In a 2010 essay for The American Spectator, the late, great intellectual Angelo Codevilla wrote a rare essay that was, in retrospect, so prescient as to be outright eerie. Titled "America's Ruling Class" and deploying "class"-based phraseology historically more at home in some corners of the political Left than on the postwar political Right, Codevilla set his sights squarely on his eponymous target.
"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," he wrote. "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."
Even more eerily prescient was Codevilla's description of what motivates the ruling class. "Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself," he wrote. "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."
Is there a single sober-minded observer of our decrepit politics, in 2021, who does not read these words and immediately recognize that this is what is happening—indeed, what has been happening—in these United States?
Beginning with the 2008 bailouts, a parochial uniparty establishment—geographically and (nominally) politically diverse, but all sculpted by elite K-12 and higher education institutions to hold uniformly "correct" beliefs—deemed it necessary to toss moral hazard into the wind and lavish taxpayer money upon the failing Wall Street titans. As for elites' message to the myriad struggling homeowners whose dreams were shattered by Fannie and Freddie, Clinton-era tropes about the relentless pursuit of "affordable housing" and simple lucre-seeking depravity: Drop dead.
The ruling class only tightened its grip in the ensuing years after the 2008 bailouts and the Dow Jones Industrial Average's 2009 nadir. Corporate profits soon skyrocketed, and the stock market began a prolonged, historically record-breaking ascent. But economic inequality worsened. Elites of both parties further doubled down on "free trade" and extensive economic entangling with a Chinese Communist Party regime hellbent on hollowing out the American industrial heartland and ultimately dedicated to America's national implosion.
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https://www.newsweek.com/american-ruling-class-reaches-its-inflection-point-opinion-1636787
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