July 30, 2022
A superb article exposes the fissures in America
By Andrea Widburg
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/202...in_america.html


For the past few days, I've been trying to explain to a Millennial the concept of that "Great America" that is encompassed in Trump's MAGA slogan ("Make America Great Again"). Marinated in modern academia, which hates America, he simply doesn't get it. Perhaps that's why I was stunned by the perspicacity in Michael Anton's latest, which looks at the ruling class's vision of America, a vision that, in its own way, is even more antithetical to the MAGA viewpoint than this young man's generalized disdain.

First, a little bit of middle-aged history for the young 'uns out there. My generation (those of us who came of age before the year 1990) remember something that's utterly alien to young folks today: we remember socializing with people from the opposite political party. During those social engagements, there were often vigorous political disagreements, but they were never ugly political disagreements.

Looking back, what I realized is that the people participating in those discussions had a relatively similar vision for America: they wanted a clean, prosperous, nationally secure America with a strong middle and working class, and with Americans measured by the content of their character, not the color of their skin, their sex, or their sexual preferences. The political discussions were about the best way to achieve those goals rather than about the goals themselves.

Things are different now, and it matters politically. When Trump coined the phrase MAGA, he was harkening back to that shared vision of a worthy America that had institutions that sought to strengthen both the country itself and the individuals within the country. Now, though, thanks to a generation of young people raised on Howard Zinn's openly communist, anti-American A People's History of the United States, not to mention the Critical Race Theory, DEI theory, and LGBTQ+++ theory that permeate education all the way down to the toddler years, we've raised several generations of people (many in corporate America) who believe that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, colonialist, scarily Christian abortion of a nation.

It turns out that there is a very specific Progressive political subclass that uses the useful idiots as its foot soldiers but that actually has an even more nihilistic view of our country. As Michael Anton points out in his superb "They Can't Let Him Back In," this political class hates America just as ferociously as the young leftists do. But unlike the young ones, who hate the idea of America in a sort of generic way, these political types hate you, the MAGA American, with specificity and a burning desire to destroy you.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

They Can't Let Him Back In
Michael Anton
https://compactmag.com/article/they-can-t-let-him-back-in
July 28, 2022


The people who really run the United States of America have made it clear that they can’t, and won’t, if they can help it, allow Donald Trump to be president again. In fact, they made this clear in 2020, in a series of public statements. Simply for quoting their words in an essay for The American Mind, I was mercilessly mocked and attacked. But they were quite clear. Trump won’t be president at noon, Jan. 20, 2021, even if we have to use the military to drag him out of there.

“Anti-Trump hysteria is in the final analysis not about Trump.”
If the regime felt that strongly back then, imagine how they feel now. But you don’t have to imagine. They tell you every day. Liz Cheney, Trump’s personal Javert, has said that the 45th president is literally the greatest threat facing America today—greater than China, than our crashing economy, than our unraveling civil society.

That’s rhetoric, of course, but it isn’t merely that. It’s safer, and generally more accurate, to assume that your adversaries mean what they say. If you doubt this, ask yourself: When was the last time they acted more moderately than they talk?

Even if it is just rhetoric, the words nonetheless portend turbulence. “He who says A must say B.” The logic of statement A inevitably leads to action B, even if the speaker of A didn’t really mean it, or did mean it, but still didn’t want B. Her followers won’t get the irony and, enthused by A, will insist on B.

Take some time to listen to the mainstream media. It doesn’t have to be long; five minutes should do. Then spend another five or so reading the statements of prominent politicians other than Trump. To round it out, sacrifice another five on leading intellectuals. It should become abundantly clear: They all have said A and so must say—and do—B.

And B is that Trump absolutely must not be allowed to take office on Jan. 20, 2025.-- excerpt, rest at link above --

America’s Ruling Class
And the perils of revolution.
https://spectator.org/americas-ruling-class/
by ANGELO CODEVILLA
July 16, 2010, 4:20 PM

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leaders of the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leaders stretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal) on the right to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion to buy the investors’ “toxic assets” was the only alternative to the U.S. economy’s “systemic collapse.” In this, President George W. Bush and his would-be Republican successor John McCain agreed with the Democratic candidate, Barack Obama. Many, if not most, people around them also agreed upon the eventual commitment of some 10 trillion nonexistent dollars in ways unprecedented in America. They explained neither the difference between the assets’ nominal and real values, nor precisely why letting the market find the latter would collapse America. The public objected immediately, by margins of three or four to one.

When this majority discovered that virtually no one in a position of power in either party or with a national voice would take their objections seriously, that decisions about their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interested parties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had not read them, the term “political class” came into use. Then, after those in power changed their plans from buying toxic assets to buying up equity in banks and major industries but refused to explain why, when they reasserted their right to decide ad hoc on these and so many other matters, supposing them to be beyond the general public’s understanding, the American people started referring to those in and around government as the “ruling class.” And in fact Republican and Democratic office holders and their retinues show a similar presumption to dominate and fewer differences in tastes, habits, opinions, and sources of income among one another than between both and the rest of the country. They think, look, and act as a class.

Although after the election of 2008 most Republican office holders argued against the Troubled Asset Relief Program, against the subsequent bailouts of the auto industry, against the several “stimulus” bills and further summary expansions of government power to benefit clients of government at the expense of ordinary citizens, the American people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians were doing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. Moreover, 2009-10 establishment Republicans sought only to modify the government’s agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grand schemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of being Ted Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about “global warming” for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class’s continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it.

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.-- excerpt, rest at link above --