for the benefit of its self-proclaimed betters.

In fact, the baneful state of contemporary American society might seem to be no accident at all, as it keeps the productive class in line through threats from above (impoverishment, prison, and family breakups, all of which governments have shown themselves quite willing to inflict) and below (by crime and social disorder) and bought off with cheap pleasures. It's a regime that combines the worst elements of the dystopias in 1984, Brave New World, and A Clockwork Orange.

• The progressive aristocracy is every bit as morally reprehensible as the worst of those of the past, for it relies on the existence of an underclass that will provide sufficient votes to keep it in power and motivate the productive class to work hard lest they fall into this unfortunate group. That helps explain why the
  
• progressive aristocracy has stood idly by while the schools in the nation's inner cities have deteriorated so badly and thus doomed a large swath of the population to poverty and dependence on the government. This inculcation of ignorance appears to be a matter of truly stupendous cynicism.

Thus what there is to conserve in the nation's institutions is largely unappealing to the productive class.

• The modern aristocrats are the ones who want to conserve the political, social, and cultural institutions of today, for they rely on these forces for their comfortable existence.

What is needed, then, is not conserving but reform.

• The problem is that the aristocracy has so strong a grasp of the levers of power that the means of reform scarcely exist.

Nonetheless, Codevilla argues that the aristocracy can be toppled through political means. His expectation is that the Republican Party will be transformed into one that represents the interests of the productive class or will be replaced by such a party, in order to get their votes:

• "Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflicted as today's Republicans,
  
• those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s."

...If the contemporary American aristocracy can be forced out without such a terrible confrontation, it will be impressive proof of the Founders' wisdom and the success of the American experiment. If not, the nation may well be headed for a struggle that will make the tumult of the 1960s look like a mild tiff in comparison."

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(I consider Karl Rove a prime example of the ruling class disaster who must go. Limbaugh, mentioned in this article, is a good friend of Rove and publicly supports him. Limbaugh's words to his listeners about the GOP ruling class are 100% right, but it's possible he doesn't really believe them. Those in power, many who have overseen the loss of our country, to this day show complete disdain for those they are supposed to represent. ed.)