Angelo M. Codevilla on America's Ruling Class

By John Ballard

[Update below...]

This weekend's reading assignment is America's Ruling Class -- and the Perils of Revolution in American Spectator. Thanks to Memeorandum for bringing this piece to our attention. Only one commentary link so far, and comments there make think it may be a ton of lipstick, but I'm holding judgment until I read for myself.

Again, no, I haven't read it yet. As I write it is printing out for me to read later, some fourteen thousand words plus. Much too long to sit here and digest at the computer monitor. If anyone else reads feel free to leave a comment and we can discuss it. I'll do a followup later if the spirit moves me.

Angelo M. Codevilla, a professor of international relations at Boston University, a fellow of the Claremont Institute, and a senior editor of The American Spectator, was a Foreign Service officer and served on the staff of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee between 1977 and 1985. He was the principal author of the 1980 presidential transition report on intelligence. He is the author of The Character of Nations: How Politics Makes and Breaks Prosperity, Family, and Civility.

The Ruling Class

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. 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.

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[A few hours later...]

I should have waited. This is a wasted post, along with several pages of ink used to print it out. I'm reminded of an exchange years ago told by a sales rep for a meat company.

Chicken farmer: "You know what that white stuff is in chicken shit?

Sales rep: "No, I never thought about it. What it is?"

Chicken farmer: "That's chicken shit, too."

By the end of the first page I counted half a dozen instances of spin preparing the reader to swallow what followed. Clearly the writer was breaking out more than a broad brush, a journalistic equivalent to a fire hose. I could hear Beck in the background railing about Progressives.

By the end of the second page it became fourteen
pages of prose not unlike that which can be heard any time from
conservative talk media. Somewhat turgid. Reading it is like
driving in the rain with no windshield wipers. Turns out to be lipstick after all in a pathetic effort to legitimize the Tea Party.

Sorry to have furnished the links. I will do  better next time after due diligence. Steve and Joyner are too polite.