Posted on 10/08/2021 4:17:56 AM PDT by Kaslin
In a 2010 essay for The American Spectator, the late, great intellectual Angelo Codevilla wrote a rare essay that was, in retrospect, so prescient as to be outright eerie. Titled "America's Ruling Class" and deploying "class"-based phraseology historically more at home in some corners of the political left than on the postwar political right, Codevilla set his sights squarely on his eponymous target. "Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits," he wrote. "Whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats."
Even more eerily prescient was Codevilla's description of what motivates the ruling class. "Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself," he wrote. "While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof."
Is there a single sober-minded observer of our decrepit politics, in 2021, who does not read these words and immediately recognize that this is what is happening -- indeed, what has been happening -- in these United States?
Beginning with the 2008 bailouts, a parochial uniparty establishment -- geographically and (nominally) politically diverse, but all sculpted by elite K-12 and higher education institutions to hold uniformly "correct" beliefs -- deemed it necessary to toss moral hazard into the wind and lavish taxpayer money upon the failing Wall Street titans. As for elites' message to the myriad struggling homeowners whose dreams were shattered by Fannie and Freddie, Clinton-era tropes about the relentless pursuit of "affordable housing" and simple lucre-seeking depravity: "Drop dead."
The ruling class only tightened its grip in the ensuing years after the 2008 bailouts and the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 2009 nadir. Corporate profits soon skyrocketed, and the stock market began a prolonged, historically record-breaking ascent. But economic inequality worsened. Elites of both parties further doubled down on "free trade" and extensive economic entangling with a Chinese Communist Party regime hellbent on hollowing out the American industrial heartland and ultimately dedicated to America's national implosion.
Republicans, who by dint of decades-long dripping academia/media disdain for their party and their voter base should have already realized they were now the party of blue-collar America, responded by nominating for the presidency a well-coiffed private equity plutocrat in Mitt Romney. The 2012 GOP presidential nominee was well-intentioned in most respects and admirably hawkish on immigration and national sovereignty matters, but that did not prevent the utterance of Romney's infamous "47% gaffe" -- a proverbial middle finger to the already ailing American heartland if there ever were one. President Barack Obama, ruling class talisman, cruised to reelection.
The American people, and especially the aggrieved and subjugated "deplorables," responded in 2016 by electing to the presidency a man, in Donald Trump, who spoke their language and vowed to fight for them against the uniparty ruling class regime. The ruling class responded by launching an unprecedented, four-year-long campaign against the president, from deep state malfeasance to galling and gratuitous media coverage to coordinated Big Tech censorship (most egregiously, the quashed New York Post Hunter Biden laptop story) to ubiquitous suppression of conservative and pro-Trump viewpoints in the American academy under the risible guise of "microaggressions" and "safe spaces." Elites to the half of America that voted for a duly elected president of the United States: "Drop dead."
The era of COVID-19, a virus with a more than 99% recovery rate, has only accentuated and exacerbated this divide. Elites have latched onto Rahm Emanuel's famous line about never letting a "serious crisis go to waste" and used it to seize previously unimagined power at all levels of governance. The purpose of this power, from elected officials such as President Joe Biden to career bureaucrats such as Dr. Anthony Fauci to lowly foot soldiers such as pro-critical race theory teachers' unions, is exactly what Codevilla said it was 11 years ago: "power for itself" -- power tout court. In the era of COVID, the "biomedical security state," to borrow the term recently popularized anew by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, is the most convenient means of scratching the ruling class' totalitarian itch and dividing the citizenry into de facto warring tribes.
The silver lining is that on every major issue, from COVID hysteria to critical race theory indoctrination to the Afghanistan withdrawal debacle, the rottenness of the American ruling class has been exposed. The ruling class senses this, and it will respond in the short term by doubling down yet again. But such a tactic is not sustainable. The inflection point, and the time for the deplorables to unite against ruling class tyranny, is right now.
Bkmk
Lots of calls to action lately. Not much in the way of execution. Why do we wait until elections to stand up politicians for office to represent us when we’re seeing that representation is a hollowed out tree stump?
Are they shooting a new Addams Family movie?
Before covid, I think most of us assumed the elites were confined to a small ultra-rich cabal, the federal bureaucracy and academia. Formidable to be sure, but beatable. I think the biggest post-covid shock is the realization that it extends to the leadership of corporate America. Their eagerness to accept and enforce Biden’s vaccine mandates without question is a huge problem for us. We are going to need to “flip” a few big players to our side if we are going to have any hope of ousting the elitists.
Has anyone been able to find any info on how Mr. Codevilla died?
I’ve seen drunk driver hit him while he was walking...
Another article said tragic accident...
Car accident, but no details...
What the heck?!
The new Addams Family movie, if it’s like that photo, could be called, “Young Lurch and his Boyfriend”.
The rejection of the government and its institutions is something that most of us have not experienced before. It's "new." Not in history, but to us.
We used to look to the government and other trusted institutions (medicine, anyone?) for protection. Now the government, education, many institutions have turned against what is truthful, right and good.
I haven't seen calls to action - a few suggestions about what might work for the public to reclaim its rightful power, what might work to put the brakes on globalism. Some obvious suggestions to deal with government deliberate failures such as opening the border.
The politicians, even STRONG ones, have not figured out how to stop the bureaucratic class that actually rules. The elected class is puppet actors, chosen for popularity, pushed by the media arm or the ruling class, and not for ability. No radical solution has been advanced. Last person to try that was Barry Goldwater.
May sound odd, but I'm of a mind that "more failure" will be a good thing in the long run. Our government and our institutions are incompetent in some ways, and malfeasant/deliberate in others. They do not mean to do us well in a human sense - they mean to do us well as chattel.
As long as things are comfortable, people will settle for less than the radical changes it will take to "reset," toward a country more in line with what the Declaration of Independence stands for.
The Addams Family?
I think you missed the purpose and content of the piece. Its value is to understand the nature, opportunities, and hazards of the landscape we are about to traverse and campaign on.
That landscape is normal Americans' perception of the people in the class of the Bureaucratic Blob. Normal Americans are now understanding the malign selfishness and emptiness of the Blob--which are its key weaknesses. The message is about the opportunity created by the Americans' growing awareness of the Blob Class.
Sun Tzu spoke continually about "knowing the terrain" being one of the two crucial elements to victory. The other is "knowing the strategy of your adversary." Aided by the social observations he mentions from Angelo Codevilla, we have the basis of a political, civil, rhetorical, and (God forbid) physical campaign to take our country back. It will take place within elections, but mostly outside of them in civil demonstrations like the parents' revolt against the empty-headed Communists who run their local public schools.
One of the keys to redeeming our culture is for a President and Congress to abolish the US Department of Education--education not being an area of Federal authority under the USC.
When kids had to attend classes online and parents saw what their kids were being taught, the Blob's mask dropped. I don't think the Blob even understood how far off from the American people their teachings and the their culture had become. One result is that private schools are bursting at the seams, and more are being founded daily. Any school with "classical" in its description is seeing enrollment double or more annually.
Angelo Codevilla — killed by a drunk driverAngelo Codevilla — killed by a drunk driver
So long as there are open primaries, this is the only reason to belong to a political party. imo
If you were paying attention pre-Covid you would have noticed the anti-white racism of the corporate elites has been in place for decades.
They have always wanted a world for a very small group of elites that stomped on _everyone_ else.
They have always hated a strong middle class that shared their power.
Question professor. Which one of them/these/those/unbinaries is getting testosterone treatment? Asking for a friend.
We shall see.
This is the first I’ve heard that Angelo Codevilla is gone. That is awful news!
NYT wrote “…died on Sept. 20 in Tracy, Calif. He was 78.
His son David said the cause was a car accident, which occurred while Dr. Codevilla was returning to his vineyard near Sacramento after a medical appointment on the campus of Stanford University.?”
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