Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Just read it

There's a lot to digest, but this essay by Angelo Codevilla is the smartest (and depressing) thing I've read all year. I could pull dozens of quotes from the essay, but I'll just go with two. First, on the nature of the ruling class:
In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class's chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents.
As we've watched how Washington has handled the Hillary Clinton email scandal, all of Codevilla's assertions are proving correct. Then there's the nature of how opponents are dealt with:
The Declaration of Independence says that all men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” among which are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” These rights—codified in the Constitution’s Bill of Rights—are not civil rights that governments may define. The free exercise of religion, freedom of speech and assembly, keeping and bearing arms, freedom from warrantless searches, protection against double jeopardy and self-incrimination, trial by jury of one’s peers, etc., are natural rights that pertain to human beings as such. Securing them for Americans is what the United States is all about. But today’s U.S. Civil Rights Commission advocates truncating the foremost of these rights because, as it stated in a recent report, “Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon those civil rights.” The report explains why the rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights should not be permissible: “The phrases ‘religious liberty’ and ‘religious freedom’ will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, Christian supremacy, or any form of intolerance.”

Hillary Clinton’s attack on Trump supporters merely matched the ruling class’s current common sense. Why should government workers and all who wield the administrative state’s unaccountable powers not follow their leaders’ judgment, backed by the prestige press, about who are to be treated as citizens and who is to be handled as deplorable refuse? Hillary Clinton underlined once again how the ruling class regards us, and about what it has in store for us.
More, a lot more, at the link. Read it.

7 comments:

Bike Bubba said...

Yikes, and well said. I remember thinking that one big reason for the estate tax is that there are three pillars of power in this country: education, connections, and wealth. One bulwark against the predations of the educated and connected was the simple power of the checkbook--as Walter Williams notes, nothing opens the mind of a college president more than the sound of checkbooks snapping shut.

But with the estate tax, we've put a lot of that wealth in foundations and government, where the educated and connected help themselves to it. Yikes.

Gino said...

Electing Donald Trump would result in an administration far less predictable than any Democratic one. In fact, what Trump would or would not do, could or could not do, pales into insignificance next to the certainty of what any Democrat would do. That is what might elect Trump.

Bring it.

W.B. Picklesworth said...

It's astonishing how quickly this seems to have happened. I know that the process has been a slow one, dating back to the beginning of the Republic really. But it seems like America's fallen apart in my lifetime. I remember hoping that 9/11 would be a catalyst for renewal, but it was just the opposite.

Mr. D said...

But it seems like America's fallen apart in my lifetime. I remember hoping that 9/11 would be a catalyst for renewal, but it was just the opposite.

Never let an opportunity go to waste. The ruling class intends to rule. We've been on this trajectory, more or less, since Woodrow Wilson, with the only exceptions being Calvin Coolidge and, to a lesser extent, Ronald Reagan.

Bike Bubba said...

The thing that has never made sense to me is why anyone would bother. We have centuries of examples of what happens when we get an oligarchy/plutocracy, and the end point is misery--not just for the working class, but also for the rich. How many people from the working classes--Mayo, Ford, Edison, Stryker, etc.,--have made life immeasurably better for all, including the upper classes? How many Mayos and Edisons are working in obscurity in places like Venezuela because their rulers think they know how to manage capital better than the people?

Just makes no sense to me.

Mr. D said...

We have centuries of examples of what happens when we get an oligarchy/plutocracy, and the end point is misery--not just for the working class, but also for the rich. How many people from the working classes--Mayo, Ford, Edison, Stryker, etc.,--have made life immeasurably better for all, including the upper classes?

Right, but being an oligarch is a good gig until you get Ceaucescued.

Bike Bubba said...

Or, to use Mayo and Stryker as examples, until you get appendicitis or serious injuries in a car accident.

(and yes, the Stryker grandchildren are part of the oligarchy now, but Homer certainly wasn't)

Agreed that oligarchy appears to be a good gig, but I'd have figured that would-be oligarchs would infer from history what they could be missing. I am apparently wrong.

The scary thing is that there is an out, and a terrifying one--the budgetary realities in the U.S. are simply not going to bend to the will of the plutocrats. Apparently none in that category are terribly concerned about what happened to Roman plutocrats when the whole deal started crashing in, though. Doesn't say much, at least not much that's nice, about Ivy League education.