Contempt of/for the Rulers

In my post on Bureaucracy, I mentioned briefly the fact that USA version 1 is increasingly ruled (as opposed to governed or managed) by a fixed “ruling class,” openly contemptuous of the rest of the country, and convinced of its own divine right to rule, despite the increasing evidence of its lack of competence. This post will be a slight expansion of that discussion, more focused on the social instability fomented by this class, rather than the bureaucratic misrule perpetrated by it.

One of the earliest elaborations of this was by Codevilla in 2010 (here, and later expanded into a book). I wholeheartedly encourage reading all of his original essay, in which he lays out the sordid history of the governmental response to the 2008 financial crisis, which led to usage of the term “ruling class” in America. It was clear to him that “Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.”

It has not always been so in America – there were always people who were wealthier and more powerful than others, but the upper class tended to be as culturally and ideologically diverse as the rest of America. Today, however, there is a monoculture among the elite that has little to do with competence, expertise or even wealth and education. Codevilla: “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. They vote Democrat more consistently than those who live on any of America’s Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter’s grievances.”

The ruling class also protects its own: Codevilla mentions the 1985 Laurence Tribe plagiarism incident at Harvard (admitted by Tribe here) and points out that Tribe himself (who nominally wrote a book in which a passage was clearly plagiarized), his assistant Ron Klain (who actually “wrote” the passage and did the plagiarism), and Elena Kagan (at the time, Dean of Harvard Law, who convened an investigative committee which cleared Tribe in a sealed report) all emerged unscathed from the incident: Tribe remains a progressive legal icon, Klain is now Chief of Staff for President Biden, and Kagan is on the Supreme Court. On the other hand, any members of academia who dare to go against the prevailing culture and narrative will be smeared as “fringe” regardless of the strength of their scholarship and the eminence of their record (Codevilla mentions Singer and Lindzen in climate science, but other examples abound: Curry in climate science, Bhattacharya and Kulldorff in epidemiology/public health, Fryer in economics, et al.).

Perhaps even more troubling (and here I am relying on personal observation) is that while previous generations of blue collar workers wanted to provide their children the education and support to (possibly, hopefully) move into the elite class, this appears largely not to be the case today. It is not merely that mobility into that class is seen to be unlikely, but rather that the elite is seen as so contemptuous, arrogant and dismissive toward the working class, that parents simply don’t want that for their children. Prosperity, yes, but not elite “ruling class” status. Unsurprisingly, this is seen by the elite as evidence of their (in this case, the rural working class) “anti-intellectualism” (as opposed to, say, a legitimate skepticism of a ruling class that despises them, and has a rather abysmal recent track record of “expertise”).

In the Bureaucracy post, I compiled a list of writers on this subject, which I reiterate here: Lasch, Kotkin, McWhorter, Stoller. I will also mention these additional (more recent) articles by Rod Dreher, Richard Fernandez, Martin Gurri, Victor Davis Hanson, and Mac Owens

As I wrote in my bio for this site, I feel this cultural gulf between the ruling class and the working class keenly, being rooted in both groups in various ways. One might hope (and I still do) that people like me might be able to help persuade members of both groups to feel a little less contempt for the other, but I can’t claim any success at this point. I will say that I think that the working class actually understands the ruling class far better than the reverse – the bubble around the ruling class seems to be significantly more impenetrable than the one around the working class. My guess is that this has to do with media dominance by the ruling class (or ruling class “wannabes”).

Why is this such a problem? As Codevilla says,

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

I am very much afraid that we are on a trajectory toward Civil War, unless something changes drastically. It appears to me that fundamentally the divide is being driven by the ruling class – if the ruling class were to stop fighting against the working class, the working class would be quite happy to go back to their homes and jobs; if the working class were to stop fighting against the ruling class, the ruling class would utterly remake (and likely ruin) the country.

If it actually comes to violence and Civil War, the non-regional nature of the divide (and the chaotic effect of the class split on law enforcement and military personnel) will likely make it more protracted and painful than the one in the 1860s (which, recall, was horrific itself). I suspect that the working class would eventually prevail, but have no desire to see it happen.

As in a few other posts, I have little advice to offer other than exhortation to vigilance and quiet, personal attempts to persuade without shouting. I have no idea whether it will work or not, but am fairly certain nothing else will.

In thinking about the attitude of our current ruling class, I am reminded of the poem by Bertolt Brecht (a Marxist, who knew whereof he spoke), “The Solution“:

After the uprising of the 17th June
The Secretary of the Writers Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the people
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?

Postscript: after this essay was written, this Victor Davis Hanson piece was published, making many of my same points (but much better written, of course). Read the whole thing.

Post-postscript: even later, this Glenn Reynolds article appeared (and, still later, this one and this one). Again, read the whole thing(s).