[Peace-discuss] the ruling class

[David Green]

>From what I've read of it so far, a great article, located in a "conservative" 
publication because?? Liberal multiculturalism can't handle these cultural 
issues in a serious way; leftists (mostly rightly) think that cultural issues 
distract us from class issues. But the cultural issues need to be taken 
seriously, if only because the ruling class's authority is now part and parcel 
of its claims to "expertise."




________________________________
From: E. Wayne Johnson <ewj at pigs.ag>
To: Peace-discuss <peace-discuss at anti-war.net>
Sent: Thu, August 19, 2010 5:01:48 PM
Subject: [Peace-discuss] the ruling class

some thing awakes. It's about time.

"The Ruling Class all go to good schools
where they go to bed on one another,
and then they grow up,
and make all the rules...

Hang the Judges high.
Hang the wise men of the realm."
("Ruling Class", Robyn Hitchcock. 1989.)

****  ****

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.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and 
embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century's 
Northerners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, 
"prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "who 
created and doth sustain us," our ruling class prays to itself as "saviors of 
the planet" and improvers of humanity. Our classes' clash is over "whose 
country" America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to 
whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to 
Mark's Gospel: "if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand."

"America's Ruling Class and the Perils of R3voJution"
Angelo Codevilla

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


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