By contrast, we have never had an Establishment that was so ill-equipped to lead. It is the Establishment, not the people, that is falling down on the job
Here in the early years of the twenty-first century, the American elite is a walking disaster and is in every way less capable than its predecessors. It is less in touch with American history and culture, less personally honest, less productive, less forward looking, less effective at and less committed to child rearing, less freedom loving, less sacrificially patriotic and less entrepreneurial than predecessor generations. Its sense of entitlement and snobbery is greater than at any time since the American Revolution; its addiction to privilege is greater than during the Gilded Age and its ability to raise its young to be productive and courageous leaders of society has largely collapsed.
You know, if we walked into another country, conquered it, and put people in charge who made no effort to understand or even respect the people they ruled, or to satisfy their aspirations, we'd call it a basic violation of counter-insurgency principals.
Instead, our elites retreat to their green zones in the universities, media, and governmental regulatory bodies while practicing counter-terrorism by targeting the presumed leaders of the peasantry and tagging them as extremists to be eliminated from the public discourse.
Our elites identify more with their European brethren elites and look down on ordinary Americans. This can't end well.
UPDATE: Radag B. sent me a link to a good article on our ruling class. This part sums up the ruling class view of the people they rule:
Its attitude is key to understanding our bipartisan ruling class. Its first tenet is that "we" are the best and brightest while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?
He also sent me a link to other articles he compiled on this subject. Thanks Radag.
I'm not anywhere nearly as isolationist as this article articulates on this point of view. As I've mentioned before, the things I like most about Bush were his foreign policy even as a cringed at his big-government domestic initiatives.
But on domestic policies I think the only way to defang this ruling class is to reduce the role of the federal government in our lives and economy except where absolutely necessary. In the end, I don't care what they believe. I just care that they want to take away my right to be left alone.
The article linked points out the role of enabling federal agencies to write voluminous rules apart from effective oversight. This is a problem at the state level, too, as I experienced in my career. I despaired that the Administrative Procedures Act of 1969 was gutted in the late-1990s by the state legislature under pressure from court challenges. I don't think that it was a given that the Michigan Supreme Court would have ruled that the legislature's role in ensuring that state agency administrative rules complied with what the legislature ended when it granted rule-making authority was a "legislative veto" and thus unconstitutional. I say this not as a lawyer, of course. But now the legislature has little power to stop administrative rules where the executive agency already has authority to write rules. And nobody in the state legislature really cares--or even knows about this loss of power. I wrote a number of pieces on the change but nobody really cared. I'm sure I knew more about this process than 98% of the people in the legislative branch. Sure, the legislature can expressly deny authority to write rules or take it away (subject to veto) or simply write the rules into statute (but that can be very technical language depending on the topic), but all our rough work-arounds to the basic problem of lack of effective legislative oversight.
I digress, but the point is that just electing the right people can be undermined by the permanent bureaucracy that writes the rules (with the force of law) that we live by without the scrutiny that the flash and drama of bills and laws allows. These are the foot soldiers of the ruling class. There are good and solid reasons to have administrative rules. But there are good and solid reasons to limit them and provide rigorous oversight of the process by elected officials empowered to stop them.
