July 7, 2010, "America’s Ruling Class–And the Perils of Revolution," Angelo M. Codevilla, The Imaginative Conservative
"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.
Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind.
Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.
Never has there been so little diversity
within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some
people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our
own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained
prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from
different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given
matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of
California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the
Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big
in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much
contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So
was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that
formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the
origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be
governed. All that has changed.
Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San
Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the
same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes
and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and
evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and
the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the
wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language —
serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or
profession they are in, their road up included government channels and
government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the
rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers
in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some,
e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a
non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or
halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes,
habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of
Americans not oriented to government.
The two classes have less in common
culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more
different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and
Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to
the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who
created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as
“saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is
over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail,
over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions
points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided
against itself, that house cannot stand.”
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The Political Divide
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Important as they are, our political
divisions are the iceberg’s tip. When pollsters ask the American people
whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next
presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever
pollsters add the preferences “undecided,” “none of the above,” or “tea
party,” these win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the
Republicans trail far behind. That is because while most of the voters
who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent
them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as
Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them
well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts
of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a
few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling
class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican
politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the
rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in
the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats.
But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most
Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral
politics.
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Sooner or later, well or badly, that
majority’s demand for representation will be filled. Whereas in 1968
Governor George Wallace’s taunt “there ain’t a dime’s worth of
difference” between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with
only 13.5 percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a
serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39
percent of Americans vs. 31 percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for
Clinton) simply by speaking ill of the ruling class. Today, few speak
well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and
pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a
declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive,
raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans’
conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has
solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust
the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do
more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.
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While Europeans are accustomed to being
ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people’s
realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well
nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The
ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008.
Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers —
easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but
virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.
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Far from speculating how the political
confrontation might develop between America’s regime class — relatively
few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans — and a
country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task here is to
understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation’s
unpredictable future. More on politics below.
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The Ruling Class
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Who are these rulers, and by what right
do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could
expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at
best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our
ruling class apart from the rest of us?
The most widespread answers — by such as the Times’s
Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly,
modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to
run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated
officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly
fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a
“newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of
globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist
and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling
class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection
with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.
Other explanations are counterintuitive.
Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest
enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto,
California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university
towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many
Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do
not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that
rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists.
Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle
includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors
and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people
demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as
officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government.
They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of
America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic
opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the
millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the
middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what
they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.
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Professional prominence or position will
not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it
is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the
U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president
(Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a
fraternity, this class requires above all comity — being in with the
right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side,
and joining in despising the Outs. Once an official or professional
shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the
class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing
to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move
profitably among our establishment’s parts.
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If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe
in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment,
you can “write” your magnum opus by using the products of your student
assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having
written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be
verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim
(perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was “inadvertent,” and you can
count on the Law School’s dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee
including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a
secret report that “closes” the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a
justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs:
the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized
instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the
professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for
example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT
(Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their
questions about “global warming” to be taken seriously. For our ruling
class, identity always trumps.
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Much less does membership in the ruling
class depend on high academic achievement. To see something closer to an
academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have
little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from how
babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams.
Hence for good or ill, France’s ruling class are bright people —
certifiably. Not ours. But didn’t ours go to Harvard and Princeton and
Stanford? Didn’t most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting
into the Ecole Nationale d’Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or
the dozens of other entry points to France’s ruling class requires
outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such
places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America’s
“top schools” is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with
acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary
schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been
virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an
open secret that “the best” colleges require the least work and give out
the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and
renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself
people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The
most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to
criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class
stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed
itself down, the more it has defined itself by the presumption of
intellectual superiority.
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The Faith
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Its attitude is key to understanding our
bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that “we” are the best and
brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and
dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the
Founding generation’s paradigm that “all men are created equal”?
The notion of human equality was always a
hard sell, because experience teaches us that we are so unequal in so
many ways, and because making one’s self superior is so tempting that
Lincoln called it “the old serpent, you work I’ll eat.” But human
equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed
that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they
were yearning for equal treatment under British law, or because they had
read John Locke.
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It did not take long for their paradigm
to be challenged by interest and by “science.” By the 1820s, as J. C.
Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that different breeds of
animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners
were citing the Negroes’ deficiencies to argue that they should remain
slaves indefinitely. Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach’s
rendition of Hegelian philosophy, according to which biblical
injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beings or, in the
young Karl Marx’s formulation, that ethical thought is “superstructural”
to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called “all
men are created equal” “a self-evident lie,” much of America’s educated
class had already absorbed the “scientific” notion (which Darwin only
popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural
selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue
inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they
please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing
Negroes and improving them, it also pleased them to believe that
Southerners had to be punished and reconstructed by force. As the 19th
century ended, the educated class’s religious fervor turned to social
reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary
nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolved of
all, were the improvers.
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Thus began the Progressive Era. When
Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked “can’t you let anything alone?” he
answered with, “I let everything alone that you can show me is not
itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those
things alone that I see are going down-hill.” Wilson spoke for the
thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like
Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. By such upper-middle-class waters,
progressives who imagined themselves the world’s examples and the
world’s reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice, and
peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for
power. Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the
Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to
reshape American society. Nor was Wilson the last to invade a foreign
country (Mexico) to “teach [them] to elect good men.”
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World War I and the chaos at home and
abroad that followed it discredited the Progressives in the American
people’s eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and
promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans’
lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including
Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to
attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people’s
backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American
people had failed them because democracy in its American form
perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down
on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad
for examples to emulate.
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The cultural divide between the
“educated class” and the rest of the country opened in the interwar
years. Some Progressives joined the “vanguard of the proletariat,” the
Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as
they were to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found
much to be imitated in these regimes because they promised
energetically to transcend their peoples’ ways and to build “the new
man.” Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925
the American Civil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a
Tennessee law that required teaching the biblical account of creation.
The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally, as well as the subsequent
hit movie Inherit the Wind, were the occasion for what one might
have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans
who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II
approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and
its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But
Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed
on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the
League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie
[Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot
Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American
narrow-mindedness against Wilson’s benevolent genius.
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Franklin Roosevelt brought the
Chautauqua class into his administration and began the process that
turned them into rulers. FDR described America’s problems in
technocratic terms. America’s problems would be fixed by a “brain trust”
(picked by him). His New Deal’s solutions — the alphabet-soup
“independent” agencies that have run America ever since — turned many
Progressives into powerful bureaucrats and then into lobbyists. As the
saying goes, they came to Washington to do good, and stayed to do well.
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As their number and sense of importance
grew, so did their distaste for common Americans. Believing itself
“scientific,” this Progressive class sought to explain its differences
from its neighbors in “scientific” terms. The most elaborate of these
attempts was Theodor Adorno’s widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948).
It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits,
ranked these traits and their intensity in any given person on what it
called the “F scale” (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans,
and concluded that most who were not liberal Democrats were latent
fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to
college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert
McCloskey’s Conservatism and Personality (1958)
at Rutgers’s Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of
methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism in terms
of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality
disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved
“scientifically” that conservatives were maladjusted ne’er-do-well
ignoramuses. (My class project, titled “Liberalism and Personality,”
following the same methodology, proved just as scientifically that
liberals suffered from the very same social diseases, and even more
amusing ones.)
The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today’s bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxist notion that human judgments are “epiphenomenal” products of spiritual or material alienation, the notion that the common people’s words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. They absorbed it osmotically, second — or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents’ clinging to “God and guns” as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said “what everybody knows is true.” Confident “knowledge” that “some of us, the ones who matter,” have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truths that direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long before they took power.
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The Agenda: Power
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Our ruling class’s agenda is power for
itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense,
it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage
and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it
is a “machine,” that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its
members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest
livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels’ wealth. Because this
is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the
machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges — civic as well as
economic — to the party’s clients, directly or indirectly. This,
incidentally, is close to Aristotle’s view of democracy. Hence our
ruling class’s standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to
any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government —
meaning of those who run it, meaning themselves, to profit those who pay
with political support for privileged jobs, contracts, etc. Hence more
power for the ruling class has been our ruling class’s solution not just
for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes and
tornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori, one might
wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind
can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Let us now look at what this means in our time.
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Dependence Economics
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By taxing and parceling out more than a
third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep
into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of
wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends on
sellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence
of force, modern government is about nothing if not tampering with
civil equality. By endowing some in society with power to force others
to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher
prices — even to buy in the first place — modern government makes
valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are. Thus if
you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials make
detailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on
the menu. Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have
value dilutes the currency’s value for all.
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Laws and regulations nowadays are longer
than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be
treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more
than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated
differently from others because their senators offered key political
support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government
and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and
large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public
employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes
onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far
from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few
words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field
exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more
significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican
administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions
arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others.
Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear
Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then
rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG.
Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power
(and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the
auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of
our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don’t have
to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody
has to know about them is whom they empower.
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By making economic rules dependent on
discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be
bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s,
as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to
people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders
and investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from
the ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only
those connected with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were
bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing
“alternative energy,” our ruling class created arguably the world’s
biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would
buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuing
diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The
prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and
allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy
among large companies to show support for a “green agenda,” because such
allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why
companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement
in “climate change.”
At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.
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At the very least, such involvement profits them by making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any “green jobs” thus created are by definition creatures of subsidies — that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on “global warming” is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.
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Beyond patronage, picking economic
winners and losers redirects the American people’s energies to tasks
that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose
for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith’s characterization of America as
“private wealth amidst public squalor” (The Affluent Society,
1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest’s complaint: left to
themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs,
making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and
shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well as other
unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it.
Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their
private desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in
improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that
Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they
must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that
their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how
much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to
support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the
ruling class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive
regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be
improved (and, yes, by which the ruling class feeds and grows).
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The 2010 medical law is a template for
the ruling class’s economic modus operandi: the government taxes
citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens to purchase
health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the
citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange
for the money, the government promises to provide care through its
“system.” But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures,
and “best practices” that constitute “the system” become the arbiters of
what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might end up dissatisfied
with what “the system” offers. But when he gave up his money, he gave
up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boards and
commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of
care. Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began
considering a plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement
Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds into government-run “guaranteed
retirement accounts.” If the government may force citizens to buy health
insurance, by what logic can it not force them to trade private
ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as
the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more
about managing retirement income than individuals?
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Who Depends on Whom?
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In Congressional Government (1885)
Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S. Constitution prevents the
government from meeting the country’s needs by enumerating rights that
the government may not infringe. (“Congress shall make no law…” says the
First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single
member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of
“responsible parties.” Hence the ruling class’s perpetual agenda has
been to diminish the role of the citizenry’s elected representatives,
enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner
in the government’s plans, and to craft a “living” Constitution in which
restrictions on government give way to “positive rights” — meaning
charters of government power.
Consider representation. Following
Wilson, American Progressives have always wanted to turn the U.S.
Congress from the role defined by James Madison’s Federalist #10,
“refine and enlarge the public’s view,” to something like the British
Parliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain’s
electoral system — like ours, single members elected in historic
districts by plurality vote — had made members of Parliament responsive
to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson’s time the growing
importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hence whoever
controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.
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In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court’s 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which,
by setting the single standard “one man, one vote” for congressional
districts, ended up legalizing the practice of “gerrymandering,”
concentrating the opposition party’s voters into as few districts as
possible while placing one’s own voters into as many as possible likely
to yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have
gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today’s Congress consists
more and more of persons who represent their respective party
establishments — not nearly as much as in Britain, but heading in that
direction. Once districts are gerrymandered “safe” for one party or
another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count
more on elected legislators to toe the party line.
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To the extent party leaders do not
have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors,
representing those in society whom they find most amenable. In
America ever more since the 1930s — elsewhere in the world this practice
is ubiquitous and long-standing — government has designated certain
individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society’s
sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative
rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has
chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector’s true
representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.
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Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical
Association (AMA) strongly supported the new medical care law, which the
administration touted as having the support of “the doctors” even
though the vast majority of America’s 975,000 physicians opposed it.
Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive
providers of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the
government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby
to the AMA’s officers keep them in line, while the impracticality of
doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the doctor
ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state
of Arizona’s enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to
Hispanics, the National Association of Chiefs of Police — whose
officials depend on the administration for their salaries — issued a
statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising
Hispanics’ animosity. This reflected conversations with the
administration rather than a vote of the nation’s police chiefs.
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Similarly, modern labor unions are ever
less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the
aegis of an organization chosen jointly by employers and government.
Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew
spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as
of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the
SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by
workers’ secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace,
but rather by such deals, or by the union presenting what it claims are
cards from workers approving of representation. The union gets 2 percent
of the workers’ pay, which it recycles as contributions to the
Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public
employees. The union’s leadership is part of the ruling class’s beating
heart.
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The point is that a doctor, a building
contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts in today’s America
insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.
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Ordinary people have also gone a long
way toward losing equal treatment under law. The America described in
civics books, in which no one could be convicted or fined except by a
jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected
representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated
today’s administrative state — in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and
adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today’s legal-administrative texts are
incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted
exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do
not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever “agency policy”
they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any
“agency policy” you will be informed that it was formulated with input
from “the public.” But not from the likes of you.
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Disregard for the text of laws — for the
dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them —
in favor of the decider’s discretion has permeated our ruling class
from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver
Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) that
presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S.
Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it
could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our
ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending
allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as
“interstate commerce” and “due process,” then transmuting others, e.g.,
“search and seizure,” into “privacy.” Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court
endowed its invention of “privacy” with a “penumbra” that it deemed
“broad enough to encompass a woman’s decision whether or not to
terminate her pregnancy.” The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period.
Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to
reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the
Constitution’s limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were
invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to
secure the “positive rights” they invent, because these expressions of
popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves
were construing.
By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: “Are you serious? Are you serious?” No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today’s America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.
As the discretionary powers of
officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the
importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is
becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
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Disaggregating and Dispiriting
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The ruling class is keener to reform the
American people’s family and spiritual lives than their economic and
civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class’s self-definition so
definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so
open. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish
one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called
religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that
it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its
very particular interest — often defined as mere coherence against
outsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its
members from playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all,
it reproduces itself.
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Since marriage is the family’s fertile
seed, government at all levels, along with “mainstream” academics and
media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate, and exhort in
support not of “the family” — meaning married parents raising children —
but rather of “families,” meaning mostly households based on something
other than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the
distinction between cohabitation and marriage — except that husbands are
held financially responsible for the children they father, while
out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage and
forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize
“child care” for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have
also led society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by
precept as well as by parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the
Democratic administration’s secretary of defense and the Republican
Senate’s majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.)
condemned the military’s practice of punishing officers who had
extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring
marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to
that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on
fidelity is “contrary to societal norms.” Not surprisingly, rates of
marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have
increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one
in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which
case they have about a four in 10 chance of living in poverty. Since
unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government
services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic
Party’s most faithful voters.
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While our ruling class teaches that
relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also
insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is
fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review
articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the
government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of
parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses
could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents’ consent,
the people who run America’s schools nowadays administer pregnancy
tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents’
knowledge. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are
taught. But the government may and often does object to how parents
raise children. The ruling class’s assumption is that what it mandates
for children is correct ipso facto, while what parents do is potentially
abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to
be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence. Only sheer
political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents’
right to homeschool their children against the ruling class’s desire to
accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: “to make young gentlemen as
unlike their fathers as possible.”
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At stake are the most important
questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what
standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in
Wilson’s words and explicit in our ruling class’s actions is the
dismissal, as the ways of outdated “fathers,” of the answers that most
Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American
people’s intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance is the very heart
of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its
claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows
things and operates by standards beyond others’ comprehension.
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While the unenlightened ones believe
that man is created in the image and likeness of God and that we are
subject to His and to His nature’s laws, the enlightened ones know that
we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and
the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the
antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective
judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the
enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns.
Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or
interest, science is “science” only in the “right” hands. Consensus
among the right people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic
matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.
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That is why the ruling class is united
and adamant about nothing so much as its right to pronounce definitive,
“scientific” judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government
declares, and its associated press echoes that “scientists say” this or
that, ordinary people — or for that matter scientists who “don’t say,”
or are not part of the ruling class — lose any right to see the
information that went into what “scientists say.” Thus when Virginia’s
attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had
concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth’s
temperatures are rising “like a hockey stick” from millennial stability —
a conclusion on which billions of dollars’ worth of decisions were made
— to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia’s
faculty senate condemned any inquiry into “scientific endeavor that has
satisfied peer review standards” claiming that demands for data “send a
chilling message to scientists…and indeed scholars in any discipline.”
The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general’s
demands for data amounted to “an assault on reason.” The fact that the
“hockey stick” conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are
on record manipulating peer review, the fact that
science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction between
truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the
distinction between itself and those they rule.
By identifying science and reason with
themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition. Though they cannot
prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it as socially
disabling as smoking — to be done furtively and with a bad social
conscience. Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans,
they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by “world standards.”
Each day, the ruling class produces new “studies” that show that one or
another of Americans’ habits is in need of reform, and that those
Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally,
wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.
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Meddling and Apologies
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America’s best and brightest believe
themselves qualified and duty bound to direct the lives not only of
Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush’s 2005 inaugural
statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and
hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an
extrapolation of the sentiments of America’s Progressive class, first
articulated by such as Princeton’s Woodrow Wilson and Columbia’s
Nicholas Murray Butler. But while the early Progressives expected the
rest of the world to follow peacefully, today’s ruling class makes
decisions about war and peace at least as much forcibly to tinker with
the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed,
they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people’s
insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and
peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is
why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the
American people oscillate between bellicosity and “isolationism.”
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Because our ruling class deems
unsophisticated the American people’s perennial preference for decisive
military action or none, its default solution to international threats
has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to
reform the world’s Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans,
believing that changing hearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace
and that it knows how to change them. The apparently endless series of
wars in which our ruling class has embroiled America, wars that have
achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, has
contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it — but not in its own
eyes.
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Rather, even as our ruling class has
lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded violently to reform foreign
countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not
having matched that image — their private image. Woodrow Wilson began
this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe’s peoples that America
had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace
treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people
that Article X was the Europeans’ non-negotiable demand. The fact that
the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable
communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was
merely the American Progressives’ private dream. In our time, this
double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama
apologized to Europe because “the United States has fallen short of
meeting its responsibilities” to reduce carbon emissions by taxation.
But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose
doing so. Hence President Obama was not apologizing for anything that he
or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow
Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do while glossing
over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the
reducing. Wilson redux.
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Similarly, Obama “apologized” to
Europeans because some Americans — not him and his friends — had shown
“arrogance and been dismissive” toward them, and to the world because
President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So
President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held
African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter —
not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state
Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona’s law that
directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that
sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us
that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself
from his own administration by telling him, “Reagan is a conservative,
an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him…”
This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its
inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee in the Temple: “Lord, I thank thee
that I am not like other men…”
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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.
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The Country Class
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Describing America’s country class is
problematic because it is so heterogeneous. It has no privileged
podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares
above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty.
It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the
rulers’ defining ideas and proclivities — e.g., ever higher taxes and
expanding government, subsidizing political favorites, social
engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of
life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other
side of the ruling class’s coin: its most distinguishing
characteristics are marriage, children, and religious practice. While
the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally
accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different
because of its non-orientation to government and its members’ yearning
to rule themselves rather than be ruled by others.
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Even when members of the country class
happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations,
their concerns are essentially private; in their view, government owes
to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct what anyone
perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special
treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather
than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as
possible. Thus the Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in Kelo, which
allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better
connections to government, reminded the country class that government is
not its friend.
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Negative orientation to privilege
distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from
joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties
with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the
company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to
the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to
which he is forced to belong for putting the union’s interests above
those of parents who want to choose their children’s schools. In
general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low
who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by
comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy
can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against
insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government
against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big
business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and
that ordinary people are more unequal than ever.
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Members of the country class who want to
rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid
the ruling class’s rituals while guarding against infringing its
prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should
play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of
performance — including academic ones — should be matters of public
record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open
argument. For such people, the Supreme Court’s 2009 decision in Ricci,
upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the
results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may
sometimes still trump political connections.
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Nothing has set the country class apart,
defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it
has, so much as the ruling class’s insistence that people other than
themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior.
Persons who were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone,
who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent
politicians of both parties who say that the issues of modern life are
too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted by the ruling
class’s dismissal of opposition as mere “anger and frustration” — an
imputation of stupidity — while others just scoff at the claim that the
ruling class’s bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence.
A few ask the fundamental question: Since when and by what right does
intelligence trump human equality? Moreover, if the politicians are so
smart, why have they made life worse?
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The country class actually believes that
America’s ways are superior to the rest of the world’s, and regards
most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less virtuous. Thus
while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota’s factory methods are
worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to “world standards.”
This class also takes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul:
nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under
flag rank belong to this class in every measurable way. Few vote for the
Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country
class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by
or “God Bless America” is sung after seven innings of baseball, and
most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National
Football League’s plaintive renditions of the “Star Spangled Banner.”
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Unlike the ruling class, the country
class does not share a single intellectual orthodoxy, set of tastes, or
ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human
equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God’s
law. Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many
consider equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs.
Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out
of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri — entertainment complexes
larger than Hollywood’s — because since the 1970s most of Hollywood’s
products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its
underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The
same goes for “popular music” and television. For some in the country
class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste,
while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others.
While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the
stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class’s hands, a
considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for
their own sake. By that very token, the country class’s characteristic
cultural venture — the homeschool movement — stresses the classics
across the board in science, literature, music, and history even as the
ruling class abandons them.
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Congruent Agendas?
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Each of the country class’s diverse
parts has its own agenda, which flows from the peculiar ways in which
the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are
naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between
government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their
community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party
establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women
anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are
dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All
resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that
their own agenda’s advancement requires concerting resistance to the
ruling class across the board.
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Not being at the table when government
makes the rules about how you must run your business, knowing that you
will be required to pay more, work harder, and show deference for the
privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman’s
nightmare. But what to do about it?
In our time the interpenetration of government and business — the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations — is so thick and deep, the people “at the table” receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business’s agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation — and through support of the Republican Party — usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: “The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” For government to advantage some at others’ expense, said he, “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association.” In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.
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In our time the interpenetration of government and business — the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations — is so thick and deep, the people “at the table” receive and recycle into politics so much money, that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business’s agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation — and through support of the Republican Party — usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: “The sum of good government,” said Thomas Jefferson, is not taking “from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.” For government to advantage some at others’ expense, said he, “is to violate arbitrarily the first principle of association.” In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few realize how revolutionary that is.
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As bureaucrats and teachers’ unions
disempowered neighborhood school boards, while the governments of towns,
counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as
the ruling class reduced the number and importance of things that
American communities could decide for themselves, America’s thirst for
self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost
always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector
people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in
the country class that they now work for public employees rather than
the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters
regain control of government? Restoring localities’ traditional powers
over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take
repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. .
So would the restoration of traditional “police” powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one’s self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.
.
So would the restoration of traditional “police” powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one’s self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.
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America’s pro-family movement is a
reaction to the ruling class’s challenges: emptying marriage of legal
sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excluding parents from
their children’s education. Americans reacted to these challenges
primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all
marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce,
abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not.
The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great
facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children,
but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual
contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country
class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something
of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any
illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations
will long save their families from societal influences made to order to
discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class’s intrusions would
require discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong,
as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That
revolutionary task would involve far more than legislation.
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The ruling class’s manifold efforts to
discredit and drive worship of God out of public life — not even the
Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or
reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done
in response to Supreme Court rulings — convinced many among the vast
majority of Americans who believe and pray that today’s regime is
hostile to the most important things of all. Every December, they are
reminded that the ruling class deems the very word “Christmas” to be
offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity in
public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being “American
Taliban” trying to set up a “theocracy.” Let members of the country
class object to anything the ruling class says or does, and likely as
not their objection will be characterized as “religious,” that is to say
irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par with the
“science” of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter.
Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual
basis of the ruling class’s claim to rule, resistance to that rule,
whether to the immorality of economic subsidies and privileges, or to
the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to
its seizure of children’s education, must deal with secularism’s
intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics
as the term is commonly understood.
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The Classes Clash
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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.
.
.
Certainly the country class lacks its
own political vehicle — and perhaps the coherence to establish one. In
the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to
channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is
eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to
represent the country class. For it to do so, it would have to become
principles-based, as it has not been since the mid-1860s. The few who
tried to make it so the party treated as rebels: Barry Goldwater and
Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When it failed to stop
Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with
establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan’s
principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging
that Republicans had driven the country “into the ditch” all alone. But
they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, never mind the larger
country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. 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.
.
.
The name of the party that will
represent America’s country class is far less important than what,
precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because,
for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of
confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the
ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit
with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require
empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is
there to government by one party but government by another party? Yet
this logic, though all too familiar to most of the world, has always
been foreign to America and naturally leads further in the direction
toward which the ruling class has led. Any country party would have to
be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats’ mirror image.
.
.
Yet to defend the country class, to
break down the ruling class’s presumptions, it has no choice but to
imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while. Consider:
The ruling class denies its opponents’ legitimacy. Seldom does a
Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public
affairs without reiterating the litany of his class’s claim to
authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed,
stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of
the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other
characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting
the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to
contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it
will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates,
the pretense that taxes can control “climate change,” and the outrage of
banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party
would have to attack the ruling class’s fundamental claims to its
superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and
hearten one’s own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.
.
.
Suppose that the Country Party (whatever
its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most
statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were
slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats’ plan of 2009-2010,
namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the
Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest
groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side.
Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America
safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own “revolution
from above” to reverse the ruling class’s previous “revolution from
above,” it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America.
Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be
antithetical to the country class’s diversity as well as to the American
Founders’ legacy.
.
.
Achieving the country class’s inherently
revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution
and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use
legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to
reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside.
Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up
the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.
.
.
Reducing the taxes that most Americans
resent requires eliminating the network of subsidies to millions of
other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of
government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network is
practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are
morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the
country cannot afford the practice in general. The electorate is likely
to cut off millions of government clients, high and low, only if its
choice is between no economic privilege for anyone and ratifying
government’s role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for
government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions
or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by
which the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make
than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few
obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education,
can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises
such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of
thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction
program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded
by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part.
Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do
elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.
.
.
The grandparents of today’s Americans
(132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school
boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents’,
today’s 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the
mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now
concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and
administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to
explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political
articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every
two years.
.
.
If self-governance means anything, it
means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections.
The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his
chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. Yet
to subject the modern administrative state’s agencies to electoral
control would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any
number of technical matters. Law can require environmental regulators or
insurance commissioners, or judges or auditors to be elected. But only
citizens’ discernment and vigilance could make these officials good.
Only citizens’ understanding of and commitment to law can possibly
reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has
permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who
dislikes a court’s or an official’s unlawful act to counter it with
another unlawful one than to draw all parties back to the foundation of
truth.
.
.
How, for example, to remind America of,
and to drive home to the ruling class, Lincoln’s lesson that trifling
with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motives destroys its
protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of
Congress were to co-sponsor a “Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy
Pelosi, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without
further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto
law…” and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III
Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members
of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass a
bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be
confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s answer to a
question on the Congress’s constitutional authority to mandate
individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: “Are you kidding?
Are you kidding?” The point having been made, the Country Party could
lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest
purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot
be allowed to trump the Constitution.
.
.
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."
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comment:
=======================
"Karl W Koch
As with most of our verbally acute intelligentsia, Mr. Codevilla is perhaps correct for data presented, but fails to recognize our democracy’s true Ruling Class and how it perverts our American democracy. The Ruling Class is a conspiratorial alliance of Public Sector bureaucrats, entitlement recipients, extremely wealthy money people and elected Politicians..
The base of the Public Sector is the Entitlement Class. The Entitlement Class is by nature a product of Public Sector Bureaucrats. Its purpose is to sustain the Public Sector.
The Public Sector wants society to provide it with preferential incomes at the expense of the people who contribute to society: our nations entrepreneurs and workers.
So the Public Sector is the Ruling Class Master and those who contribute to society’s wealth are their slaves.
KW Koch"
=====================
Comment: I've posted this piece by Codevilla before but probably not enough.
Comment: I've posted this piece by Codevilla before but probably not enough.
.
