Thursday.....Politics.....The Ruling Class

I dropped off some small Christian evangelical cards with this blog's URL written on the back at the college that is closest to us. Over the summer I did this at Pitt, where I went to school, and at Penn State. There was a nice response from the State College students but very little from the Oakland gang. I had the impression while walking around Pitt that there would be little interest in a blog about politics and religion. Maybe it was the international flavor of the campus, then maybe it was just the temperature. It may be that when someone drops by for the first time that the last blog published determines whether one checks out my profile where I have a statistic on visitors to it.  Today is a book review. I noticed long ago that Christian book publishing went through periods where there was one great book after another and other periods where whole seasons could pass with little that was extraordinary.  Presently we have one great political book after another. This book today is very comparable to Mark Levin's Liberty And Tyranny. In fact it goes well with Levin's book for his addressed the government aspect of the world's elites and this one has more to do with an entire class of elites who demand to rule. Along with Thomas Sowell's Intellectuals And Society these three books combine for a tour de force on defining America's problems. It may have been a month ago that I was listening to Rush Limbaugh, because of my work schedule I rarely get to hear him, and he read, word for word, an essay published in a magazine by a professor emeritus in international relations at Boston University. Yes Virginia, there still are some great, great professors out there! The essay affected me as it effected Rush. It was turned into a small paperback with the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution reprinted in full at the back. Its title..The Ruling Class, How They Corrupted America And What We Can Do About It,  and the author...Angelo M. Codevilla. I would like to reach a few college students with this book. I know, it's all reading at college with little time for personal reading, but I'm living proof that one can read peripheral topics at college. One only has to sacrifice a few hundred thousand dollars of income over the years for not specializing in one's major. It may not sound like a good deal but what good is that future profession if America indeed does collapse from within and/or without through decades of ignoring vigilance in protecting our foundations. This book can be easily read in two days but may stay with you forever like the imprint on the mind of Hillary's smile as she says I have no plans on running for president in 2012. So here we go; the professor's forward begins with America now divides ever more sharply into two classes, the smaller of which holds the commanding heights of government, from which it disposes in ever greater detail of America's economic energies, from which it ordains new ways of living as if it had the right to do so, and from which it asserts that that right is based on the majority class' stupidity, racism, and violent tendencies. He likens the other class, the Country Class, to the frog in the pan that is slowly boiled, at least until this year. The Ruling Class since the 1930s have been inclined to dismiss the public's opposition as ignorant, and to believe themselves entitled to shape a new and different America. This is why America is rebelling now through Tea Parties and other methods of revolt. The Ruling Class' chief pretension is its intellectual superiority...confusing its own opinions with science and praying to themselves as saviors of the planet. All the while the Country Class observes that they, the Ruling Class... lose every war....run up an unpayable national debt, and generally make life worse. They resort to their living Constitution and denigrate the American people's devotion to God. They have lost America's respect according to Professor Codevilla, and this is very true! Codevilla takes one on a short and concise history of what happened in the financial collapse and writes on this topic that Differences between Bushes, Clintons and Obamas are of degree, not of kind. The Ruling Class established themselves in the Democratic Party and the Country Class has settled in the Republican Party. Higher education is the next topic and we read 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 cannon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. The small Christian college that our son attended, with its rigorous disciplines, cannot possibly be bettered by the "accepted" elite schools that have traded the soul of Higher Education for a puppy mill of future bureaucrats. Ethics comes next and professor Codevilla gives this example: a Harvard law professor plagiarized his magnum opus in 1984 and was confronted ten years later. He is addressed in the book; you could claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you could count on the law school's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee (including former and future Harvard President Derek Bok) that would issue a secret report that "closed" the incident. Of course the "global warming" frauds were brought up. He lays this situation at the feet of Darwinism and Progressivism. He quotes Barack Obama's famous description of his opponents as clinging to "God and Guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out he had said "what everybody knows is true." A quote from then Vice President George H. W. Bush is added. The words spoken to Gorbachev were Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him."  Codevilla takes apart the Ruling Class' "defining feature" of equality and presents evidence that it is the Country Class that truly exhibits the belief that all men are created equal! Professor Codevilla is hard on the Republican Party since Ronald Reagan and very high on the Tea Party Movement and would be very satisfied over the results of yesterday's primaries and also might be very critical of Karl Rove's attempt to return to business as usual in the party. The author uses the last pages to give plenty of caveats to the Country Class in this volatile time. Whether its Levin's Statist, Sowell's arrogant Intellectual or Codevilla's Ruling Class, Americans are increasingly on the same page in discerning that minority who believes that they are so much better than those not initiated into their group, those who have not been born into their privileges, acquired their tastes, likewise rejected their creator or profited from their hollow list of credentials. Some are as good but no one better than Codevilla is calling us to attention.