GSâïž ihatediscus2
? NEXT: AFTERNOON THREAD @ 14:00 PST ?
âȘ Roughly half the country is living under an alien regime that means to do harm to 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 Hernån 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 Eisenhowerâs 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 classâ privileges, and those who did notâbetween the âinsâ and the âouts,â between the ruling class and what had been known in English history as the country class.
During the Obama years, the American country classâ 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 Americaâs history.
Donald Trumpâs 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 Partyâs leaders who continued to blame âthe Russiansâ for Hillary Clintonâs defeat meant more than to salve a bit their defeat. They probably did not mean for their âresistanceâ to be more than a traditional mobilization of defeated forces. But the âresistanceâ took on a life of its own, fed from on high by such as the CIAâs John Brennan and FBIâs James Comey, and the host of their politicized subordinates, as well as from below by violent âintersectionalâ 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 âdeplorableâ supporters. The ruling class sought to resist them by dispiriting them and discrediting them in their own and othersâ eyes. Demonizing Trump was the means by which they sought to do this.
Arguably the American country classâ 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 communicationsâ 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 Trumpâs alleged Russia collusion; when they shamelessly purveyed obviously unsourced rumor as truth; when they seconded officialsâ 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 companiesâespecially Google, Facebook, and Twitterâbegan mathematically to discriminate against conservative communications; when the Democrat-controlled House of Representativesâ proposed legislation would have mandated voting by mail and ballot harvestingâsevering the link between any ballot and the voterâs will or even existenceâconservatives 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 Trumpâs misplaced faith in the objectivity of âthe experts,â 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 oneâs 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 âexpertsâ 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 wouldnât have predicted it? The call came from all of societyâs commanding heights: Trumpâs defeat had been declared. By whom? By the folks on these varied heightsâcertainly 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 storyâs 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.âȘ
