Barney Frank’s one dollar fare conundrum and the ruling class
As Angelo M. Codevilla described in his stunning essay, America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution, Barney Frank’s actions are emblematic of the ruling class mentality.
I may be, but I don’t think I am, wrong about what I am going to propose here. And this is that Angelo Codevilla may have inadvertently written the marching papers - the founding document, if you will - for the Second American Revolution.
I’m sure he didn’t intend to do so, and he may even be appalled at the notion that his “stunning essay” could be so interpreted, but I think that is exactly what it happening. “Ruling Class” hit the right-side political intelligentsia like a nuclear-powered hand grenade. One effect is the hollow silence concerning the essay from redoubts like National Review Online, which senses that the great unwashed whom their writers have always tried to guide into genteel conservatism of the sort that won’t scare either your granny or the horses in the street finally have been provided the sort of intellectual red meat to permanently enliven their suspicions that NRO is populated by a bunch of tired old establishment foofs not worth the powder to blow them into Bill Buckley’s grave.
But the Tea Partiers know it, and the younger, more lively, less embalmed of the conservative and liberty minded intelligentsia are treating “Ruling Class” as the intellectual lodestone around which they will organize their future efforts at effecting change in America.
“Ruling Class” is, in a word, huge. If you haven’t yet read it, then you are significantly more ignorant than you should be - and you will be mystified by some of the changes you will see in the political landscape over the next several years.
Yes, it is that important.
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Reading Codevilla’s essay has changed the way I talk, exactly the same changes I see in your DP writing. I can’t honestly say it nudged me toward revolution, because I was already there. However, it gives me hope that more people will think that way, and that revolutionary activities will stand some chance of success rather than being a suicidal stunt.
(Not necessarily violent revolution. Major upheaval in the power structure would suffice. I don’t believe that the ruling class and their beholden will give up their droits without bloodshed, but I would be delighted to be proved wrong.)
I have a post that I am giving unusual care to — I might actually write a second draft. It dimly occurred to me that I am echoing Codevilla. Can I say “stay tuned?”
I certainly take the essay that way and appreciate the link….
BTW, Tim, congrats on the new Daily Caller connection. I used to lump Tucker in with the “foofs,” but the way he’s gone about setting up the Caller, bringing in writers like you and “Treacher,” and running stories like JornoList, has forced me to reconsider. Old line establishment conservatism, as exemplified by NRO, Frum, and their ilk, is moribund to the point of irrelevance. Nobody under the age of, oh, sixty ;^), trusts those guys any more.
Re: Violence
Revolutions are about the transfer of power. Power is ultimately based on force, and the willingness to use it. At some point all revolutions have to make some sort of show of force, to demonstrate that they can.
There will be blood. The only question is how much.
IMO, Goldberg got the ball rolling when he considered a special case (the “progressives”).
Codevilla has shown that Goldberg’s fascists are just one facet of the problem.
I don’t agree, OG. What Goldberg demonstrated was that the “progressives” are exactly the fascists they decry. But I already knew that progressives were the enemies of what I value - that is to say - liberty.
But Codevilla has broadened the critique to include the entire class of enemies of liberty - the Ruling Class. This crystallized my dislike and distrust of what, for lack of a better word, I called “RINOs.” John McCain, for instance, is, to my mind, as much an enemy of liberty for his history of enabling progressive goals in the name of “bipartisanship” as the progressives themselves - especially since he gives them cover with “conservatives” who aren’t paying attention to the erosion of the liberties they value through the machinations of a class that values their perks, perogatives, and powers far more highly than they value liberty for the people they supposedly represent.
In other words, the fight isn’t against the left or the right or, in fact, any political ideology per se, it is against a class of people who could loosely be classified as enemies of liberty on behalf of themselves and the state.
I lately got in a towering argument over at Crooked Timber, and posted a link to the Codevilla piece. And somewhere in there, I became Enlightened.
It’s the part about “identity always trumps”. Since becoming an amateur student of the progressive condition, I’ve been stumped by various mysteries about that condition. Thanks to Codevilla and my interlocutors at CT, I finally realized just how important the concept of ideology as social status marker is, on the left. I always knew that ideology was a social status marker for them (as it is with various other groups). But they use it in a way which is alien to me, and I doubt I could ever have understood this without a good strong hint. In-group status is literally everything to them; it is fundamental to their consciousness. They cannot evaluate any proposition without reference to it. From their point of view it justifies everything, and from ours it explains everything. For two days, it was as though my sky was raining bricks - all falling into place. My approach to progressives will never be the same. They are religious. There is no other word for it.
Codevilla also explains (not clearly enough) how we get lawmakers voting on a bill they’ve never read. I used to wonder, if nobody’s read it, who wrote it? But now I understand. Everybody who votes yes, gets his own little back-room session where they buy his vote. Whatever it takes to buy his vote, gets written into the bill by some flunky. When it comes time to vote, he doesn’t care what the other congresscritters sold their souls for. He knows what his own cut of the action is. That’s all he needs to know.
Codevilla’s essay was certainly electrifying, and I think, on the mark. I was struck, as an old communist from the ’60s, about how similar this was to many essays I read at the time which purported to de-code politics from a Marxist perspective. We were taught to follow the money, and to view most of the political leaders as puppets of the ruling class. Democrats and Republicans pretend to contend for power, and except for some minor policy differences, they are interchangeable.
Of course our ideas about what we would do with society once we achieved the “Revolution” were much different from those implicit in Codevilla’s essay, still I think that the basic analysis was, and is, valid.
Many of us are beginning to understand that those who control this country are ruining it. We must resist them, even though the struggle will be ugly, brutal and bloody.
” I finally realized just how important the concept of ideology as social status marker is, on the left. ”
That’s funny, Musical Mountaineer… I came to this understanding in high school; it’s easy to understand if you’re watching a bunch of teenagers choose political positions.
There are a lot of people tired of being “little people”, when the laws only apply to “little people”.
“I came to this understanding in high school”
I doubt that. You observed that people take political positions just to be cool or fit in, which is a fairly sophisticated observation for a high-schooler. What I’m saying is that progressives have taken this to a higher level: they take on what amounts to a cognitive disability, just to be hyper-cool and fit in super-tight. I don’t think many high-school kids reach this level of investment/indoctrination. At least, they didn’t when I was in high school.
This disability manifests itself in an infinite variety of otherwise inexplicable mental blocks and emotional responses. It’s relatively easy to observe these responses and see the pattern to them. It is also easy to come up with wrong explanations.
Take the way the University of Virginia handled Michael Mann, which Codevilla mentions. Mann’s defenders are smart, educated people who understand what science is. Yet they were able to say, in effect, “Mann determined the correct conclusions in advance of his research; this eliminates the possibility of scientific misconduct”. When I first heard about it, I assumed it was a cynical whitewash. Certainly the University stood to be embarrassed and probably lose funding if Mann’s misconduct was exposed. But I was wrong; their defense of Mann wasn’t cynical or dishonest. It was principled. They believed what they said. To them, questions about Mann’s data and methods really are irrelevant, sinister, anti-scientific distractions from the only question that matters: are his conclusions correct? Well, they are. By definition, they are. Mann is one of the good people. End of investigation.
That’s just one instance of one aspect of this cognitive defect. On some other aspects, my initial assessment of the condition was closer to the mark. But I totally missed on this one and quite a few others. When it came to concepts like a scientist being earnestly, virtuously anti-scientific, my imagination failed. Other explanations such as cynicism or simple faith often seemed less far-fetched than this rampant doublethink. But other explanations, by comparison, do not explain.
I had an argument with one of my siblings—a self-identifying progressive. He and I agree on a whole range of issues. But, once you factor in the ideology/political identity, the issues get lost. The quest for political power controls the factions and trumps all consideration of the underlying issues—abortion, immigration, budget restraint, etc. The winner-take-all duality of our political system is the enemy of logical legislative sanity. It is also, the biggest barrier to destroying the Ruling Class.
In-group status is literally everything to them;
“Within the Party, Everything. Outside the Party, Nothing.’–Fidel Castro
David Horowitz nailed this point years ago in his book The Politics of Bad Faith.
I’ve been trying to track down a particular article, with no success. The central argument was that the point of making people swear allegiance to lies was not that you expected them to believe the lies, but that you expected them not to. Making them publicly support the lie was about humiliation, not persuasion. It is through humiliation that you brainwash children into social conformity, teaching them that they are rewarded for parroting the lie and punished severely for questioning it. It is through this technique that the habit of blind faith and herd-following is inculcated, and the cognitive faculty destroyed.
Done properly, the result is an adult who does not even remember that he is afraid. Their conscious mind veers away from the dangerous topics automatically If pressed, the fear-driven response will be to attempt humiliation of the questioner, thus repeating the cycle.