Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

Who is the ruling class

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[This is a long piece that gets pretty conservative even for my tastes, but explains somewhat why we keep getting the same stuff from both parties no matter who we elect. And the drastic view of what change will really look like if it ever appears. Found at www.aldaily.com]

America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla from the July 2010 – August 2010 issue

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one…

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind.

… No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it….

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers — by such as the Times’s Thomas Friedman and David Brooks — are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg’s notion that America is now ruled by a “newocracy”: a “new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization — including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational members of the meritocracy.” In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities’ priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to Palo Alto, California, to Boston’s Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate — just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative “nonprofit” and “philanthropic” sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government…

http://spectator.org/archives/…

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  2. Thanks for sharing this because it is a good idea to start to analyze this as a serious problem instead of ridicule it as if it’s a joke.  It’s not a joke; these ramblings are a serious problem and they are sucking in many vulnerable, frustrated and angry people.  Let’s start calling it out for what it is. This is what Glenn Beck is teaching on his show.  It draws people in by expressing all the reasons why regular folks are angry in our country (they do have every reason to be angry) and then twists and turns it into an idealogical attack on liberals and progressives.  It’s very clever in it’s presentation, especially to pull in people who were not previously involved, but now are, and happened to come along these preachings as they entered their journey to find out what is going on.  

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    p>The draw in is the initial points, the ones which Seascraper quotes in his post.  They are compelling talking points for many, including me, as I am obviously completely disappointed and outraged at what is going on in our country.  But then it sneakily encourages the reader/listener/observer to place blame where the blame does not belong.

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    p>For example:

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    Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.
    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. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence 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. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

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    p>Notice how they blame our education system for producing single-minded individuals with a common worldview, who then go on to corrupt and rule.  This is an attempt to persuade people not to trust the education system.  They are subtly suggesting here that it’s education that is causing groups of people to follow the same world view that is destroying our country.  This is a trick.  This will cause newly involved persons to distrust our education system and perhaps avoid it.  This only helps to give more power to the people who are currently in control.  

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    p>There are so many other places in Glen Beck’s teachings where words and situations are manipulated to drive the their single most important message, and that would be that Democrats/Progressives are a corrupt entity that are trying to take over the world.

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    p>We need to start looking into who is behind this message.  I think it is there that we will find the corrupt power that is ruining our country.

    • Interestingly enough, Angelo M. Codevilla is Professor Emeritus at our own Boston University — he retired in 2008:

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      Angelo Codevilla has been a U.S. Naval officer, an Assistant Professor at Grove City College and North Dakota State College, a U.S. Foreign Services Officer, and a member of President-Elect Reagan’s Transition Teams within the U.S. Department of State, in which position he dealt with Western Europe and with matters affecting the U.S. intelligence community. He served as a U.S. Senate staff member dealing with oversight of the U.S. intelligence services, and has held a professorial lecturer at Georgetown University and a Senior Research Fellow for the Hoover Institute at Stanford University. His books include No Victory, No Peace (2004), Between the Alps and a Hard Place (2000), The Character of Nations (1997), Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century (1992), While Others Build (1988), and Modern France (1974). He has also translated and edited The Prince by Machiavelli (1997). He taught at Boston University from 1995 until his retirement in 2008.

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      p>He is a Senior Fellow at the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank (now THERE’S an oxymoron) in Southern California. His piece is prominently featured on the Claremont website.

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      p>Interesting background for the author of an anti-intellectual screed like this. His resume lists the following positions:

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      • U.S. Naval Officer
      • Assistant Professor, Grove City College
      • Assistant Professor, North Dakota State College
      • U.S. Foreign Services Officer
      • Member, President-Elect Reagan’s Transition Team
      • U.S. Senate staff member
      • Professional Lecturer, Georgetown University
      • Senior Research Fellow, Hoover Institute
      • Professor, Boston University

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      p>Hmmm … looks like (a) a government bureaucrat, (b) an academic, (c) a pointy-headed intellectual, and (d) a member of the ruling class.

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      p>liveandletlive wrote:

      We need to start looking into who is behind this message.  I think it is there that we will find the corrupt power that is ruining our country.

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      p>Indeed, particularly in the context of President Obama’s rousing “barn-burner” of yesterday.

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      p>I think the right wing is terrified. I think they are pandering to the most base instincts of an equally-terrified demographic — terrified because they have been terrorized by right-wing hate-mongering.

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      p>I think the right wing is attempting to push all the old hate-buttons, and I think we are seeing just the beginning.

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      p>Let’s see — “Effete anti-intellectual snobs” worked for Spiro Agnew in 1969, apparently the right wing thinks it will work for the GOP today.

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      p>On October 19, 1969, Spiro Agnew told an audience of wealthy Republicans:

      Education is being redefined at the demand of the uneducated to suit the ideas of the uneducated. The student now goes to college to proclaim rather than to learn. The lessons of the past are ignored and obliterated in a contemporary antagonism known as ‘The Generation Gap.’ A spirit of national masochism prevails, encouraged by an effete core of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals.

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      p>Sound familiar?

      • OK in a basic sense I can argue that the  megastate with its huge amount of money has become the place to make a fortune be being pals (or more) with government appointees. You can have a business but the best thing is to get it legislated that everybody in the USA has to buy your product.

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        p>There is a little too much “it all ties together” to me in this piece but certainly in my field of art the government is the major player, and has picked board members at the private philanthropic level whose tastes are in line with that of the economic elite at the expense of the middle class (even while I admit that nobody is really proud of the things our society has created solely on the middle class model).

    • OK I didn’t read that part the way you did, but I think your reading is reasonable… there are certain connections between morality and the ground rules of the modern economy that I suspect exist, but I thought they were poorly stated in this piece.

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      p>Even so it’s possible to me that we have a megastate that has grown away from providing the things of life, or goods and services, to placing a premium on the dealing and mongering of those goods and services.

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      p>So I think there may be a connection between working primarily to produce something and biologically producing something such as a child. So a society that values children as something good and necessary, and has laws that promote children, for instance by rules about adultery, homosexuality etc. that seem awfully Christian.

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      p>In the same way things that stand in the way of people working, such as drugs, also have to be morally condemned, simply because they make people stop working.

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      p>So if you see a state educational system which goes easy on drugs and gays you might see it as a threat to society which depends on people producing children and other forms of wealth.  

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