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Monday, July 26, 2010
Bastions And Batteries: A Coda To Codevilla
Thank you, Gentle Reader, for being patient while your Curmudgeon took a few days to rest, reorient, and rearm. It was a necessary retreat to silence in a life normally too full of words, in which intervals suitable for quiet reflection have become ever scarcer. But you didn't come here this fine July morning to read an old crank's apologia pro sua persona, so on to the main event.
This compendious article by American Spectator's Angelo M. Codevilla has already attracted quite a bit of attention in the DextroSphere. Though none of its insights are original -- indeed, much of it is prefigured in Thomas Sowell's 1995 The Vision Of The Anointed -- it's a highly useful condensation of all the key aspects of contemporary American politics and the influences that drive it. Perhaps the most useful thing about it is that it puts forward a conclusion that, though well supported by the evidence, few of us in the Right have been willing to accept:
Even to speak plainly of a "ruling class" has been difficult for American conservatives and libertarians...until now; impermeable classes are anathema to the American mind. The reign of the Obamunists, so plainly marked by disdain for the opinions and preferences of the common run of Americans, has made it not merely possible but obligatory. But beyond that, the marked attitudinal cleavage between the Ruling Class and common Americans -- the elite's intra-class acceptance and admission of its low regard for the rest of us -- compels us to abandon a hope stoutly maintained for many decades: that they who hold high office are as well-intentioned as any of us, merely misguided about what works and what doesn't.
They are not well-intentioned; they are villains, would-be dictators and slavemasters.
Their techno-fascist[1] policies are not wrong...by their lights.
The media figures who promote, support, and defend them are aware of their villainy, share their attitudes toward common Americans, and aspire to join them in the corridors of power.
It is no longer possible, even for the blindest and most wishful among us, to believe otherwise.
Codevilla makes several observations about the formative influences that produced our Ruling Class. In particular, he notes that the great majority of them are graduates of elite Ivy League universities. An aspirant to high office who doesn't sport an ivy-covered diploma has become an extraordinary rarity. But we have known for quite some time that the road to political power passes through the Ivies, especially such training centers for techno-fascists as Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. Such schools, as ridiculous as the "educations" they offer have become, are a principal Ruling Class bastion.
America's universities in general are a bastion of the "progressive," corporate-social-fascist Left. The Ivies are merely the pinnacle of the pyramid; schools outside the hallowed seven all strive to be called "the Harvard of the Midwest," or something of that sort. Every university faculty, and the faculties of many humbler colleges and technical institutes, has been taken over by the Ruling Class. That fruit of the "long march through the institutions"[2] has largely made it possible for our elitists to pre-screen and pick their successors.
Upon graduation from his selected Ivy, an aspirant to Ruling Class inclusion, whom we shall call Smith, faces three questions of direction:
- Where shall I live?
- At what shall I work?
- With whom shall I socialize?
The correct answers are:
- In a large coastal city, preferably New York or Washington, D.C.
- In a government bureaucracy, at a non-profit organization closely coupled to government and public-policy formation, or in the left-wing media.
- Like-minded persons with similar credentials and aspirations.
The passing score on this quiz is 100%; there's no partial credit.
Here we see more bastions of the techno-fascist Ruling Class. You won't see a credible candidate for national office emerge from a startup technology company in Pocatello, Idaho or a "smokestack" business in Peoria, Illinois. Commercial activity's demands for customer orientation, sustained effort, and consistent results would rasp away his veneer of superior wisdom. Nor will he spend his free time bowling with the boys from the local Pontiac dealership, nor playing bocce with other parishioners of Our Lady of the Pines. Those are contaminated zones, where he's too likely to have his pretensions laughed away by more sensible Americans.
However, after several years of immersion in the "right" environments and among the "right" sort of people, his attitudes will be set firmly enough to allow him to present himself to the larger public: shake a few hands, emit a few high-sounding phrases, and posture as a "reformer." He'll have established his bona fides among those whose approval and support he must have to get elected or appointed to a high office. He'll have absorbed from his older confreres the cunning and tactics required to have a shot at deceiving the hoi polloi.
He'll know "us" from "them," and he'll know whose interests are conformant with his desire for prestige and power.
The Ruling Class's bastions are both offensive and defensive in nature. The offensive aspect is fairly plain: persons in government, in the Old Media, and in the large non-profit foundations wield immense power, with which they've done great damage to the fortunes and public images of those they dislike. The defensive aspect is a bit subtler; it largely involves the suppression of damaging information -- damaging to the Ruling Class, that is -- and misdirection of the attention of persons outside the circles of power and influence.
Anyone who's been paying attention to the behavior of the Old Media as the Obamunist scandals have piled up will already understand the importance of suppression to the Ruling Class's cause. For a newspaper to lionize the late Robert Byrd of West Virginia, without a single mention of his years as a high official in the Ku Klux Klan, is routine. The same treatment is applied without alteration to the life of Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts: only the "good parts" appeared in the obituaries of the "liberal lion of the Senate." The contrast such treatment makes with the treatment of conservative figures in and out of politics, including Ronald Reagan, Tom Delay, Rick Santorum, Mother Teresa, and Pope John Paul II, speaks more eloquently of Old Media "journalists'" alignments and tactical priorities than any other aspect of their reportage.
Among Old Media pundits and editorialists, we see a more blatant form of the Old Media's alignment. There's hardly a conservative viewpoint to be found in the pages of any regional daily. When the New York Times replaced William Safire, one of the most eloquent conservative voices of his day, with center-left David Brooks, it became clear that there would be no further thought spared for those who diverge from the Times's techno-fascist preferences in American politics. The same pattern holds true for every broadcast television network. Sincerely felt, clearly expressed conservative views are denied to those who get their commentary from the Old Media.
The New Media of talk radio and the Internet are "the enemy" to the mandarins of the Old. They spare neither effort nor expense in their delegitimizations of that enemy. FOX News, perhaps the most important development in unidirectional journalism in the past century, comes in for unceasing abuse -- a campaign that has even enlisted persons in the Obama White House. Conservative Internet news organs are treated as inherently illegitimate even when they're the source of verifiable facts reported nowhere else. The Drudge Report, one of the best known rightist news sources on the Web, is endlessly reviled by Old Media figures, specifically because of the damage its factual reportage did to Bill Clinton. As for the DextroSphere, comment is hardly required.
In the recent, well publicized JournoList scandal, we have several examples of Ruling Class offensive tactics, most notably the coordinated efforts of the membership to smear prominent conservatives as racists and to deride GOP vice-presidential candidate Sarah Heath Palin. In the concurrent NAACP / Shirley Sherrod scandal, the Old Media have been tireless in defensively averting attention from the NAACP members' blase acceptance of Miss Sherrod's admission that she had relegated a white farmer to lesser status, deserving of lesser help than a black petitioner. The points made here are simple ones, but you may be sure that they'll receive no respect from the Ezra Kleins, the Spencer Ackermans, the Keith Olbermanns, the David Gregories and the James Wolcotts of the Old Media bastion. It's critical that they conserve their bandwidth for vilifications of conservatives as racists.
But the above is essentially prefatory. The core question is what freedom-minded Americans ought to do about it.
Your Curmudgeon, a military thinker by education and long habit, regards the key to effective counter-action as getting our attitude right. If we persist in regarding our Ruling Class as "well-intentioned but misguided or misinformed," we will continue to emphasize persuasion. This amounts to self-defeat via self-deception, for your enemy cannot be persuaded. He must be defeated, which requires an entirely different mindset.
Once the enemy has been identified, the effective commander looks for his weak points. He pits his offensive forces against those points; he opposes defensive, holding-action forces to the enemy's strengths. Where his offensive forces penetrate, he reinforces his attack; where they fail, he withdraws and seeks other uses for them. Where his defensive forces fail to hold, he must regretfully abandon the target, if only to conserve his powers for more defensible positions.
Political combat isn't a perfect analogue to warfare, but it possesses enough parallels to it to help us illuminate what's good and bad about conservatives' strategy and tactics.
What are the Ruling Class's weak points? Are they being addressed adequately? On those fronts where we're making inroads, do we have a way to reinforce the attack -- to sharpen the spear as it penetrates, and do even more damage? On those fronts where we've been fighting a holding action, which ones have proved indefensible in practice? Ought we to abandon them and redirect their defenders to more useful sectors?
Codevilla opines thus:
The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all stupid. The country class [i.e., the freedom-minded, conservatively inclined private citizenry] is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat, while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain....
Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist, or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own. The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoral success are obliged to follow them.
This could be summarized as attack on principle. The Ruling Class's principle, of course, is that "we know best." If that principle is the Ruling Class's weak point -- and we have reason to believe that principles have moved to the forefront of our political discourse -- then this is the correct focus. But a principle is inherently a premise. One cannot argue premises; one can only address the consequences that have flowed from them. That makes it imperative that the delegitimization of the Ruling Class be founded on what their rule has done and is doing to America, its economy, its social cohesion, and its standing in the world.
One who really possesses "superior intellect and morality" would display certain behaviors in practice. He would admit to his limitations and his areas of ignorance. He would concede his failures and strive to correct his mistakes. He would recoil from policy directions that have caused or are causing harm to the innocent. Above all, he would be morally humble. That is, he would not preen himself on his "morality" or his "compassion;" he would allow his deeds to speak for themselves.
The destruction of the Ruling Class's claim to power must proceed from that sort of analysis. Only persons already aligned with the principles of freedom would accept that our elite is ipso facto illegitimate on principle. They who reflexively support the Ruling Class must be regarded as currently unreachable, to be persuaded only by defeat and the emergence of an alternative with superior performance.
It remains true that "you can't beat something with nothing." Thus, the delegitimization of the Ruling Class cannot be the sole end of the freedom movement. The "alternative with superior performance" must be visible from the beginning of our attack.
The freedom-minded's principle, which is innately opposed to that of the Ruling Class, is that "we have a right to be left alone." The opposition from what Codevilla calls the "country class," which is friendly to American conservatism though not necessarily explicit about it, proceeds from that principle without articulating it. The lack of articulation is our weak point, nor may we abandon it as indefensible.
Freedom has a stirring sort of sound. No one ever uses "Slavery!" as a slogan with which to rally the troops; you won't see it on any placards or protest banners. But freedom is an abstraction; worse, it's a negation. Freedom is what you have when coercion, constraint, and intimidation have been excluded from your decision-making.
To argue for freedom, one must be prepared to discuss its record in practice, and how it compares to the record of the techno-fascist Ruling Class. As Dostoyevsky has told us, men will swiftly and happily sacrifice freedom for a credible promise of security and comfort. The one thing the freedom advocate cannot do is promise. He can point to Constitutional constraints on the State and guarantees of individuals' rights at every opportunity. He can cite the birth certificate of the nation:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with inherent and inalienable rights; that among these, are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
...as often and as passionately as he likes. Yet he must nevertheless be ready for the rejoinders: "But what about my subsidies? What about my income tax deductions? What if I can't afford to send my children to college? What if I fall into a well and can't afford medical care?"
We cannot promise a particular outcome. We can -- indeed, we must -- admit that in a free society, there will be some who suffer. There will be some whose troubles are not of their own making. Some of these will "fall through the cracks." As David Bergland likes to put it, "Utopia is not one of the options."
Such admissions are part of what we must steel ourselves to doing. Similarly, we must be ready with the record of freedom, and how it compares to the Ruling Class's record. We must be relentless about spotlighting the promises the elite have made, and how they've compared to what was actually delivered.
The last and most terrible of all considerations is what we would have to do if all our peaceable efforts were to fail. The Ruling Class will maintain its grip on power by whatever means are available to it. Already, Democrats have succeeded in stealing governorships (Washington) and positions in the United States Senate (Minnesota and Missouri). Developments such as the Secretary of State Project are already apace throughout the country. These, combined with other methods of vote fraud and voter intimidation, could turn Barack Hussein Obama into a replay of Robert Mugabe or Hugo Chavez. Inasmuch as Boards of Election all over America are preponderantly staffed by Democrats, and the Left has no moral scruple that would prevent it from stealing any election it could steal, this is a possibility we must address.
If things turn out too badly, we might have to lock and load.
The protection of our right to our weapons is the most important of all our near-term undertakings. Fortunately, recent Supreme Court decisions appear to have reinforced this control on the actions of the State, but the right must be exercised to be meaningful. Just as one must know whence the threat approaches, one must be prepared to meet it with all the force one can command. If our political masters are so desirous of retaining their power and prestige that they invalidate our elections, whether by fraud or by decree, we must be prepared to march, and bleed, and die.
If confronted by that requirement, many vocally ardent freedom advocates will accept fetters and subjugation in preference.
It's time to hear your thoughts, Gentle Readers.
NOTES:
1. A techno-fascist is one who holds that the regimentation of a human society is both possible and efficient, given the right knowledge and tools in the right hands. Despite the differences in rationale, the outcome is indistinguishable from Marxian socialism or Hitlerian / Mussolinian national socialism. A recent example of a more or less open techno-fascist would be Michael Dukakis, the former governor of Massachusetts.
2. Though not alone in this, Gramsci is the best known early Marxist theorist to advocate as a strategy the infiltration and subversion of a society's lines of communication and education. The Fabian Socialists of early 20th century Great Britain made use of this technique to great advantage. Their success attracted the emulation of our domestic socialists.
Comments
Beautiful! I’ve put up an excerpt and a link back to here.
We urgently need wide agreement among conservatives on a nuts-and-bolts strategy to counter the tide of filth that threatens us.Posted by KG on 07/26/2010 at 05:18 PM”...to march, and bleed, and die.” Unfortunately, however true, this points directly back to, “Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization.”
Posted by on 07/26/2010 at 05:48 PMJas - The country class wholly lacks organization in D.C. Elsewhere it may lack hierarchy but not organization. Decades of repression has molded it into an effective and resilient 4GW movement. Codevilla fails to think of decentralized natural affinity, combined with an open source mentality, as an asset. He says the opposition has made the rules and we must play by them. Codevilla, bless his heart anyway, is wrong.
Posted by Ol' Remus on 07/26/2010 at 11:10 PMOl’ Remus:
You got it dead right. Brief your teams on the principles for which they fight (e.g., individual freedom, extremely limited government, and unlimited exercise of all properly-understood human rights) and make sure that each one knows that it is his or her job to make sure, by any means necessary, that those principles are standing when the smoke clears and the bleeding stops.
Victory or death.
Posted by concerned american on 07/27/2010 at 11:50 PM>>"But what about my subsidies? What about my income tax deductions? What if I can’t afford to send my children to college? What if I fall into a well and can’t afford medical care?"<<
These are all economic issues. As Harry Browne offered doubters:
“Would you give up your favorite government programs if it meant you never had to pay Income Tax again?”
Confiscation of one’s production is a fundamental breach of freedom. Removal of the coercive, punitive and redistributive tax system is an issue that no one has discussed seriously in years.Posted by Henrik on 07/28/2010 at 11:17 AMI bought more ammo.
I’m praying to God that only paper targets will be shot.
Posted by Russell on 07/28/2010 at 11:21 AMThe major problem with the Browne approach, Henrik, is getting Smith, who receives a dairy subsidy, to believe that Jones, who’s asking for his vote, can and will get the income tax killed and buried forever. Inasmuch as about 90% of the people in the United States can claim that some subsidy, or some restriction of trade, or some aspect of current tax law favors them, it’s a tough row to hoe. Smith, you see, not only has to take Jones as sincere and as good as his word; he also has to be persuaded that Jones will succeed in persuading Davis, who gets a home-mortgage-interest tax deduction, and Blake, who benefits from protection by the government’s licensure of his trade, and North, whose triple-tax-free municipal bonds constitute the greater part of his savings for retirement.
It’s a study in renormalized rationality, with little prospect of convergence on an optimal outcome until a truly huge number of Americans “get smart.” In other words, I won’t be holding my breath.
Posted by on 07/28/2010 at 11:29 AM
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