America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

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."

I won’t argue against the theory, it certainly seems the case but do you really believe Gore was a phony opponent? I think they really believed Gore would win, at least with their fraud operation.

I agree that Gore is a special case, and your question is a valid one. When I was thinking of the phoniness of the candidates, there was simply no way I could leave out Gore because of his phoniness in general.

Beginning with Gore's speech pattern, through his invention of the Internet, up to his AGW scams, how in my right mind could I have omitted him from any list of phonies?

But wait, there's more.

Prior to Gore's run, any question of voter fraud was on the part of the DNC. (Well, Sanchez' theft of Bob Dornan's seat was abetted by Newt Gingrich, but we are talking about ruling class and not any one party, right?) After that,

there was always talk of the selected Prez and how he really didn't have a mandate. That made it so much easier for W to grow government and never get conservative stuff done. Think of promises never done:
1. tort reform.
2. eliminate dept of Education (and other Fed reductions)
3. privatized SS
4. [fill in the blank]
5. Defend the Beck decision (aiding unionized conservatives)
6. Defend the borders (not promised, but expected as normal)
Suddenly paper ballots were unreliable. Haggling cads readily saw hanging chads. Paper ballots in Florida designed by a Dem dominated bureau, worst outcome in a Dem dominated voting area. Prime for group hysteria. Phony, Phony, Phony -- and primed for a case of group hysteria where everyone suddenly thought they blew it.
That ushered in the era of electronic voting machines of the type Hugo Chavez makes available. Did I mention phony?

If Gore didn't win the election, his side won the voting rigging game for the ruling class.

Wretchard rang in on this piece within another thread he had started (Pawn to King Four, Pawn to King Four ) that was addressing the ruling class' confrontation similarly [I've added the various bits of emphasis at points where I see spurs to more thought]:

115. wretchard
The Codevilla article in the Spectator raises the same issue as this post. He argues that what his article terms the “ruling class” has decided to cross the Rubicon and march on the republic. The article says:
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. …
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 kidding? Are you kidding?” 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.
He answers the question I ask in the first paragraphs of this post — have hostilities been declared? — in the affirmative. Codevilla’s only doubt is whether the “ruling class” has the resources to prevail. Codevilla says, “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.”

I have been kinder than Codevilla; I don’t know for sure whether the revolution from the top he refers to is really underway. But on the other hand I’ve argued that if it is — if the fight is on, then it will take the form of a race to build rival coalitions around rival visions. His article is an assertion that kind of conflict is underway. This [Wretchard's] post is about what to do if it is.
What Codevilla misses is the sense that the “ruling class” if it has been forced to roll the iron dice, acts out of a fear that its historic window is closing, driven not only ambition, but by self preservation. One of the roots of the current crisis is the de-mediating nature of modern technology. The gatekeepers are becoming obsolete. Not only that, but even small groups of people have acquired a modicum of hard power.
In retrospect 9/11 must have scared the elite in a totally different way from its effect on flyover country. Flyover country saw it as simple attack on America. The elite must have seen it in part as a warning that control could be lost.[Wretchard explains this in another comment.] The psychological response of the Europeans and Obama is consistent with a desire to re-wrap the world in rules fearing the American anger as much as the Muslim hatred. There was no distinction between the two. Both were equally disruptive of the settled order. For if Muslim hatred could generate such effects, what would happen if American individuals or small groups rose in symmetrical response? The thought did not bear thinking.
It is important to factor the destabilizing effect of technology into the analysis because it suggests that if the conflict exists, it is not a war of choice on the part of the elites but one of necessity. This also implies that the elites are not leading a ‘revolution’ from the top as Codevilla believes they are; on the contrary they a reaction. The old order is fighting for its life, not just against al-Qaeda and similar outfits, but in principle against anything that directly acts in the political and cultural sphere.

Wretchard then expresses the threat these elites see in us. Everything that is in our nature that wants to be free of them and would allow us to achieve it, is seen as an attack on THEIR status and status quo. In a way he touches on the meaning of my tagline. DO NOT ACCEPT ANY LABEL ON YOURSELF lest your enemies attempt to use it to hem you in. Remember Alinsky rule 4: “Make the enemy [conservatives] live up to its own book of rules.”

If so then sheer initiative, simple self-rule, simple entrepreneuralism and innovation is rebellion itself. This explains the curious antipathy to the Tea Parties, despite their staid, almost boring nature. They are incendiary. In way they are ‘like’ al-Qaeda to a mind whose obsession is ‘enlightenment’ and ‘control’. Take that point of view and see how natural it is to think of Christianists and Tea-Baggers in the same light as Hezbollah.
Self-organization in itself becomes subversive when the viewpoint chosen is from the top.

It seems to me that Wretchard's last paragraph suggests that every and all means will be used to stop your self-organizing efforts. They are ruthless and will stop at nothing, so be prepared for anything. YOU are deemed as subversive as al-Qaeda and even more dangerous.

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.

It starts in kindergarten! When will Conservatives WAKE UP????

( Yes! I am shouting, jumping up and down, waving my arms, and having a fit!)

Marxism is our nation's **MOST** serious threat! Schools are the Marxists **most** powerful weapon against us!

Conservatives! We must get our nation's children into conservative private K-12 schools. Reformation must start with our nation's youngest children.

If our nation's college classrooms were filled to the brim with youth who were capable of defending their faith and our nation's founding principles, their Marxist professors would wither before their righteousness. There would be conservative clubs, fraternities, and sororities in colleges throughout the land. In 10 to 20 short years we would see real spiritual and cultural change in our nation.

I think it's nonsense to attribute the evangelism for America, that runs throughout history, to the Progressives, as he does here, you'd have to discount John Winthrop's "Shining City on a Hill" from the 1630's, up through the founders to Reagan.

Freedom, as an idea, is a powerful liberator. Everything begins as an idea. That the universe and our place in it began as a glimmer of an idea in the mind of God.

As an idea, the vision of a "Shining City on a Hill" is extremely powerful. With this idea the people will free themselves!

During the Cold War I used to joke that instead of bombs we should drop translated copies of the Constitution, Declaration of Independence, the Federalist Papers, Friedman's "Free to Choose", and Ayn Rand's "Atlas Shrugged" on our enemies. Do that, that and the people, themselves, would rise up an overthrow their oppressors.

I also seriously joked that if we really wanted to win the Viet Nam War we should have parked a Navy aircraft carrier off the North Viet Nam coast and offered free passage with eventual citizenship to any North Viet Nam officer and his family who wanted it. ( Freedom is, indeed, a powerful motivator.)

(By the way...Please read my tag.)

Codevilla stumbles upon the reason I adopted my screen name Avoiding Sulla (click my name).

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. [italics in original, bolding mine.]

See, when general Sulla came with his army and sacked Rome, he ended the Social War with the heads of his personal rival Marius (it always was going to be one or the other who was killed) and his followers. Sure he retired from the dictatorship after 4 years, but the people's sense of pride in being Roman citizens had been quashed by all the social justice programs to which whole generations had grown accustomed, and newly granted citizens (Rome's equivalent to Mexicans) only knew.

So once Sulla died and his enemies no longer feared him (even in retirement he was feared except by one fool who died by Sulla's hands as Sulla died himself from consumption -- that guy KNEW vengeance!), those who wished to rule slowly came back all while having taken notes of who it was they had to target in return.

Among the watchers was the young Caesar. He had fled to exile and remained remarkably safe because he was held by pirates for ransom. It was he saw the pattern and eagerly awaited his chance to duplicate Marius' popularity along with Sulla's ruthlessness, and who nearly pulled it off except for that famous last republican gasp by Brutus and friends.

There is not a doubt in my mind that our ruling class has deliberately set up the coming conflict. Near everything that has transpired has followed the path that led to the death of the Roman Republic. The single difference that our founding fathers prevented that still is in place is that our sitting presidents, though CIC, are not themselves head of armies. Marius, Sulla, Pompey, Caesar, Antony and most of all Octavian -- all generals -- were in a new mold of patrician "republican" made possible by the cultural collapse that shared its hubris with the proletarians, a hubris that came with world domination. IOW -- anyone who continues to use the term RINO helps blur the fact about who are the enemies of our constitution and our Nation's ability to remain an entity independent of a world government.

This, developing a leadership that will help us retain the USA, is one of the tricky parts wherein we should hold to a standard that we may still want to keep. To do that, we may need to establish a form of justice to apply to those who try to force Alinsky rules like number 4 against us.

What we need to do is find ways to beat rule number 4 (“Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”) and simultaneously not undercut our objectives. They have no rules, so we use it against them. Discovering what and how that is may involve employing rule number 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”

I've a feeling NFHale already has a few in mind.

P.S. Wretchard has a more in-depth follow-up to Codevilla at As Time Goes By.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled

But the Ruling Class has been busy for the last 40 years creating its own demographic base.

By destroying the family, we now have 25% illegitimacy among whites, 50% among hispanics and 70% among blacks.

Unmarried mothers with children require the massive welfare state administered by the Ruling Class in order to be able to dispense with having to deal with a husband.

The unmarried mothers are on average among the least intelligent portion of the population and are in general lousy parents.

Their children are dumped into government schools (which in many cases are mere glorified babysitters) and also dumped in front of television sets and movie screens in order to occupy their time.

They are completely indoctrinated into the degeneracy, hate-mongering and victimology which is the philosophy that underlies the public educational system as well as the Hollyweird popular culture.

And by opening the borders wide and allowing tens of millions of socialist-inclined foreign nationals to pour in decade after decade, the Ruling Class is on the verge of having created a multi-pronged demographic base of support of racialist blocs, unmarried mothers and radical leftists that will give them a chokehold on America and eventually allow them to snuff out freedom entirely.

Amnesty is the Alamo. We have to close the border and begin to control the uncontrolled immigration. And reverse the massive subsidization of unmarried mothers and create incentives in favor of marriage and having children within marriage. We are on the precipice, and it ia a minute to midnight.

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