Talk of Revolution, Continued in a Very Important Essay

A while back, Grim observed that certain parties in Government were almost literally attacking the taxpayers/proletariat. Not physically, of course--but in a number of other ways: monetarily, culturally, and "scientifically". IIRC (I can't find the post quickly), Grim postulated that the aggressor(s) were, de facto, the Party Of Government.

That nomenclature was re-worked to "Political Class"--or more precisely, the "Ruling Class."

Now Prof. Codevilla writes an essay, probably one of the more important ones of the decade. Codevilla lays out, in some detail, the cultural/scientific/monetary aggression against the populace undertaken by the Progressives: the Ruling Class.

It is, in fact, a war against "the Country Class"--the proletariat.

Some excerpts follow.

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.

...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."

There follows a description of said "ruling class," which posits that 'the ruling class' happens to be Democrat politicians--and not merely by virtue of its current majority-status in Congress, nor due to its occupation of the White House. That identification: "Democrats=Ruling Class" is operative because the Republican Party has no real followers. (Reince Priebus, call your office!!)

However, the authors ALSO posit that the Democrat Party's "ruling class" status stands on very poor soil, indeed; and they have numbers which would support their contention.

The authors define the Ruling Class this way:

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.

Doesn't sound particularly American, does it?

And they are "Scientifically Inclined"--mostly because "Science" tells them that there are superiors--namely, themselves...

...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.

Thus, the Progressives!

Adorno, McCloskey, Feuerbach, and others are justifiably indicted.

The objective?

...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.

Gee. I hadn't noticed!

What, prithee, is the natural result of their power-lust?

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.

Tax carbon, subsidize ethanol, favor Big Pharma and Big Banks...

How can the Ruling Class help you? Glad you asked!!

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.

ChooChoos, water restrictions for outlying cities, gasoline taxes, "Fat-tracking" (yup--that's in ObamaCare, too), and of course, Death Panels.

See if this sounds familiar:

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.

And the execrable Oliver Wendell Holmes gets a mention. After you read this graf, you'll understand why he is worshipped by the Ruling Class:

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."

(An outcome which would have pleased Holmes, who was perfectly happy with mutilation of 'the less fit.')

Codevilla also identifies the Enemy of the Ruling Class.

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.

And to DEFEND itself--with arms, if necessary--which is the reason for the Rulers' consternation with the Second Amendment and with people who just keep buying ammo...

...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.

I would quibble here that while the family is a singularly potent block to The Ruling Class, the more important one is the Church. Codevilla obliquely gives the Church its due, of course, citing standard Catholic/Christian beliefs which interfere with the Class's projects. However, later in the essay, he gives the Church its due regards.

And yes, there's an indictment of the War Party subsidiary of the Ruling Class, thank God!

...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."

And another brilliant reduction here:

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.

Dead-on.

Who is the victim of the Ruling Class? The Country Class.

...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.

One notes, for example, the near-180-degree oppositional philosophies of the Professional Police Chiefs' gang vs. the 'cops on the street' in regards the Second Amendment.

Codevilla now goes into a lengthy description of the Country Class' characteristics which prominently features religious (not exclusively Christian) tendencies and beliefs.

And then he simply rips the Republicans, noting that they haven't really held to principles since the Civil War.

Concluding,

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.

Indeed.