When Lasch's book came out, there was a great deal of excitement. The book, whether directly or indirectly, supported the claims of PJ Buchanan, and--later--Donald Trump. It was certainly part of the thinking behind Codevilla's essay of 2011.
The echoes rattle through the Epstein affair, 15 years after Codevilla's paper and 30+ years after PJB's Convention speech.
...What the Epstein files expose, above all, is the social and moral estrangement of American elites from the people they claim to govern.
Epstein was not merely a predator who gained access to power. He was a node within a closed world of wealth, influence, and immunity. The scandal is not that powerful people behaved badly in private—history shows many such examples—but that they did so with a confidence rooted in the belief they were insulated from the consequences of their behavior.
They moved through a transnational elite culture that had largely severed itself from ordinary moral constraints, legal accountability, and civic obligation. That culture did not merely tolerate Epstein but normalized him.
This echoes the point Christopher Lasch made decades ago, long before private islands and hedge-fund philanthropy became familiar symbols of elite excess. In his 1994 book “The Revolt of the Elites,” Lasch argued that the modern American ruling classes had stopped seeing themselves as stewards of a shared national project. Instead, they increasingly saw themselves as a mobile, globalized caste, educated in the same institutions, moving through the same cities, governed by the same tastes, and primarily accountable only to each other. Citizenship was seen as a minor inconvenience. Nationhood and patriotism were just sentimental relics from less enlightened times....
If you think--for one second--that the Trump Revolution will put a stop to the Cloud People's arrogance, immorality, and total corruption, you are wrong.
Merely turn to any 10 pages of the Old Testament......
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