Codevilla Points the Finger

Angelo Codevilla set the alarm bells ringing a decade ago (before President Trump) and hasn't stopped since.  Here he lays out the current scene.

...For four decades beginning in the mid-1960s, a class of rulers grew in America. They became ever more uniform socially and intellectually, ever more opposed to the rest of Americans, and ever more powerful. This happened as government took upon itself the tasks of eliminating poverty and harmonizing the races, and as it controlled ever greater shares of the national income. 

Increasingly, their powers were based on claims of expertise coming from the universities. These underwent a fourfold increase in size (from 9 percent of Americans with four-year degrees in 1965 to 36 percent in 2015). Their connection with government conferred both wealth and additional prestige. Few paid attention to President Eisenhower’s warning about the connection between government and academic elites....

Some of those 'elites' don't have too much in terms of edju-mi-cayshun, but talked their way into the in-crowd; others attempted to blog their way in.  Local examples are not hard to find--they're the ones who reverted to form after very rewarding "conversion" on the radio (ex-newspaper Lefty) or who are sidelined and increasingly-peevish blogger-left-behind types.

...Donald Trump’s surprising victory proved to be the catalyst for this oligarchy to articulate itself into something that was able to transcend our constitutional republic altogether, to dispense with and even to penalize the habits and institutions that had held it together. Ours is now a socio-political system wholly different from that constitutional republic of the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. It is mandating a way of life that few in America could have imagined....

Yes, indeed.  There are plenty of examples, but California, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Michigan are prominent.  (No links.  If you don't know about them, you're hopeless.)

...It is unlikely that in November 2016 the Democratic Party’s leaders who continued to blame “the Russians” for Hillary Clinton’s defeat meant more than to salve a bit their defeat. They probably did not mean for their “resistance” to be more than a traditional mobilization of defeated forces. But the “resistance” took on a life of its own, fed from on high by such as the CIA’s John Brennan and FBI’s James Comey, and the host of their politicized subordinates, as well as from below by violent “intersectional” groups like Antifa and Black Lives Matter. 

This resistance was powerfully sustained in the middle by countless corporate executives, government employees, editors, and reporters. The convergence of so many like-minded people quickly and decisively transmuted a political tactic into the replacement of a republic with an oligarchy. It replaced government by consent with rule by force. ...

That "rule by force" is--so far--only a regulatory 'rule.'  Of course, that can change quickly.

...And then Election Night. As predicted, election officials in places controlled by the Left stopped counting until it was clear how many ballots it would take for Trump to be defeated. The requisite number came, filled out by no one knows who. And then . . . who wouldn’t have predicted it? The call came from all of society’s commanding heights: Trump’s defeat had been declared. By whom? By the folks on these varied heights—certainly not by the authorities designated by the Constitution to decide who wins and loses. 

But the more instances of fraud the Trump campaign sought to investigate, the louder and from more sources sounded the judgment that there was nothing to investigate. It had been decided. You peons shut up and obey....

It is more and more evident that Trump was several steps ahead of their game on this election thing.  He laid a trap and sprung it; the howling that Codevilla describes above is the howling of a bear caught in that trap.  It's still very dangerous (and it has friends in foreign places) but .......as the "nooz" is always saying, "The Walls Are Closing In."