Upon getting home and checking the news, it turns out that this article is creating quite a buzz in the conservative blogosphere.
The article is entitled America's Ruling Class - And the Perils of Revolution by Angelo Codevilla.
I won't lie to you, it is a long article. But it is one of the most cogent and important articles I have read in years. You need to carve out a chunk of time to click on the link I have provided, and read this article. I will post just the highlighted excerpts from the article that serve as breaks in the text to give you an idea of the power of Codevilla's words:
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson
For the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class...Please, please take the time to read and take in this article. It is well worth your time.
Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind...
The American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008...
Like a fraternity, this [ruling] class requires above all comity - being in with the right people, giving the required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs...
[Woodrow] Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society...
The Progressives found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America...
By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the arbiter of wealth and poverty...
The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class...
Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen...
At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what..?
The country class view is that government owes to it people equal treatment rather than action to correct any perceived imbalance or grievance...
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was, and never will be." -Thomas Jefferson
4 comments:
The contents of the article can be connected to your video clip of Representative Phil Hare. In the film Hare tows the line about caring about people and even says he is "the dreamer".
"Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth." Gangs and corporations do the same thing.
George
Oliver Wendell Holmes argued that presidents, Congresses, and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen...
Yet the Founders foresaw even that problem, and added a way to amend the Constitution. True leaders would present their arguments and push for ratification, rather than shop for an activist judge.
This statement stood out to me.
As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.
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