America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

[GratefulCitizen]

This article is a great read, but a long one.

It is unfortunate that complex ideas cannot be presented in a 12 minute segment of an opinion show.
(Or on a segment of the Daily Show...:rolleyes:)

http://spectator.org/archives/2010/07/16/americas-ruling-class-and-the/

[TF Kilo]

Interesting article, although I do not agree with him on a few things; I do not agree that it would be easy to dismantle various burdensome government agencies like the Department of Education for example, and I also do not agree that "the ruling class" is bent on trying to re-mold the rest of the world through various wars. The Democrats, whom he claims are the primary party of the ruling class, never would have invaded Iraq and want to pull out of Afghanistan.

pull up us code
control f
education
next, delete, repeat as required

Save as "un F'ed US Code"

[Rumblyguts]

The author closely parallels my poli-sci text(The Irony of Democracy) from a couple years ago. The elite are at the top, work within the top groups of our society, and they rule to keep themselves at the top based on the pretense that the masses are not smart enough to govern.

It sounds like his premise is that this is something new; according to my text, our government was created to work in just such a manner.

[Sigaba]

The piece is reminiscent of C. Wright Mills.

[incarcerated]

Noteworthy snippets:

….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….


Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.
If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps….


The Agenda: Power
Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or indirectly….


Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will be treated differently from others because their senators offered key political support, but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words, spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower….

[Paslode]

Interesting article, although I do not agree with him on a few things; I do not agree that it would be easy to dismantle various burdensome government agencies like the Department of Education for example

As we have seen in the past 19 months.....Under the right circumstances you can do anything with near impunity. With a audience desperate for change, promises of hope and change to fill that void.....then you can do anything with the stroke of the pen with little interference. You can take over industries, enact laws and create organizations that will reek havoc...........it is just as easy to tear all that down, you just need the right person to feed the frenzy and pursue the witch hunt of the evil doers.


and I also do not agree that "the ruling class" is bent on trying to re-mold the rest of the world through various wars. The Democrats, whom he claims are the primary party of the ruling class, never would have invaded Iraq and want to pull out of Afghanistan.

For some on both side of the Red/Blue isle war is a profit making enterprise. Whether it is a good war or not depends on who is in control and thus benefiting from the proceeds war. What those proceeds are depends on your agenda.

As far as what the Democrats would or wouldn't have done, I don't see anything much in the way of protest or jeering from the Media and Liberal base now that The O is running the Show.......Would Bush have gotten away with a having a Presidential Assassination List, let alone have one that contain US Citizens?

Are some of those on that list deserving? Yes. But The One now has the ability to assassinate fellow Americans without due process, which is a violation of the Constitution. Thus the received proceeds of war are not always monetary.

So how long before this One Man Judge, Jury and Trial decides rogue elements such as Gov. Jan Brewer, Glen Beck and the Tea Parties become enemies of the State and garner inclusion on the Presidential Hit List?


I know it is all far fetched, but 19 months ago you would have dismissed the government taking over GM, Chryler, Insurance, Healthcare, etc......It will never happen, right?

Never say never :rolleyes:

[tonyz]

Noteworthy snippets:


Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.
If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT (Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about "global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps….


The Agenda: Power
Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof.….


This is an interesting observation - I recently had a similar discussion with my wife as we track the career choices/progressions made by various colleagues.

[incarcerated]

Another snippet:


Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland) 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, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as "interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.
By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade. Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.
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.

[Richard]

Personally, I always find it a struggle reading such tracts as this one because of the overtly politically charged slant of the language being used.

I also struggle with the validity of such pieces when I early on run into patently false statements like this one:

"Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job."

I agree with Sigaba and think The Power Elite is worth a read if you're really interested in this topic - especially the updated version - but personally, I always found books like Listen, Yankee and The Ugly American of greater interest and practical value to anyone living the SF lifestyle.

And so it goes...

Richard's $.02 :munchin