Roughly half the country is living under an alien regime that means to harm us socially, politically, and economically.
By
its campaign and conduct of the 2020 election, the ruling class ceased
pretending to be part of a constitutional republic. By treating fellow
Americans as inferiors through word and deed, its members renounced their
common citizenship with us. Eschewing persuasion, they set about compelling
obedience to an openly manipulated election.
Thus
did they burn their bridges to the rest of America as surely as did Hernán
Cortéz when he burned the ships that had carried his troops to conquer the
Aztec empire. Henceforth, they must rule or ruin as the oligarchy they have become.
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.
Elsewhere,
I have discussed how inherently pregnant with peril the existence of such a
class was for constitutional life. Suffice it to say, by the beginning of the
Obama Administration in 2009, the rest of Americans had sensed that American
public life had ceased to revolve around the struggle between Democrats and
Republicans, and was more between those who lived by the ruling class’ privileges,
and those who did not—between the “ins” and the “outs,” between the ruling
class and what had been known in English history as the country class.
During
the Obama years, the American country class’ budding resistance spurred the
ruling class further to become conscious of itself, to increase its own
privileges, its cohesion, and above all its contempt for and demands on those
below them. Political correctness ceased to be bemusing for the country class
and came to be seen as the threat to freedom that it is. Corporate America
became indistinguishable from government in its demands for compliance. That is
why the 2016 presidential primaries and election revealed a substantial
anti-ruling class majority among Americans, though it was split between opposite
ends of the political spectrum.
In
short, during the Obama years the ruling class was becoming an oligarchy that
ruled by exercising the powers of government and of incumbency in corporations
as well as all manner of social institutions. Private institutions, allied with
government and inspired by government-supported universities, increasingly
exercised arbitrary powers.
But
by November 2016 this oligarchy had yet to articulate itself into something
capable of acting for a common purpose. That is why the 2016 election may prove
to have been the last more-or-less bona fide free election in America’s
history.
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.
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.
Because
this revolution involved subordinating truth itself to political power, it
effected negation of civilization itself.
This
is how it happened. It had been clear to that class that Trump was dangerous
only because he represented his “deplorable” supporters. The ruling class
sought to resist them by dispiriting them and discrediting them in their own
and others’ eyes. Demonizing Trump was the means by which they sought to do
this.
Arguably
the American country class’ principal mistake between 2016 and 2020 was to
suppose that the Left was actually after Trump, rather than set about crushing
them and killing the American regime.
When
those at the top of American communications’ food chain, the folks at the New
York Times, said openly that they would put truth aside during the noble fight
against Trumpism, when the news industry shamelessly purveyed obviously
incredible stories about Trump’s alleged Russia collusion; when they
shamelessly purveyed obviously unsourced rumor as truth; when they seconded
officials’ using classified information as a shield and sword against
conservatives; when corporations and even government agencies began to require
that employees attend brainwashing sessions; when communications
companies—especially Google, Facebook, and Twitter—began mathematically to
discriminate against conservative communications; when the Democrat-controlled
House of Representatives’ proposed legislation would have mandated voting by
mail and ballot harvesting—severing the link between any ballot and the voter’s
will or even existence—conservatives imagined that this was mere hardball
politics within a republican context. Not so.
When
the coronavirus hit, Americans did not realize how thoroughly their ruling
class had already jelled into an oligarchy with the intention above all to
crush them. Neither did they comprehend how assuredly it would not waste this
opportunity to do so. Tragically led astray by Donald Trump’s misplaced faith
in the objectivity of “the experts,” personified by Dr. Anthony Fauci,
conservatives were persuaded to respond to an epidemic with an
infection/fatality rate comparable to the average flu as if it were the
plague.
But
even plagues, once endemic, follow ineluctable courses through populations.
Thus, by following the ignorant promise of safety through masks, etc. did
conservatives at first agree to suspend face-to-face relationships. They
suffered to disarticulate social life even more than economic life, to put
aside one’s friends and God. They agreed to restrict their understanding of
things to what the mass media would allow them to hear. They did all of this
even as evidence mounted that the “experts” were nothing but agents of the
oligarchy.
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.
That
is how oligarchies work.
What may be done about
this is another story. But the story’s premise is that it must begin with the
realization that the conservative more-or-less half of American life is living
under an alien regime that means to continue harming us socially and morally
just as much as economically. Plainly, we find ourselves in a (mostly not yet
violent) state of war. The beginning of such safety as we may work out for
ourselves is to regard our rulers as they regard us.
About
Angelo Codevilla
Angelo M. Codevilla is a
senior fellow of the Claremont Institute, professor emeritus of international
relations at Boston University and the author of To Make And Keep
Peace (Hoover Institution Press, 2014).
https://amgreatness.com/2020/11/20/from-ruling-class-to-oligarchy/