Americas Ruling Class

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America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution

By Angelo M. Codevilla

from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue of the American Spectator

As over-leveraged investment houses began to fail in September 2008, the leadersof the Republican and Democratic parties, of major corporations, and opinion leadersstretching from the National Review magazine (and the Wall Street Journal ) on theright to the Nation magazine on the left, agreed that spending some $700 billion tobuy 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 Republicansuccessor 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 publicobjected 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 decisionsabout their money were being made in bipartisan backroom deals with interestedparties, and that the laws on these matters were being voted by people who had notread 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 generalpublic's understanding, the American people started referring to those in and aroundgovernment as the "ruling class." And in fact Republican and Democratic officeholders 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 theTroubled 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, theAmerican people had every reason to believe that many Republican politicians weredoing so simply by the logic of partisan opposition. After all, Republicans had beenhappy 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 thegovernment's agenda while showing eagerness to join the Democrats in new grandschemes, if only they were allowed to. Sen. Orrin Hatch continued dreaming of beingTed Kennedy, while Lindsey Graham set aside what is true or false about "globalwarming" for the sake of getting on the right side of history. No prominent Republicanchallenged 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

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Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would liketo be part of it.

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, inAmerica 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 hadgained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status fromdifferent sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. TheBoston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, andFlorida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and thehardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contactwith one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was adirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universitiesthat 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 thathas changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educationalsystem that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniformguidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgmentsabout good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minoritiesand the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong oneswhen 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 includedgovernment 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 classspeaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rulesuneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, andembody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century'sNortherners and Southerners -- nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them,"prayed to the same God." By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God "whocreated 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. Thegravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark's Gospel: "if a house bedivided against itself, that house cannot stand."

The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters askthe American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in thenext presidential election, Republicans win growing pluralities. But whenever pollsters add the preferences "undecided," "none of the above," or "tea party," these

win handily, the Democrats come in second, and the Republicans trail far behind.That is because while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that



Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identifythemselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders representthem well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate -- most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans.This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class's prime legitimate

representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only afourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats.But some two-thirds of Americans -- a few Democratic voters, most Republicanvoters, and all independents -- lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Sooner or later, well or badly, that majority's demand for representation will be filled.Whereas in 1968 Governor George Wallace's taunt "there ain't a dime's worth of difference" between the Republican and Democratic parties resonated with only 13.5percent of the American people, in 1992 Ross Perot became a serious contender for the presidency (at one point he was favored by 39 percent of Americans vs. 31

percent for G.H.W. Bush and 25 percent for Clinton) simply by speaking ill of theruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned insize and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over adeclining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes,and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling classis as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifthof Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will domore harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom theydistrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked thiscountry into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. Theruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavellicompares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early onwhile they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they becomeobvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America'sregime class -- relatively few people supported by no more than one-third of Americans -- and a country class comprising two-thirds of the country, our task hereis to understand the divisions that underlie that confrontation's unpredictable future.

More on politics below.

The Ruling Class

Who are these rulers, and by what right do they rule? How did America change froma place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to onein which, at best, they might have the chance to climb into them? What sets our ruling class apart from the rest of us?

The most widespread answers -- by such as the Times's Thomas Friedman andDavid Brooks -- are schlock sociology. Supposedly, modern society became so

complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a newclass of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector.



Similarly fanciful is Edward Goldberg's notion that America is now ruled by a"newocracy": a "new aristocracy who are the true beneficiaries of globalization --including the multinational manager, the technologist and the aspirational membersof the meritocracy." In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

Other explanations are counterintuitive. Wealth? The heads of the class do live in our big cities' priciest enclaves and suburbs, from Montgomery County, Maryland, to PaloAlto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns fromPrinceton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or Californiafarmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the socialscience and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates withphysicians and physicists. Rather, regardless of where they live, their social-intellectual circle includes people in the lucrative "nonprofit" and "philanthropic"sectors and public policy. What really distinguishes these privileged peopledemographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in

companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democratmore consistently than those who live on any of America's Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Streets. These socioeconomic opposites draw their money and orientation from thesame sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees inthe middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what theysuppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any morethan mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or amember of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or evenpresident (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like afraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, givingthe required signs that one is on the right side, and joining in despising the Outs.Once an official or professional shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, theinterests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing toaccommodate the interests of its senior members, he can move profitably among our establishment's parts.

If, for example, you are Laurence Tribe in 1984, Harvard professor of law, leftist pillar of the establishment, you can "write" your magnum opus by using the products of your student assistant, Ron Klain. A decade later, after Klain admits to having written

some parts of the book, and the other parts are found to be verbatim or paraphrasesof a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarismwas "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, toappoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok thatissues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justiceof the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did notwrite the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean andthe committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. Bycontrast, for example, learned papers and distinguished careers in climatology at MIT(Richard Lindzen) or UVA (S. Fred Singer) are not enough for their questions about"global warming" to be taken seriously. For our ruling class, identity always trumps.



Much less does membership in the ruling class depend on high academicachievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France,where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls detailsfrom how babies are raised to how to make cheese, and people get into and advance in that bureaucracy strictly by competitive exams. Hence for good or ill,

France's ruling class are bright people -- certifiably. Not ours. But didn't ours go toHarvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. Butwhile getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperformingothers in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passingexams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passingexams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile.American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it hasbeen virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secretthat "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade pointaverages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but

rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitmentto fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticismnor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself throughnegative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defineditself by the presumption of intellectual superiority.

The Faith

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, anddysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Foundinggeneration's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teachesus that we are so unequal in so many ways, and because making one's self superior is so tempting that Lincoln called it "the old serpent, you work I'll eat." But humanequality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all menare made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equaltreatment under British law, or because they had read John Locke.

It did not take long for their paradigm to be challenged by interest and by "science."

By the 1820s, as J. C. Calhoun was reading in the best London journals that differentbreeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners wereciting the Negroes' deficiencies to argue that they should remain slaves indefinitely.Lots of others were reading Ludwig Feuerbach's rendition of Hegelian philosophy,according to which biblical injunctions reflect the fantasies of alienated human beingsor, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" tomaterial reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are createdequal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbedthe "scientific" notion (which Darwin only popularized) that man is the product of chance mutation and natural selection of the fittest. Accordingly, by nature, superior men subdue inferior ones as they subdue lower beings or try to improve them as they

please. Hence while it pleased the abolitionists to believe in freeing Negroes andimproving them, it also pleased them to believe that Southerners had to be punished



and reconstructed by force. As the 19th century ended, the educated class's religiousfervor turned to social reform: they were sure that because man is a mere part of evolutionary nature, man could be improved, and that they, the most highly evolvedof all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can'tyou let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can showme is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those thingsalone that I see are going down-hill." Wilson spoke for the thousands of well-off Americans who patronized the spas at places like Chautauqua and Lake Mohonk. Bysuch upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world'sexamples and the world's reformers dreamt big dreams of establishing order, justice,and peace at home and abroad. Neither were they shy about their desire for power.Wilson was the first American statesman to argue that the Founders had done badlyby depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor wasWilson the last to invade a foreign country (Mexico) to "teach [them] to elect good

men."

World War I and the chaos at home and abroad that followed it discredited theProgressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes hadbrought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improvedAmericans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, includingProhibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrongwith America. The American people had failed them because democracy in itsAmerican form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to lookdown on the masses, to look on themselves as the vanguard, and to look abroad for examples to emulate.

The cultural divide between the "educated class" and the rest of the country openedin the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," theCommunist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as theywere to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. Not just the Nation, but also the New York Times and National Geographic found much to be imitated in these regimes becausethey promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the newman." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the AmericanCivil Liberties Union sponsored a legal challenge to a Tennessee law that required

teaching the biblical account of creation. The ensuing trial, radio broadcast nationally,as well as the subsequent hit movie Inherit the Wind , were the occasion for what onemight have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans whobelieved in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, someAmerican Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) andothers Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: theapproaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they hadrefused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the criticallyacclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator HenryCabot Lodge, who allegedly brought on the war by appealing to American narrow-mindedness against Wilson's benevolent genius.



Franklin Roosevelt brought the Chautauqua class into his administration and beganthe process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems intechnocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked byhim). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies thathave run America ever since -- turned many Progressives into powerful bureaucrats

and then into lobbyists. As the saying goes, they came to Washington to do good,and stayed to do well.

As their number and sense of importance grew, so did their distaste for commonAmericans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain itsdifferences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of theseattempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked thesetraits and their intensity in any given person on what it called the "F scale" (F for fascist), interviewed hundreds of Americans, and concluded that most who were notliberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives

filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned HerbertMcCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had definedconservatism in terms of answers to certain questions, had defined a number of personality disorders in terms of other questions, and run a survey that proved"scientifically" that conservatives were maladjusted ne'er-do-well ignoramuses. (Myclass project, titled "Liberalism and Personality," following the same methodology,proved just as scientifically that liberals suffered from the very same social diseases,and even more amusing ones.)

The point is this: though not one in a thousand of today's bipartisan ruling class ever heard of Adorno or McCloskey, much less can explain the Feuerbachian-Marxistnotion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or materialalienation, the notion that the common people's words are, like grunts, mere signs of pain, pleasure, and frustration, is now axiomatic among our ruling class. Theyabsorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and fromcompanions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "Godand guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointingout he had said "what everybody knows is true." Confident "knowledge" that "some of us, the ones who matter," have grasped truths that the common herd cannot, truthsthat direct us, truths the grasping of which entitles us to discount what the ruled say

and to presume what they mean, made our Progressives into a class long beforethey took power.

The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim throughintellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always andeverywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to itsmembers. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoodsand enhance mightily the upper levels' wealth. Because this is so, whatever else

such parties might accomplish, they must feed the machine by transferring money or jobs or privileges -- civic as well as economic -- to the party's clients, directly or



indirectly. This, incidentally, is close to Aristotle's view of democracy. Hence our ruling class's standard approach to any and all matters, its solution to any and allproblems, is to increase the power of the government -- meaning of those who run it,meaning themselves, to profit those who pay with political support for privileged jobs,contracts, etc. Hence more power for the ruling class has been our ruling class's

solution not just for economic downturns and social ills but also for hurricanes andtornadoes, global cooling and global warming. A priori , one might wonder whether enriching and empowering individuals of a certain kind can make Americans kinder and gentler, much less control the weather. But there can be no doubt that such power and money makes Americans ever more dependent on those who wield it. Letus now look at what this means in our time.

Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, throughregulations that reach deep into American life, our ruling class is making itself the

arbiter of wealth and poverty. While the economic value of anything depends onsellers and buyers agreeing on that value as civil equals in the absence of force,modern government is about nothing if not tampering with civil equality. By endowingsome in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, andforcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- moderngovernment makes valuable some things that are not, and devalues others that are.Thus if you are not among the favored guests at the table where officials makedetailed lists of who is to receive what at whose expense, you are on the menu.Eventually, pretending forcibly that valueless things have value dilutes the currency'svalue for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed tospecify how people will be treated unequally. For example, the health care bill of 2010 takes more than 2,700 pages to make sure not just that some states will betreated differently from others because their senators offered key political support,but more importantly to codify bargains between the government and various parts of the health care industry, state governments, and large employers about who wouldreceive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and whowould pass what indirect taxes onto the general public. The financial regulation bill of 2010, far from setting univocal rules for the entire financial industry in few words,spends some 3,000 pages (at this writing) tilting the field exquisitely toward some

and away from others. Even more significantly, these and other products of Democratic and Republican administrations and Congresses empower countlessboards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, whileruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescuedGoldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democraticsuccessor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions thatsupport it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read thelaws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, allanybody has to know about them is whom they empower.



By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling classteaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, buildersand investors had every reason to make as much money as they could from the

ensuing inflation of housing prices. When the bubble burst, only those connected withthe ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing theuse of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class createdarguably the world's biggest opportunity for making money out of things that few if any would buy absent its intervention. The ethanol industry and its ensuingdiversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts tocertain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show supportfor a "green agenda," because such allotments would be worth tens of billions of dollars. That is why companies hired some 2,500 lobbyists in 2009 to deepen their involvement in "climate change." At the very least, such involvement profits them by

making them into privileged collectors of carbon taxes. Any "green jobs" thus createdare by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creatingsuch privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increasesthe number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans thatsatisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods andservices that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the Americanpeople's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than whatAmericans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society , 1958) hasever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americansuse land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy totransport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat aswell as other unhealthy things, and go to the doctor whenever they feel like it.Americans think it justice to spend the money they earn to satisfy their private desireseven though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community andthe planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more denselyand close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to useless energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits inhow much medical care they get, that they must divert more of their money to

support people, cultural enterprises, and plans for the planet that the ruling classdeems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the mainwrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which theruling class feeds and grows).

The 2010 medical law is a template for the ruling class's economic modus operandi:the government taxes citizens to pay for medical care and requires citizens topurchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that thecitizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for themoney, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then allthe boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute

"the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizenmight end up dissatisfied with what "the system" offers. But when he gave up his



money, he gave up the power to choose, and became dependent on all the boardsand commissions that his money also pays for and that raise the cost of care.Similarly, in 2008 the House Ways and Means Committee began considering a planto force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer thosefunds into government-run "guaranteed retirement accounts." If the government may

force citizens to buy health insurance, by what logic can it not force them to tradeprivate ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as thegovernment itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managingretirement income than individuals?

Who Depends on Whom?

In Congressional Government (1885) Woodrow Wilson left no doubt: the U.S.Constitution prevents the government from meeting the country's needs byenumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make nolaw..." says the First Amendment, typically.) Our electoral system, based on single

member districts, empowers individual voters at the expense of "responsible parties."Hence the ruling class's perpetual agenda has been to diminish the role of thecitizenry's elected representatives, enhancing that of party leaders as well as of groups willing to partner in the government's plans, and to craft a "living" Constitutionin which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning chartersof government power.

Consider representation. Following Wilson, American Progressives have alwayswanted to turn the U.S. Congress from the role defined by James Madison'sFederalist #10 , "refine and enlarge the public's view," to something like the BritishParliament, which ratifies government actions. Although Britain's electoral system --like ours, single members elected in historic districts by plurality vote -- had mademembers of Parliament responsive to their constituents in ancient times, by Wilson'stime the growing importance of parties made MPs beholden to party leaders. Hencewhoever controls the majority party controls both Parliament and the government.

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began withthe Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the singlestandard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing thepractice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as fewdistricts as possible while placing one's own voters into as many as possible likely to

yield victories. Republican and Democratic state legislatures have gerrymandered for a half century. That is why today's Congress consists more and more of persons whorepresent their respective party establishments -- not nearly as much as in Britain,but heading in that direction. Once districts are gerrymandered "safe" for one party or another, the voters therein count less because party leaders can count more onelected legislators to toe the party line.

To the extent party leaders do not have to worry about voters, they can choose privileged interlocutors, representing those in society whom they find most amenable.In America ever more since the 1930s -- elsewhere in the world this practice isubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals,

companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners inelaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government



empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them thesector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the rulingclass.

Thus in 2009-10 the American Medical Association (AMA) strongly supported the

new medical care law, which the administration touted as having the support of "thedoctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it.Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusiveproviders of the codes by which physicians and hospitals bill the government for their services. The millions of dollars that flow thereby to the AMA's officers keep them inline, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion inthe doctor ranks. When the administration wanted to bolster its case that the state of Arizona's enforcement of federal immigration laws was offensive to Hispanics, theNational Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on theadministration for their salaries -- issued a statement that the laws would endanger all Americans by raising Hispanics' animosity. This reflected conversations with the

administration rather than a vote of the nation's police chiefs.

Similarly, modern labor unions are ever less bunches of workers banding together and ever more bundled under the aegis of an organization chosen jointly byemployers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees InternationalUnion, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agenciesas well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIUwould relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballotsdid the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by theunion presenting what it claims are cards from workers approving of representation.The union gets 2 percent of the workers' pay, which it recycles as contributions to theDemocratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. Theunion's leadership is part of the ruling class's beating heart.

The point is that a doctor, a building contractor, a janitor, or a schoolteacher counts intoday's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organizationaffiliated with the ruling class. Less and less do such persons count as voters.

Ordinary people have also gone a long way toward losing equal treatment under law.The America described in civics books, in which no one could be convicted or finedexcept by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected

representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today'sadministrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly allthe rules. Today's legal-administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed andfreighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. Thebureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agencypolicy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agencypolicy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But notfrom the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentionsof those who wrote them -- in favor of the decider's discretion has permeated our

ruling class from the Supreme Court to the lowest local agency. Ever since Oliver Wendell Holmes argued in 1920 (Missouri v. Holland ) that presidents, Congresses,



and judges could not be bound by the U.S. Constitution regarding matters that thepeople who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventionalwisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution whilepretending allegiance to it. They began by stretching such constitutional terms as"interstate commerce" and "due process," then transmuting others, e.g., "search and

seizure," into "privacy." Thus in 1973 the Supreme Court endowed its invention of "privacy" with a "penumbra" that it deemed "broad enough to encompass a woman'sdecision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period . Perfunctory to the point of mockery, thisconstitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class wasacting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts wereinvalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the"positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will wereinconsistent with the constitution they themselves were construing.

By 2010 some in the ruling class felt confident enough to dispense with the charade.

Asked what in the Constitution allows Congress and the president to force everyAmerican to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Areyou kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges andbureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legalwords that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on theright side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages havegrown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becomingvestigial, and the American people become ever more dependent.

Disaggregating and Dispiriting

The ruling class is keener to reform the American people's family and spiritual livesthan their economic and civic ones. In no other areas is the ruling class's self-definition so definite, its contempt for opposition so patent, its Kulturkampf so open. Itbelieves that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in andperpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, andrepressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because itlooks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence againstoutsiders who most often know better. Thus the family prevents its members from

playing their proper roles in social reform. Worst of all, it reproduces itself.

Since marriage is the family's fertile seed, government at all levels, along with"mainstream" academics and media, have waged war on it. They legislate, regulate,and exhort in support not of "the family" -- meaning married parents raising children --but rather of "families," meaning mostly households based on something other thanmarriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction betweencohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizesmarriage and forces those married couples who raise their own children to subsidize"child care" for those who do not. Top Republicans and Democrats have also led

society away from the very notion of marital fidelity by precept as well as by paradingtheir affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of



defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Timeset al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramaritalaffairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamentalto the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared thatinsistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of

marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. Thebiggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all householdsare women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chanceof living in poverty. Since unmarried mothers often are or expect to be clients of government services, it is not surprising that they are among the Democratic Party'smost faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and childrenare contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the stateis fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articlesand books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children,

effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas withinliving memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without theparents' consent, the people who run America's schools nowadays administer pregnancy tests and ship girls off to abortion clinics without the parents' knowledge.Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught. But thegovernment may and often does object to how parents raise children. The rulingclass's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, whilewhat parents do is potentially abusive. It only takes an anonymous accusation of abuse for parents to be taken away in handcuffs until they prove their innocence.Only sheer political weight (and in California, just barely) has preserved parents' rightto homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish whatWoodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers aspossible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings tolive? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit inWilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the waysof outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to thesequestions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moralsubstance is the very heart of what our ruling class is about. Its principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things and

operates by standards beyond others' comprehension.

While the unenlightened ones believe that man is created in the image and likenessof God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened onesknow that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and thewill to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion thatordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better andworse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments aresubjective and that ordinary people can no more be trusted with reason than they can with guns. Because ordinary people will pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the "right" hands. Consensus among the right

people is the only standard of truth. Facts and logic matter only insofar as proper authority acknowledges them.



That is why the ruling class is united and adamant about nothing so much as its rightto pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When thegovernment declares, and its associated press echoes that "scientists say" this or that, ordinary people -- or for that matter scientists who "don't say," or are not part of the ruling class -- lose any right to see the information that went into what "scientists

say." Thus when Virginia's attorney general subpoenaed the data by which Professor Michael Mann had concluded, while paid by the state of Virginia, that the earth'stemperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusionon which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate thepossibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiryinto "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming thatdemands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in anydiscipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demandsfor data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick"conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulatingpeer review, the fact that science-by-secret-data is an oxymoron, the very distinction

between truth and error, all matter far less to the ruling class than the distinctionbetween itself and those they rule.

By identifying science and reason with themselves, our rulers delegitimize opposition.Though they cannot prevent Americans from worshiping God, they can make it associally disabling as smoking -- to be done furtively and with a bad social conscience.Though they cannot make Americans wish they were Europeans, they continue to press upon this nation of refugees from the rest of the world the notion that Americans ought to live by "world standards." Each day, the ruling class producesnew "studies" that show that one or another of Americans' habits is in need of reform,and that those Americans most resistant to reform are pitiably, perhaps criminally,wrong. Thus does it go about disaggregating and dispiriting the ruled.

Meddling and Apologies

America's best and brightest believe themselves qualified and duty bound to directthe lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free andhence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but anextrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated bysuch as Princeton's Woodrow Wilson and Columbia's Nicholas Murray Butler. But

while the early Progressives expected the rest of the world to follow peacefully,today's ruling class makes decisions about war and peace at least as much forciblyto tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, theyconflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw abright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whoseaffairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class hascomplained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennialpreference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to internationalthreats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform

the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changinghearts and minds is the prerequisite of peace and that it knows how to change them.



The apparently endless series of wars in which our ruling class has embroiledAmerica, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives andtreasure, has contributed to defining it, and to discrediting it -- but not in its own eyes.

Rather, even as our ruling class has lectured, cajoled, and sometimes intruded

violently to reform foreign countries in its own image, it has apologized to them for America not having matched that image -- their private image. Woodrow Wilsonbegan this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that Americahad mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (theLeague of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was theEuropeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seizedcontrol of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that theLeague scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time,this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obamaapologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting itsresponsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people

never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obamawas not apologizing for anything that he or anyone he respected had done, but rather blaming his fellow Americans for not doing what he thinks they should do whileglossing over the fact that the Europeans had done the taxing but not the reducing.Wilson redux.

Similarly, Obama "apologized" to Europeans because some Americans -- not himand his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and tothe world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II.So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held Africanslaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and hisfriends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized toChinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status.Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator MikhailGorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distancedhimself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, anextreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is allabout a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls thePharisee in the Temple: "Lord, I thank thee that I am not like other men..."

In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike

that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of theworld and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work inprogress, just like the rest the world, and they are the engineers.

The Country Class

Describing America's country class is problematic because it is so heterogeneous. Ithas no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. Itshares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It definesitself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas andproclivities -- e.g., ever higher taxes and expanding government, subsidizing political

favorites, social engineering, approval of abortion, etc. Many want to restore a way of life largely superseded. Demographically, the country class is the other side of the



ruling class's coin: its most distinguishing characteristics are marriage, children, andreligious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes theprofessionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is differentbecause of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rulethemselves rather than be ruled by others.

Even when members of the country class happen to be government officials or officers of major corporations, their concerns are essentially private; in their view,government owes to its people equal treatment rather than action to correct whatanyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose specialtreatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaminggovernment regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus theSupreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some tobe taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the countryclass that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keephis company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have closeties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company togrow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apartthe schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for puttingthe union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children'sschools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low whoare aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just alittle connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who takethe side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of localgovernment against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that bigbusiness, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and thatordinary people are more unequal than ever.

Members of the country class who want to rise in their profession through sheer competence try at once to avoid the ruling class's rituals while guarding againstinfringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams shouldplay a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance --including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professionaldisputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's2009 decision in Ricci , upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to

the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence maysometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given itwhatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class's insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Personswho were brought up to believe themselves as worthy as anyone, who manage their own lives to their own satisfaction, naturally resent politicians of both parties who saythat the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most areinsulted by the ruling class's dismissal of opposition as mere "anger and frustration"-- an imputation of stupidity -- while others just scoff at the claim that the ruling class's

bureaucratic language demonstrates superior intelligence. A few ask the fundamental



question: Since when and by what right does intelligence trump human equality?Moreover, if the politicians are so smart, why have they made life worse?

The country class actually believes that America's ways are superior to the rest of theworld's, and regards most of mankind as less free, less prosperous, and less

virtuous. Thus while it delights in croissants and thinks Toyota's factory methods areworth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class alsotakes part in the U.S. armed forces body and soul: nearly all the enlisted, non-commissioned officers and officers under flag rank belong to this class in everymeasurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you areamidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flagpasses by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and mostpeople show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League'splaintive renditions of the "Star Spangled Banner."

Unlike the ruling class, the country class does not share a single intellectual

orthodoxy, set of tastes, or ideal lifestyle. Its different sectors draw their notions of human equality from different sources: Christians and Jews believe it is God's law.Libertarians assert it from Hobbesian and Darwinist bases. Many consider equalitythe foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the countryclass now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson,Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the rulingclass and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. Thesame goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christianradio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular FoxNews serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera housesaround the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in theruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these thingsfor their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic culturalventure -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board inscience, literature, music, and history even as the ruling class abandons them.

Congruent Agendas?

Each of the country class's diverse parts has its own agenda, which flows from thepeculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent

businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relationsbetween government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishmentsare accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriageworry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful toGod sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and morerealize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to theruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must runyour business, knowing that you will be required to pay more, work harder, and show

deference for the privilege of making less money, is the independent businessman'snightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government



and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thickand deep, the people "at the table" receive and recycle into politics so much money,that independent businesspeople cannot hope to undo any given regulation or grantof privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise hisfuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and

bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business'sagenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course toreduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results inenough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, theeconomic argument is framed in moral terms: "The sum of good government," saidThomas Jefferson, is not taking "from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned."For government to advantage some at others' expense, said he, "is to violatearbitrarily the first principle of association." In our time, more and more independentbusinesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. Butfew realize how revolutionary that is.

As bureaucrats and teachers' unions disempowered neighborhood school boards,while the governments of towns, counties, and states were becoming conduits for federal mandates, as the ruling class reduced the number and importance of thingsthat American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paidmore and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxessupport them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that theynow work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reversethe roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities'traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, wouldtake repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restorationof traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employeeunions to heel is only incidentally a matter of cutting pay and benefits. As self-governance is crimped primarily by the powers of government personified in itsemployees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions nowperformed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers,are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functionsand personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers tobear to discredit you, is a very revolutionary thing to do.

America's pro-family movement is a reaction to the ruling class's challenges:emptying marriage of legal sanction, promoting abortion, and progressively excludingparents from their children's education. Americans reacted to these challengesprimarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriagesbecame rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and governmentauthority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for whichthe Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating itsown children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contactamong like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is mostconcerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few inthis part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into

private associations will long save their families from societal influences made toorder to discredit their ways. But stopping the ruling class's intrusions would require



discrediting its entire conception of man, of right and wrong, as well as of the role of courts in popular government. That revolutionary task would involve far more thanlegislation.

The ruling class's manifold efforts to discredit and drive worship of God out of public

life -- not even the Soviet Union arrested students for wearing crosses or praying, or reading the Bible on school property, as some U.S. localities have done in responseto Supreme Court rulings -- convinced many among the vast majority of Americanswho believe and pray that today's regime is hostile to the most important things of all.Every December, they are reminded that the ruling class deems the very word"Christmas" to be offensive. Every time they try to manifest their religious identity inpublic affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being "American Taliban" trying toset up a "theocracy." Let members of the country class object to anything the rulingclass says or does, and likely as not their objection will be characterized as"religious," that is to say irrational, that is to say not to be considered on a par withthe "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because

aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the rulingclass's claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economicsubsidies and privileges, or to the violation of the principle of equal treatment under equal law, or to its seizure of children's education, must deal with secularism'sintellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term iscommonly understood.

The Classes Clash

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country classdisrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The rulingclass wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, andabove all stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt,malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled wantself-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself andof the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the rulingclass -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on anyissue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. Theclash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable.

In this clash, the ruling class holds most of the cards: because it has established

itself as the fount of authority, its primacy is based on habits of deference. Breakingthem, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involvefar more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along withEdmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortablequestion common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: arewe now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away ahalf century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good amongthem -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutionsand habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization.By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well representedby the Democratic Party. But a two to one numerical disadvantage augurs defeat,

while victory would leave it in control of a people whose confidence it cannot regain.



Certainly the country class lacks its own political vehicle -- and perhaps thecoherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has noalternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which iseager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the countryclass. For it to do so, it would have to become principles-based, as it has not been

since the mid-1860s. The few who tried to make it so the party treated as rebels:Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan. The party helped defeat Goldwater. When itfailed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations withestablishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles asmuch as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans haddriven the country "into the ditch" all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republicanvoters, never mind the larger country class, have confidence that the party is on their side. Because, in the long run, the country class will not support a party as conflictedas today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent itwill either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigslike Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less importantthan what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between whatwe might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party havingtransformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seemto require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote isthere to government by one party but government by another party? Yet this logic,though all too familiar to most of the world, has always been foreign to America andnaturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Anycountry party would have to be wise and skillful indeed not to become the Democrats'mirror image.

Yet to defend the country class, to break down the ruling class's presumptions, it hasno choice but to imitate the Democrats, at least in some ways and for a while.Consider: The ruling class denies its opponents' legitimacy. Seldom does aDemocratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs withoutreiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponentswho are either uninformed, stupid, racist, shills for business, violent, fundamentalist,or all of the above. They do this in the hope that opponents, hearing no other characterizations of themselves and no authoritative voice discrediting the ruling

class, will be dispirited. For the country class seriously to contend for self-governance, the political party that represents it will have to discredit not just suchpatent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climatechange," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such aserious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to itssuperior intellect and morality in ways that dispirit the target and hearten one's own .The Democrats having set the rules of modern politics, opponents who want electoralsuccess are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to captureCongress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially

if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats' plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution



and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain fromthem, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, itsurely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carryingout its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolutionfrom above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America.

Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to thecountry class's diversity as well as to the American Founders' legacy.

Achieving the country class's inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the CountryParty to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, toreintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passingnational legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

Reducing the taxes that most Americans resent requires eliminating the network of

subsidies to millions of other Americans that these taxes finance, and eliminating the jobs of government employees who administer them. Eliminating that network ispractical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrongand economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford thepractice in general. The electorate is likely to cut off millions of government clients,high and low, only if its choice is between no economic privilege for anyone andratifying government's role as the arbiter of all our fortunes. The same goes for government grants to and contracts with so-called nonprofit institutions or non-governmental organizations. The case against all arrangements by which thegovernment favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against anysuch arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensomebureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money canbe cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and publicbroadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as aweight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human bodydegraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part.Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary taskstakes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities toserve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their

grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize themere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. Theywould have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away fromcredentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. Thiswould involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting inelections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise governmentpower must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier anofficial to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the governmentis. Yet to subject the modern administrative state's agencies to electoral control

would require ordinary citizens to take an interest in any number of technical matters.Law can require environmental regulators or insurance commissioners, or judges or



auditors to be elected. But only citizens' discernment and vigilance could make theseofficials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possiblyreverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeatedAmerican life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or anofficial's unlawful act to counter it with another unlawful one than to draw all parties

back to the foundation of truth.

How, for example, to remind America of, and to drive home to the ruling class,Lincoln's lesson that trifling with the Constitution for the most heartfelt of motivesdestroys its protections for all? What if a country class majority in both houses of Congress were to co-sponsor a "Bill of Attainder to deprive Nancy Pelosi, BarackObama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law..." and larded this constitutionalmonstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? Whenthe affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority topass a bill every word of which is contrary to the Constitution, they would be

confronted, publicly, with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's answer to a question on theCongress's constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kindsof insurance: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" The point having been made, theCountry Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even thenoblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot beallowed to trump the Constitution.

How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrastingagendas is beyond my scope. Suffice it to say that the ruling class's greatest difficulty-- aside from being outnumbered -- will be to argue, against the grain of reality, thatthe revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, thecountry class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place withoutimposing it. America has been imposed on enough.



A STRATEGY FOR THE RIGHT

What I call the Old Right is suddenly back! The terms old and new inevitably getconfusing, with a new "new" every few years, so let's call it the "Original" Right, theright wing as it existed from 1933 to approximately 1955. This Old Right was formedin reaction against the New Deal, and against the Great Leap Forward into theLeviathan state that was the essence of that New Deal.

This anti-New Deal movement was a coalition of threegroups: (1) the "extremists," the individualists andlibertarians, like H.L. Mencken, Albert Jay Nock, Rose

Wilder Lane, and Garet Garrett; (2) right-wingDemocrats, harking back to the laissez-faire views of the nineteenth century Democratic party, men such asGovernor Albert Ritchie of Maryland or Senator James

A. Reed of Missouri; and (3) moderate New Dealers, who thought that the Roosevelt New Deal went too far,for example Herbert Hoover. Interestingly, eventhough the libertarian intellectuals were in theminority, they necessarily set the terms and therhetoric of the debate, since theirs was the only thought-out contrasting ideology to the New Deal.

The most radical view of the New Deal was that of libertarian essayist and novelist Garet Garrett, an

editor of the Saturday Evening Post . His brilliant littlepamphlet The Revolution Was, published in 1938, began with these penetrating words – words that would never be fully absorbed by the right:

There are those who still think they are holding a pass against a revolution thatmay be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. Therevolution is behind them. It went by in the night of depression, singing songsto freedom.

The revolution was, said Garrett, and therefore nothing less than a counterrevolutionis needed to take the country back. Behold, then, not a 'conservative,' but a radical

right.

In the late 1930s, there was added to this reaction against the domestic New Deal, areaction against the foreign policy of the New Deal: the insistent drive toward war inEurope and Asia. Hence, the right wing added a reaction against big governmentabroad to the attack on big government at home. The one fed on the other. The right

wing called for non-intervention in foreign as well as domestic affairs, and denouncedFDR's adoption of Woodrow Wilson's Global Crusading which had proved sodisastrous in World War I. To Wilson-Roosevelt globalism, the Old Right countered

with a policy of America First. American foreign policy must neither be based on theinterests of a foreign power – such as Great Britain – nor be in the service of such

abstract ideals as "making the world safe for democracy," or waging a "war to end all



wars," both of which would amount, in the prophetic words of Charles A. Beard, to waging "perpetual war for perpetual peace."

And so the original right was completed, combating the Leviathan state in domesticaffairs. It said "no!" to the welfare-warfare state. The result of adding foreign affairs

to the list was some reshuffling of members: former rightists such as Lewis W.Douglas, who had opposed the domestic New Deal, now rejoined it asinternationalists; while veteran isolationists, such as Senators Borah and Nye, orintellectuals such as Beard, Harry Elmer Barnes, or John T. Flynn, gradually butsurely became domestic right-wingers in the course of their determined opposition tothe foreign New Deal.

If we know what the Old Right was against, what were they for ? In general terms,they were for a restoration of the liberty of the Old Republic, of a government strictly limited to the defense of the rights of private property. In the concrete, as in the caseof any broad coalition, there were differences of opinion within this overall

framework. But we can boil down those differences to this question: how much of existing government would you repeal? How far would you roll government back?

The minimum demand which almost all Old Rightists agreed on, which virtually defined the Old Right, was total aboliton of the New Deal, the whole kit and kaboodleof the welfare state, the Wagner Act, the Social Security Act, going off gold in 1933,and all the rest. Beyond that, there were charming disagreements. Some would stopat repealing the New Deal. Others would press on, to abolition of Woodrow Wilson'sNew Freedom, including the Federal Reserve System and especially that mighty instrument of tyranny, the income tax and the Internal Revenue Service. Still others,extremists such as myself, would not stop until we repealed the Federal Judiciary Act

of 1789, and maybe even think the unthinkable and restore the good old Articles of Confederation.

Here I should stop and say that, contrary to accepted myth, the original right did notdisappear with, and was not discredited by, our entry into World War II. On thecontrary, the congressional elections of 1942 – an election neglected by scholars –

was a significant victory not only for conservative Republicans, but for isolationistRepublicans as well. Even though intellectual rightist opinion, in books and especially in the journals, was virtually blotted out during World War II, the right was stillhealthy in politics and in the press, such as the Hearst press, the New York Daily

News, and especially the Chicago Tribune. After World War II, there was an

intellectual revival of the right, and the Old Right stayed healthy until the mid-1950s.

Within the overall consensus, then, on the Old Right, there were many differences within the framework, but differences that remained remarkably friendly andharmonious. Oddly enough, these are precisely the friendly differences within thecurrent paleo movement: free trade or protective tariff, immigration policy, and

within the policy of "isolationism," whether it should be "doctrinaire" isolationism,such as my own, or whether the United States should regularly intervene in the

Western Hemisphere or in neighboring countries of Latin America. Or whether thisnationalist policy should be flexible among these various alternatives.

Other differences, which also still exist, are more philosophical: should we beLockians, Hobbesians, or Burkeans: natural rightsers, or traditionalists, or



utilitarians? On political frameworks, should we be monarchists, check-and-balancefederalists, or radical decentralists? Hamiltonians or Jeffersonians?

One difference, which agitated the right wing before the Buckleyite monolithmanaged to stifle all debate, is particularly relevant to right-wing strategy. The

Marxists, who have spent a great deal of time thinking about strategy for theirmovement, always post the question: who is the agency of social change? Whichgroup may be expected to bring about the desired change in society? ClassicalMarxism found the answer easy: the proletariat. Then things got a lot morecomplicated: the peasantry, oppressed womanhood, minorities, etc.

The relevant question for the right wing is the other side of the coin: who can weexpect to be the bad guys? Who are agents of negative social change? Or: whichgroups in society pose the greatest threats to liberty? Basically, there have been twoanswers on the right: (1) the unwashed masses; and (2) the power elites. I will returnto this question in a minute.

On the differences of opinion, of the question of diversity in the Old Right, I wasstruck by a remark that Tom Fleming of Chronicles made. Tom noted that he wasstruck, in reading about that period, that there was no party line, that there was noperson or magazine excommunicating heretics, that there was admirable diversity and freedom of discussion on the Old Right. Amen! In other words there was no

National Review.

What was the Old Right position on culture? There was no particular position, because everyone was imbued with, and loved the old culture. Culture was not anobject of debate, either on the Old Right or, for that matter, anywhere else. Of course,

they would have been horrified and incredulous at the accredited victimology that hasrapidly taken over our culture. Anyone who would have suggested to an Old Rightistof 1950, for example, that in forty years, the federal courts would be redrawingelection districts all over the country so that Hispanics would be elected according totheir quota in the population, would have been considered a fit candidate for theloony bin. As well he might.

And while I'm on this topic, this is the year 1992, so I am tempted to say, repeat afterme: COLUMBUS DISCOVERED AMERICA!

Even though a fan of diversity, the only revisionism I will permit on this topic is whether Columbus discovered America, or whether it was Amerigo Vespucci.

Poor Italian-Americans! They have never been able to make it to accredited victimstatus. The only thing they ever got was Columbus Day. And now, they're trying totake it away!

If I may be pardoned a personal note, I joined the Old Right in 1946. I grew up inNew York City in the 1930s in the midst of what can only be called a communistculture. As middle-class Jews in New York, my relatives, friends, classmates, andneighbors faced only one great moral decision in their lives: should they join theCommunist Party and devote 100 percent of their lives to the cause; or should they remain fellow travelers and devote only a fraction of their lives? That was the greatrange of debate.



I had two sets of aunts and uncles on both sides of the family who were in theCommunist Party. The older uncle was an engineer who helped build the legendary Moscow subway; the younger one was an editor for the Communist-dominated Drug

Workers Union, headed by one of the famous Foner brothers. But I hasten to add thatI am not , in the current fashion, like Roseanne Barr Arnold or William F. Buckley, Jr.,

claiming that I was a victim of child abuse. (Buckley's claim is that he was the victimof the high crime of insouciant anti-Semitism at his father's dinner table.)

On the contrary, my father was an individualist, and was always strongly anti-communist and anti-socialist, who turned against the New Deal in 1938 because ithad failed to correct the depression – a pretty good start. In my high school andcollege career, at Columbia University, I never met a Republican, much less anyonestrongly right-wing.

By the way, even though I am admittedly several years younger than Daniel Bell,Irving Kristol, and the rest, I must say that during all those years I never heard of

Leon Trotsky, much less of Trotskyites, until I got to graduate school after World WarII. I was fairly politically aware, and in New York in those days, the "left" meant theCommunist Party, period. So I think that Kristol and the rest are weaving pretty legends about the cosmic importance of the debates between Trotskyites andStalinists in alcoves A and B at the City College cafeteria. As far as I'm concerned, theonly Trotskyites were a handful of academics. By the way, there is a perceptive sayingin left-wing circles in New York: that the Trotskyites all went into academia, and theStalinists went into real estate. Perhaps that's why the Trotskyites are running the

world.

At Columbia College, I was only one of two Republicans on the entire campus, the

other being a literature major with whom I had little in common. Not only that: but, aremarkable thing for a cosmopolitan place like Columbia, Lawrence Chamberlain,distinguished political scientist, and dean of Columbia college, admitted one timethat he had never met a Republican either.

By 1946, I had become politically active, and joined the Young Republicans of New York. Unfortunately, the Republicans in New York weren't much of an improvement:the Dewey-Rockefeller forces constituted the extreme right of the party; most of them

being either pro-Communist, like Stanley Isaacs, or social democrats like JacobJavits. I did, however, have fun writing a paper for the Young Republicansdenouncing price control and rent control. And after the Republican capture of

Congress in 1946, I was ecstatic. My first publication ever was a "hallelujah!" letter inthe New York World-Telegram exulting that now, at last, the Republican 80thCongress would repeal the entire New Deal. So much for my strategic acumen in1946.

At any rate, I found the Old Right and was happy there for a decade. For a couple of years, I was delighted to subscribe to the Chicago Tribune, whose every news item was filled with great Old Right punch and analysis. It is forgotten now that the only organized opposition to the Korean War was not on the left, which, except for theCommunist Party and I.F. Stone, fell for the chimera of Wilsonian-Rooseveltian"collective security," but was on the so-called extreme right, particularly in the Houseof Representatives.



One of the leaders was my friend Howard Buffett, Congressman from Omaha, who was a pure libertarian and was Senator Taft's midwestern campaign manager at themonstrous Republican convention of 1952, when the Eisenhower-Wall Street cabalstole the election from Robert Taft. After that, I left the Republican Party, only toreturn this year for the Buchanan campaign. During the 1950s, I joined every right-

wing third party I could find, most of which collapsed after the first meeting. Isupported the last presidential thrust of the Old Right, the Andrews-Werdel ticket in1956, but unfortunately, they never made it up to New York City.

After this excursion on my personal activity in the Old Right, I return to a key strategic question: who are the major bad guys, the unwashed masses or the powerelite? Very early, I concluded that the big danger is the elite, and not the masses, andfor the following reasons.

First, even granting for a moment that the masses are the worst possible, that they are perpetually Hell-bent on lynching anyone down the block, the mass of people

simply don't have the time for politics or political shenanigans. The average personmust spend most of his time on the daily business of life, being with his family, seeinghis friends, etc. He can only get interested in politics or engage in it sporadically.

The only people who have time for politics are the professionals: the bureaucrats,politicians, and special interest groups dependent on political rule. They make money out of politics, and so they are intensely interested, and lobby and are active twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, these special interest groups will tend to win out over theuninterested masses. This is the basic insight of the Public Choice school of economics. The only other groups interested full-time in politics are ideologists likeourselves, again not a very large segment of the population. So the problem is the

ruling elite, the professionals, and their dependent special interest groups.

A second crucial point: society is divided into a ruling elite, which is necessarily aminority of the population, which lives off the second group – the rest of thepopulation. Here I point to one of the most brilliant essays on political philosophy ever written, John C. Calhoun's Disquisition on Government.

Calhoun pointed out that the very fact of government and of taxation creates inherentconflict between two great classes: those who pay taxes, and those who live off them;the net taxpayers vs. the tax-consumers. The bigger government gets, Calhoun noted,the greater and more intense the conflict between those two social classes. By the

way, I've never thought of Governor Pete Wilson of California as a distinguishedpolitical theorist, but the other day he said something, presumably unwittingly, that

was remarkably Calhounian. Wilson lamented that the tax-recipients in California were beginning to outnumber the taxpayers. Well, it's a start.

If a minority of elites rule over, tax, and exploit the majority of the public, then this brings up starkly the main problem of political theory: what I like to call the mystery of civil obedience. Why does the majority of the public obey these turkeys, anyway?This problem I believe, was solved by three great political theorists, mainly but not alllibertarian: Etienne de la Boetie, French libertarian theorist of the mid-sixteenthcentury; David Hume; and Ludwig von Mises. They pointed out that, precisely

because the ruling class is a minority, that in the long run, force per se cannot rule.Even in the most despotic dictatorship, the government can only persist when it is



backed by the majority of the population. In the long run, ideas, not force, rule, andany government has to have legitimacy in the minds of the public.

This truth was starkly demonstrated in the collapse of the Soviet Union last year.Simply put, when the tanks were sent to capture Yeltsin, they were persuaded to turn

their guns around and defend Yeltsin and the Russian Parliament instead. More broadly, it is clear that the Soviet government had totally lost legitimacy and supportamong the public. To a libertarian, it was a particularly wonderful thing to seeunfolding before our very eyes, the death of a state, particularly a monstrous one suchas the Soviet Union. Toward the end, Gorby continued to issue decrees as before, butnow, no one paid any attention. The once-mighty Supreme Soviet continued to meet,

but nobody bothered to show up. How glorious!

But we still haven't solved the mystery of civil obedience. If the ruling elite is taxing,looting, and exploiting the public, why does the public put up with this for a singlemoment? Why does it take them so long to withdraw their consent?

Here we come to the solution: the critical role of the intellectuals, the opinion-molding class in society. If the masses knew what was going on, they would withdraw their consent quickly: they would soon perceive that the emperor has no clothes, thatthey are being ripped off. That is where the intellectuals come in.

The ruling elite, whether it be the monarchs of yore or the Communist parties of today, are in desperate need of intellectual elites to weave apologias for state power.The state rules by divine edict; the state insures the common good or the general

welfare; the state protects us from the bad guys over the mountain; the stateguarantees full employment; the state activates the multiplier effect; the state insures

social justice, and on and on. The apologias differ over the centuries; the effect isalways the same. As Karl Wittfogel shows in his great work, Oriental Despotism, in

Asian empires the intellectuals were able to get away with the theory that the emperoror pharaoh was himself divine. If the ruler is God, few will be induced to disobey orquestion his commands.

We can see what the state rulers get out of their alliance with the intellectuals; but what do the intellectuals get out of it? Intellectuals are the sort of people who believethat, in the free market, they are getting paid far less than their wisdom requires.Now the state is willing to pay them salaries, both for apologizing for state power, andin the modern state, for staffing the myriad jobs in the welfare, regulatory stateapparatus.

In past centuries, the churches have constituted the exclusive opinion-moldingclasses in the society. Hence the importance to the state and its rulers of anestablished church, and the importance to libertarians of the concept of separatingchurch and state, which really means not allowing the state to confer upon one groupa monopoly of the opinion-molding function. In the twentieth century, of course, thechurch has been replaced in its opinion-molding role, or, in that lovely phrase, the"engineering of consent," by a swarm of intellectuals, academics, social scientists,technocrats, policy scientists, social workers, journalists and the media generally, andon and on. Often included, for old times' sake, so to speak, is a sprinkling of socialgospel ministers and counselors from the mainstream churches.



So, to sum up: the problem is that the bad guys, the ruling classes, have gatheredunto themselves the intellectual and media elites, who are able to bamboozle themasses into consenting to their rule, to indoctrinate them, as the Marxists would say,

with "false consciousness." What can we, the right-wing opposition, do about it?

One strategy, endemic to libertarians and classical liberals, is what we can call the"Hayekian" model, after F.A. Hayek, or what I have called "educationism." Ideas, themodel declares, are crucial, and ideas filter down a hierarchy, beginning with topphilosophers, then seeping down to lesser philosophers, then academics, and finally to journalists and politicians, and then to the masses. The thing to do is to convert thetop philosophers to the correct ideas, they will convert the lesser, and so on, in a kindof "trickle-down effect," until, at last, the masses are converted and liberty has beenachieved.

First, it should be noted that this trickle-down strategy is a very gentle and genteelone, relying on quiet mediation and persuasion in the austere corridors of intellectual

cerebration. This strategy fits, by the way, with Hayek's personality, for Hayek is notexactly known as an intellectual gut-fighter.

Of course, ideas and persuasion are important, but there are several fatal flaws in theHayekian strategy. First, of course, the strategy at best will take several hundred

years, and some of us are a bit more impatient than that. But time is by no means theonly problem. Many people have noted, for example, mysterious blockages of thetrickle. Thus, most real scientists have a very different view of such environmentalquestions as Alar than that of a few left-wing hysterics, and yet somehow it is alwaysthe same few hysterics that are exclusively quoted by the media. The same applies tothe vexed problem of inheritance and IQ testing. So how come the media invariably

skew the result, and pick and choose the few leftists in the field? Clearly, because themedia, especially the respectable and influential media, begin, and continue, with astrong left-liberal bias.

More generally, the Hayekian trickle-down model overlooks a crucial point: that, andI hate to break this to you, intellectuals, academics and the media are not allmotivated by truth alone. As we have seen, the intellectual classes may be part of thesolution, but also they are a big part of the problem. For, as we have seen, theintellectuals are part of the ruling class, and their economic interests, as well as theirinterests in prestige, power and admiration, are wrapped up in the present welfare-

warfare state system.

Therefore, in addition to converting intellectuals to the cause, the proper course forthe right-wing opposition must necessarily be a strategy of boldness andconfrontation, of dynamism and excitement, a strategy, in short, of rousing themasses from their slumber and exposing the arrogant elites that are ruling them,controlling them, taxing them, and ripping them off.

Another alternative right-wing strategy is that commonly pursued by many libertarian or conservative think tanks: that of quiet persuasion, not in the groves of academe, but in Washington, D.C., in the corridors of power. This has been called the"Fabian" strategy, with think tanks issuing reports calling for a two percent cut in atax here, or a tiny drop in a regulation there. The supporters of this strategy often



point to the success of the Fabian Society, which, by its detailed empirical researches,gently pushed the British state into a gradual accretion of socialist power.

The flaw here, however, is that what works to increase state power does not work inreverse. For the Fabians were gently nudging the ruling elite precisely in the direction

they wanted to travel anyway. Nudging the other way would go strongly against thestate's grain, and the result is far more likely to be the state's co-opting andFabianizing the think-tankers themselves rather than the other way around. This sortof strategy may, of course, be personally very pleasant for the think-tankers, and may

be profitable in cushy jobs and contracts from the government. But that is precisely the problem.

It is important to realize that the establishment doesn't want excitement in politics, it wants the masses to continue to be lulled to sleep. It wants kinder, gentler; it wantsthe measured, judicious, mushy tone, and content, of a James Reston, a DavidBroder, or a Washington Week in Review. It doesn't want a Pat Buchanan, not only

for the excitement and hard edge of his content, but also for his similar tone andstyle.

And so the proper strategy for the right wing must be what we can call "right-wingpopulism": exciting, dynamic, tough, and confrontational, rousing, and inspiring notonly the exploited masses, but the often shell-shocked right-wing intellectual cadre as

well. And in this era where the intellectual and media elites are all establishmentliberal-conservatives, all in a deep sense one variety or another of social democrat, all

bitterly hostile to a genuine right, we need a dynamic, charismatic leader who has theability to short-circuit the media elites, and to reach and rouse the masses directly.

We need a leadership that can reach the masses and cut through the crippling and

distorting hermeneutical fog spread by the media elites.

But can we call such a strategy "conservative"? I, for one, am tired of the liberalstrategy, on which they have rung the changes for forty years, of presuming to define"conservatism" as a supposed aid to the conservative movement. Whenever liberalshave encountered hard-edged abolitionists who, for example, have wanted to repealthe New Deal or Fair Deal, they say but that's not genuine conservatism. That'sradicalism." The genuine conservative, these liberals go on to say, doesn't want torepeal or abolish anything. He is a kind and gentle soul who wants to conserve whatleft-liberals have accomplished.

The left-liberal vision, then, of good conservatives is as follows: first, left-liberals, inpower, make a Great Leap Forward toward collectivism; then, when, in the course of the political cycle, four or eight years later, conservatives come to power, they of course are horrified at the very idea of repealing anything; they simply slow down therate of growth of statism, consolidating the previous gains of the left, and providing a

bit of R&R for the next liberal Great Leap Forward. And if you think about it, you willsee that this is precisely what every Republican administration has done since theNew Deal. Conservatives have readily played the desired Santa Claus role in theliberal vision of history.

I would like to ask: how long are we going to keep being suckers? How long will wekeep playing our appointed roles in the scenario of the left? When are we going tostop playing their game, and start throwing over the table?



I must admit that, in one sense, the liberals have had a point. The word"conservative" is unsatisfactory. The original right never used the term"conservative": we called ourselves individualists, or "true liberals," or rightists. The

word "conservative" only swept the board after the publication of Russell Kirk'shighly influential Conservative Mind in 1953, in the last years of the original right.

There are two major problems with the word "conservative." First, that it indeedconnotes conserving the status quo, which is precisely why the Brezhnevites werecalled "conservatives" in the Soviet Union. Perhaps there was a case for calling us"conservatives" in 1910, but surely not now. Now we want to uproot the status quo,not conserve it. And secondly, the word conservative harks back to struggles innineteenth-century Europe, and in America conditions and institutions have been sodifferent that the term is seriously misleading. There is a strong case here, as in otherareas, for what has been called "American exceptionalism."

So what should we call ourselves? I haven't got an easy answer, but perhaps we could

call ourselves radical reactionaries, or "radical rightists," the label that was given to us by our enemies in the 1950s. Or, if there is too much objection to the dread term"radical," we can follow the suggestion of some of our group to call ourselves "theHard Right." Any of these terms is preferable to "conservative," and it also serves thefunction of separating ourselves out from the official conservative movement which,as I shall note in a minute, has been largely taken over by our enemies.

It is instructive to turn now to a prominent case of right-wing populism headed by adynamic leader who appeared in the last years of the original right, and whoseadvent, indeed, marked a transition between the original and the newer, Buckleyiteright. Quick now: who was the most hated, the most smeared man in American

politics in this century, more hated and reviled than even David Duke, even thoughhe was not a Nazi or a Ku Kluxer? He was not a libertarian, he was not an isolationist,he was not even a conservative, but in fact was a moderate Republican. And yet, he

was so universally reviled that his very name became a generic dictionary synonymfor evil.

I refer, of course, to Joe McCarthy. The key to the McCarthy phenomenon was thecomment made by the entire political culture, from moderate left to moderate right:"we agree with McCarthy's goals, we just disagree with his means." Of course,McCarthy's goals were the usual ones absorbed from the political culture: the allegednecessity of waging war against an international Communist conspiracy whose

tentacles reached from the Soviet Union and spanned the entire globe. McCarthy'sproblem, and ultimately his tragedy, is that he took this stuff seriously; if communistsand their agents and fellow travelers are everywhere, then shouldn't we, in the midstof the Cold War, root them out of American political life?

The unique and the glorious thing about McCarthy was not his goals or his ideology, but precisely his radical, populist means. For McCarthy was able, for a few years, toshort-circuit the intense opposition of all the elites in American life: from theEisenhower-Rockefeller administration to the Pentagon and the military-industrialcomplex to liberal and left media and academic elites – to overcome all thatopposition and reach and inspire the masses directly. And he did it throughtelevision, and without any real movement behind him; he had only a guerrilla bandof a few advisers, but no organization and no infrastructure.



Fascinatingly enough, the response of the intellectual elites to the spectre of McCarthyism was led by liberals such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset, whoare now prominent neoconservatives. For, in this era, the neocons were in the midstof the long march which was to take them from Trotskyism to right-wing Trotskyismto right-wing social democracy, and finally to the leadership of the conservative

movement. At this stage of their hegira the neocons were Truman-Humphrey-ScoopJackson liberals.

The major intellectual response to McCarthyism was a book edited by Daniel Bell,The New American Right (1955) later updated and expanded to The Radical Right (1963), published at a time when McCarthyism was long gone and it was necessary tocombat a new menace, the John Birch Society. The basic method was to divertattention from the content of the radical right message and direct attention instead toa personal smear of the groups on the right.

The classical, or hard , Marxist method of smearing opponents of socialism or

communism was to condemn them as agents of monopoly capital or of the bourgeoisie. While these charges were wrong, at least they had the virtue of clarity and even a certain charm, compared to the later tactics of the soft Marxists andliberals of the 1950s and 60s, who engaged in Marxo-Freudian psychobabble to infer,in the name of psychological "science," that their opponents were, well, kind of crazy.

The preferred method of the time was invented by one of the contributors to the Bell volume, and also one of my least favorite distinguished American historians,Professor Richard Hofstadter. In Hofstadter's formulation, any radical dissentersfrom any status quo, be they rightists or leftists, engage in a "paranoid" style (and youknow, of course, what paranoids are), and suffer from "status anxiety."

Logically, at any time there are three and only three social groups: those who aredeclining in status, those who are rising in status, and those whose status is abouteven. (You can't fault that analysis!) The declining groups are the ones whomHofstadter focused on for the neurosis of status anxiety, which causes them to lashout irrationally at their betters in a paranoid style, and you can fill in the rest. But, of course, the rising groups can also suffer from the anxiety of trying to keep theirhigher status, and the level groups can be anxious about a future decline. The resultof his hocus-pocus is a non-falsifiable, universally valid theory that can be trotted outto smear and dispose of any person or group which dissents from the status quo. For

who, after all, wants to be, or to associate with, paranoids and the status anxious?

Also permeating the Bell volume is dismissal of these terrible radicals as sufferingfrom the "politics of resentment." It is interesting, by the way, how left-liberals deal

with political anger. It's a question of semantics. Anger by the good guys, theaccredited victim groups, is designated as "rage," which is somehow noble: the latestexample was the rage of organized feminism in the Clarence Thomas/Willie Smithincidents. On the other hand, anger by designated oppressor groups is not called"rage," but "resentment": which conjures up evil little figures, envious of their betters,skulking around the edges of the night.

And indeed the entire Bell volume is permeated by a frank portrayal of the noble,intelligent ivy-league governing elite, confronted and harassed by a mass of odious,uneducated, redneck, paranoid, resentment-filled authoritarian working and middle-



class types in the heartland, trying irrationally to undo the benevolent rule of wiseelites concerned for the public good.

History, however, was not very kind to Hofstadterian liberalism. For Hofstadter andthe others were consistent: they were defending what they considered a wonderful

status quo of elite rule, from any radicals whatever, be they right or left. And so,Hofstadter and his followers went back through American history tarring all radicaldissenters from any status quo with the status anxious, paranoid brush, includingsuch groups as progressives, populists, and Northern abolitionists before the Civil

War.

At the same time, Bell, in 1960, published a once-famous work proclaiming the End of Ideology: from now on, consensus elitist liberalism would rule forever, ideology

would disappear, and all political problems would be merely technical ones, such as which machinery to use to clear the streets. (Foreshadowing thirty years later, asimilar neocon proclamation of the End of History.) But shortly afterwards, ideology

came back with a bang, with the radical civil rights and then the New Left revolutions,part of which, I am convinced, was in reaction to these arrogant liberal doctrines.Smearing radicals, at least left-wing ones, was no longer in fashion, either in politicsor in historiography.

Meanwhile, of course, poor McCarthy was undone, partly because of the smears, andthe lack of a movement infrastructure, and partly too because his populism, eventhough dynamic, had no goals and no program whatsoever, except the very narrow one of rooting out communists. And partly, too, because McCarthy was not really suited for the television medium he had ridden to fame: being a "hot" person in a"cool" medium, with his jowls, his heavy five-o'clock shadow (which also helped ruin

Nixon), and his lack of a sense of humor. And also, too, since he was neither alibertarian nor really a radical rightist, McCarthy's heart was broken by the censure of the U.S. Senate, an institution which he actually loved.

The original right, the radical right, had pretty much disappeared by the time of thesecond edition of the Bell volume in 1963, and in a minute we shall see why. But now,all of a sudden, with the entry of Pat Buchanan into the presidential race, my God,they're back! The radical right is back, all over the place, feistier than ever and gettingstronger!

The response to this historic phenomenon, by the entire spectrum of established andcorrect thought, by all the elites from left over to official conservatives andneoconservatives, is very much like the reaction to the return of Godzilla in the oldmovies. And wouldn't you know that they would trot out the old psychobabble, as

well as the old smears of bigotry, anti-Semitism, the specter of Franco, and all therest? Every interview with, and article on Pat, dredges his "authoritarian Catholic"

background (ooh!) and the fact that he fought a lot when he was a kid (gee whiz, likemost of the American male population).

Also: that Pat has been angry a lot. Ooh, anger! And of course, since Pat is not only aright-winger but hails from a designated oppressor group (White Male IrishCatholic), his anger can never be righteous rage, but only a reflection of a paranoid,status-anxious personality, filled with, you got it, "resentment." And sure enough, this

week, January 13, the august New York Times, whose every word, unlike the words of



the rest of us, is fit to print , in its lead editorial sets the establishment line, a line which by definition is fixed in concrete, on Pat Buchanan.

After deploring the hard-edged and therefore politically incorrect vocabulary (tsk,tsk!) of Pat Buchanan, the New York Times, I am sure for the first time, solemnly

quotes Bill Buckley as if his words were holy writ (and I'll get to that in a minute), andtherefore decides that Buchanan, if not actually anti-Semitic, has said anti-Semiticthings. And the Times concludes with this final punchline, so reminiscent of the Bell-Hofstadter line of yesteryear: "What his words convey, much as his bid for thenomination conveys, is the politics, the dangerous politics, of resentment."

Resentment! Why should anyone, in his right mind , resent contemporary America? Why should anyone, for example, going out into the streets of Washington or New York, resent what is surely going to happen to him? But, for heaven's sake, whatperson in his right mind, doesn't resent it? What person is not filled with noble rage,or ignoble resentment, or whatever you choose to call it?

Finally, I want to turn to the question: what happened to the original right, anyway? And how did the conservative movement get into its present mess? Why does it needto be sundered, and split apart, and a new radical right movement created upon itsashes?

The answer to both of these seemingly disparate questions is the same: whathappened to the original right, and the cause of the present mess, is the advent anddomination of the right wing by Bill Buckley and the National Review. By the mid-1950s, much of the leadership of the Old Right was dead or in retirement. SenatorTaft and Colonel McCormick had died, and many of the right-wing congressmen had

retired.

The conservative masses, for a long time short on intellectual leadership, were now lacking in political leadership as well. An intellectual and power vacuum haddeveloped on the right, and rushing to fill it, in 1955, were Bill Buckley, fresh fromseveral years in the CIA, and National Review, an intelligent, well-written periodicalstaffed with ex-communists and ex-leftists eager to transform the right from anisolationist movement into a crusade to crush the Soviet god that had failed them.

Also, Buckley's writing style, while in those days often witty and sparkling, was rococoenough to give the reader the impression of profound thought, an impressionredoubled by Bill's habit of sprinkling his prose with French and Latin terms. Very quickly, National Review became the dominant, if not the only, power center on theright-wing.

This power was reinforced by a brilliantly successful strategy (perhaps guided by National Review editors trained in Marxist cadre tactics) of creating front groups: ISIfor college intellectuals, Young Americans for Freedom for campus activists.Moreover, lead by veteran Republican politico and National Review publisher BillRusher, the National Review complex was able to take over, in swift succession, theCollege Young Republicans, then the National Young Republicans, and finally tocreate a Goldwater movement in 1960 and beyond.



And so, with almost Blitzkrieg swiftness, by the early 1960s, the new global crusadingconservative movement, transformed and headed by Bill Buckley, was almost ready to take power in America. But not quite, because first, all the various heretics of theright, some left over from the original right, all the groups that were in any way radical or could deprive the new conservative movement of its much-desired

respectability in the eyes of the liberal and centrist elite, all these had to be jettisoned. Only such a denatured, respectable, non-radical conserving right was worthy of power.

And so the purges began. One after another, Buckley and National Review purgedand excommunicated all the radicals, all the non-respectables. Consider the roll-call:isolationists (such as John T. Flynn), anti-Zionists, libertarians, Ayn Randians, theJohn Birch Society, and all those who continued, like the early National Review, todare to oppose Martin Luther King and the civil rights revolution after Buckley hadchanged and decided to embrace it. But if, by the middle and late 1960s, Buckley hadpurged the conservative movement of the genuine right, he also hastened to embrace

any group that proclaimed its hard anti-communism, or rather anti-Sovietism oranti-Stalinism.

And of course the first anti-Stalinists were the devotees of the martyred communistLeon Trotsky. And so the conservative movement, while purging itself of genuineright-wingers, was happy to embrace anyone, any variety of Marxist: Trotskyites,Schachtmanites, Mensheviks, social democrats (such as grouped around themagazine The New Leader ), Lovestonite theoreticians of the American Federation of Labor, extreme right-wing Marxists like the incredibly beloved Sidney Hook, anyone

who could present not anti-socialist but suitably anti-Soviet, anti-Stalinistcredentials.

The way was then paved for the final, fateful influx: that of the ex-Trotskyite, right- wing social democrat, democrat capitalist, Truman-Humphrey-Scoop Jacksonliberals, displaced from their home in the Democratic party by the loony left that weknow so well: the feminist, deconstructing, quota-loving, advanced victimological left.

And also, we should point out, at least a semi-isolationist, semi anti-war left. Thesedisplaced people are, of course, the famed neoconservatives, a tiny but ubiquitousgroup with Bill Buckley as their aging figurehead, now dominating the conservativemovement. Of the 35 neoconservatives, 34 seem to be syndicated columnists.

And so the neocons have managed to establish themselves as the only right-wing

alternative to the left. The neocons now constitute the right-wing end of theideological spectrum. Of the respectable, responsible right wing, that is. For theneocons have managed to establish the notion that anyone who might be to the rightof them is, by definition, a representative of the forces of darkness, of chaos, oldnight, racism, and anti-Semitism. At the very least.

So that's how the dice have been loaded in our current political game. And virtually the only prominent media exception, the only genuine rightist spokesman who hasmanaged to escape neocon anathema has been Pat Buchanan.

It was time. It was time to trot out the old master, the prince of excommunication, theself-anointed pope of the conservative movement, William F. Buckley, Jr. It was timefor Bill to go into his old act, to save the movement that he had made over into his



own image. It was time for the man hailed by neocon Eric Breindel, in his newspapercolumn ( New York Post , Jan. 16), as the "authoritative voice on the American right."It was time for Bill Buckley's papal bull, his 40,000-word Christmas encyclical to theconservative movement, "In Search of Anti-Semitism," the screed solemnly invokedin the anti-Buchanan editorial of the New York Times.

The first thing to say about Buckley's essay is that it is virtually unreadable. Gone, allgone is the wit and the sparkle. Buckley's tendency to the rococo has elongated

beyond measure. His prose is serpentine, involuted, and convoluted, twisted andqualified, until virtually all sense is lost. Reading the whole thing through is doingpenance for one's sins, and one can accomplish the task only if possessed by a sternsense of duty, as one grits one's teeth and plows through a pile of turgid and pointlessstudent term papers – which, indeed, Buckley's essay matches in content, in learning,and in style.

Lest anyone think that my view of Buckleys' and National Review's role in the past

and present right wing merely reflects my own "paranoid style," we turn to the only revealing art of the Buckley piece, the introduction by his acolyte John O'Sullivan,

who, however, is at least still capable of writing a coherent sentence.

Here is John's remarkable revelation of National Review's self image: "Since itsfoundation, National Review has quietly played the role of conscience of the right."

After listing a few of Buckley's purges – although omitting isolationists, Randians,libertarians, and anti-civil rightsers – O'Sullivan gets to anti-Semites, and the needfor wise judgment on the issue. And then comes the revelation of Bill's papal role:"Before pronouncing [judgment, that is], we wanted to be sure," and then he goes on:

was there something substantial in the charges? "Was it a serious sin deserving ex-

communication, an error inviting a paternal reproof, or something of both?" I'm sureall the defendants in the dock appreciated the "paternal" reference: Papa Bill, the

wise, stern, but merciful father of us all, dispensing judgment. This statement of O'Sullivan's is matched in chutzpah only by his other assertion in the introductionthat his employer's treatise is a "great read." For shame, John, for shame!

The only other point worth noting on the purges is Buckley's own passage on exactly why he had found it necessary to excommunicate the John Birch Society (O'Sullivansaid it was because they were "cranks"). In a footnote, Buckley admits that "the Birchsociety was never anti-Semitic," but "it was a dangerous distraction to right reasoningand had to be exiled. "National Review," Bill goes on, "accomplished exactly that."

Well, my, my! Exiled to outer Siberia! And for the high crime of "distracting" pope William from his habitual contemplation of pure reason, a distraction that he neverseems to suffer while skiing, yachting, or communing with John Kenneth Galbraith or

Abe Rosenthal! What a wondrous mind at work!

Merely to try to summarize Buckley's essay is to give it far too much credit for clarity.But, taking that risk, here's the best I can do:

1. His long-time disciple and NR editor Joe Sobran is (a) certainly not an anti-Semite, but (b) is "obsessed with" and "cuckoo about" Israel, and (c) is therefore "contextually anti-Semitic," whatever that may mean, and yet, worst of all, (d) he remains"unrepentant";



2. Pat Buchanan is not an anti-Semite, but he has said unacceptably anti-Semiticthings, "probably" from an "iconoclastic temperament," yet, curiously, Buchanan tooremains unrepentant;

3. Gore Vidal is an anti-Semite, and the Nation, by presuming to publish Vidal's

article (by the way, a hilarious one) critical of Norman Podhoretz has revealed theleft's increasing proclivity for anti-Semitism;

4. Buckley's bully-boy disciples at Dartmouth Review are not anti-Semitic at all, but wonderful kids put upon by vicious leftists; and

5. Norman Podhoretz and Irving Kristol are wonderful, brilliant people, and it is"unclear" why anyone should ever want to criticize them, except possibly for reasonsof anti-Semitism.

Gore Vidal and the Nation, absurdly treated in Bill's article, can and do take care of

themselves, in the Nation in a blistering counterattack in its January 6-13 issue. OnBuchanan and Sobran, there is nothing new, whether of fact or insight: it's the samethin old junk, tiresomely rehashed.

Something, however, should be said about Buckley's vicious treatment of Sobran, apersonal and ideological disciple who has virtually worshipped his mentor for twodecades. Lashing out at a friend and disciple in public in this fashion, in order topropitiate Podhoretz and the rest, is odious and repellent: at the very least, we can say it is extremely tacky.

More importantly: Buckley's latest encyclical may play well in the New York Times,

but it's not going to go down very well in the conservative movement. The world isdifferent now; it is no longer 1958. National Review is no longer the monopoly powercenter on the right. There are new people, young people, popping up all over theplace, Pat Buchanan for one, all the paleos for another, who frankly don't give a fig forBuckley's papal pronunciamentos. The original right, and all its heresies is back!

In fact, Bill Buckley is the Mikhail Gorbachev of the conservative movement. LikeGorbachev, Bill goes on with his old act, but like Gorbachev, nobody tremblesanymore, nobody bends the knee and goes into exile. Nobody cares anymore;nobody, except the good old New York Times. Bill Buckley should have accepted his

banquet and stayed retired. His comeback is going to be as successful as Mohammed Ali's.

When I was growing up, I found that the main argument against laissez-faire, and for socialism, was that socialism and communism were inevitable: "You can't turn back the clock!" they chanted, "you can't turn back the clock." But the clock of the once-mighty Soviet Union, the clock of Marxism-Leninism, a creed that once mastered half the world, is not only turned back, but lies dead and broken forever. But we must notrest content with this victory. For though Marxism- Bolshevism is gone forever, therestill remains, plaguing us everywhere, its evil cousin: call it "soft Marxism,""Marxism-Humanism," "Marxism-Bernsteinism," "Marxism-Trotskyism," "Marxism-Freudianism," well, let's just call it "Menshevism," or "social democracy."



Social democracy is still here in all its variants, defining our entire respectablepolitical spectrum, from advanced victimology and feminism on the left over toneoconservatism on the right. We are now trapped, in America, inside a Menshevik fantasy, with the narrow bounds of respectable debate set for us by various brands of Marxists. It is now our task, the task of the resurgent right, of the paleo movement, to

break those bonds, to finish the job, to finish off Marxism forever.

One of the authors of the Daniel Bell volume says, in horror and astonishment, thatthe radical right intends to repeal the twentieth century. Heaven forfend! Who would

want to repeal the twentieth century, the century of horror, the century of collectivism, the century of mass destruction and genocide, who would want to repealthat ! Well, we propose to do just that.

With the inspiration of the death of the Soviet Union before us, we now know that itcan be done. We shall break the clock of social democracy. We shall break the clock of the Great Society. We shall break the clock of the welfare state. We shall break the

clock of the New Deal. We shall break the clock of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedomand perpetual war. We shall repeal the twentieth century.

One of the most inspiring and wonderful sights of our time was to see the peoples of the Soviet Union rising up, last year, to tear down in their fury the statues of Lenin, toobliterate the Leninist legacy. We, too, shall tear down all the statues of Franklin D.Roosevelt, of Harry Truman, of Woodrow Wilson, melt them down and beat theminto plowshares and pruninghooks, and usher in a twenty- first century of peace,freedom and prosperity.



RIGHT-WING POPULISM

January 1992

Well, they finally got David Duke. But he sure scared the bejesus out of them. It took a

massive campaign of hysteria, of fear and hate, orchestrated by all wings of the Ruling Elite,

from Official right to left, from President Bush and the official Republican Party through the

New York-Washington-run national media through the local elites and down to local left-

wing activists. It took a massive scare campaign, not only invoking the old bogey images of

the Klan and Hitler, but also, more concretely, a virtual threat to boycott Louisiana, to pull out

tourists and conventions, to lose jobs by businesses leaving the state. It took a campaign of

slander that resorted to questioning the sincerity of Duke's conversion to Christianity – even

challenging him to name his "official church." Even my old friend Doug Bandow participated

in this cabal in the Wall Street Journal , which virtually flipped its wig in anti-Duke hysteria,

to the extent of attacking Duke for being governed by self-interest(!) – presumably in contrastto all other politicians motivated by deep devotion to the public weal? It took a lot of gall for

Bandow to do this, since he is not a sacramental Christian (where one can point out that the

person under attack was not received into the sacramental Church), but a pietist one, who is

opposed to any sort of official creed or liturgy. So how can a pietist Christian challenge the

bona fides of another one? And in a world where no one challenges the Christian credentials

of a Chuck Colson or a Jeb Magruder? But logic went out the window: for the entire

Establishment, the ruling elite, was at stake, and in that sort of battle, all supposedly clashing

wings of the Establishment weld together as one unit and fight with any weapons that might

be at hand.

But even so: David Duke picked up 55 percent of the white vote; he lost in the runoff becausethe fear campaign brought a massive outpouring of black voters. But note the excitement;

politics in Louisiana rose from the usual torpor that we have been used to for decades and

brought out a turnout rate – 80 percent – that hasn't been seen since the nineteenth century,

when party politics was fiercely partisan and ideological.

One point that has nowhere been noted: populism won in Louisiana, because in the first

primary the two winners were Duke, a right-wing populist, and Edwin Edwards, a left-wing

populist. Out in the cold were the two Establishment candidates: incumbent Governor Buddy

Roemer, high-tax, high-spend "reform" Democrat embraced by the Bush Administration in an

attempt to stop the dread Duke; and the forgotten man, Clyde Holloway, the official

Republican candidate, a good Establishment conservative, who got only five percent of thevote. (Poor Human Events kept complaining during the campaign: why are the media ignoring

Clyde Holloway? The simple answer is that he never got anywhere: an instructive metaphor

for what will eventually be the fate of Establishment Conservatism.)

A left-wing populist, former Governor Edwards is a long-time Cajun crook, whose motto has

been the rollicking laissez les bon temps roulez ("let the good times roll"). He has always been

allegedly hated by businessmen and by conservative elites. But this was crisis time; and in

crisis the truth is revealed: there is no fundamental difference between left-wing populism and

the system we have now. Left-wing populism: rousing the masses to attack "the rich,"

amounts to more of the same: high taxes, wild spending, massive redistribution of working

and middle-class incomes to the ruling coalition of: big government, big business, and the

New Class of bureaucrats, technocrats, and ideologues and their numerous dependent groups.



And so, in the crunch, left-wing populism – phony populism – disappeared, and all crookery

was forgiven in the mighty Edwards coalition. It is instructive that the Establishment

professes to believe in Edwards' teary promises of personal reform ("I'm 65 now; the good

times have mellowed"), while refusing to believe in the sincerity of David Duke's conversion.

They said in the 60s, when they gently chided the violent left: "stop using violence, work within the system." And sure enough it worked, as the former New Left now leads the

respectable intellectual classes. So why wasn't the Establishment willing to forgive and forget

when a right-wing radical like David Duke stopped advocating violence, took off the Klan

robes, and started working within the system? If it was OK to be a Commie, or a

Weatherman, or whatever in your wild youth, why isn't it OK to have been Klansmen? Or to

put it more precisely, if it was OK for the revered Justice Hugo Black, or for the lion of the

Senate, Robert Byrd, to have been a Klansman, why not David Duke? The answer is obvious:

Black and Byrd became members of the liberal elite, of the Establishment, whereas Duke

continued to be a right-wing populist, and therefore anti-Establishment, this time even more

dangerous because "within the system."

It is fascinating that there was nothing in Duke's current program or campaign that could not

also be embraced by paleoconservatives or paleo-libertarians; lower taxes, dismantling the

bureaucracy, slashing the welfare system, attacking affirmative action and racial set-asides,

calling for equal rights for all Americans, including whites: what's wrong with any of that?

And of course the mighty anti-Duke coalition did not choose to oppose Duke on any of these

issues. Indeed, even the most leftist of his opponents grudgingly admitted that he had a point.

Instead, the Establishment concentrated on the very "negative campaigning" that they profess

to abhor (especially when directed against them). (Ironic note: TV pundits, who regularly

have face lifts twice a year, bitterly attacked Duke for his alleged face lift. And nobody

laughed!)

WHAT IS RIGHT-WING POPULISM?

The basic right-wing populist insight is that we live in a statist country and a statist world

dominated by a ruling elite, consisting of a coalition of Big Government, Big Business, and

various influential special interest groups. More specifically, the old America of individual

liberty, private property, and minimal government has been replaced by a coalition of

politicians and bureaucrats allied with, and even dominated by, powerful corporate and Old

Money financial elites (e.g., the Rockefellers, the Trilateralists); and the New Class of

technocrats and intellectuals, including Ivy League academics and media elites, who

constitute the opinion-moulding class in society. In short, we are ruled by an updated,twentieth-century coalition of Throne and Altar, except that this Throne is various big

business groups, and the Altar is secular, statist intellectuals, although mixed in with the

secularists is a judicious infusion of Social Gospel, mainstream Christians. The ruling class in

the State has always needed intellectuals to apologize for their rule and to sucker the masses

into subservience, i.e., into paying the taxes and going along with State rule. In the old days,

in most societies, a form of priestcraft or State Church constituted the opinion-moulders who

apologized for that rule. Now, in a more secular age, we have technocrats, "social scientists,"

and media intellectuals, who apologize for the State system and staff in the ranks of its

bureaucracy.

Libertarians have often seen the problem plainly, but as strategists for social change they have badly missed the boat. In what we might call "the Hayek model," they have called for



spreading correct ideas, and thereby converting the intellectual elites to liberty, beginning

with top philosophers and then slowly trickling on down through the decades to converting

journalists and other media opinion-moulders. And of course, ideas are the key, and spreading

correct doctrine is a necessary part of any libertarian strategy. It might be said that the process

takes too long, but a long-range strategy is important, and contrasts to the tragic futility of

official conservatism which is interested only in the lesser-of-two-evils for the currentelection and therefore loses in the medium, let along the long, run. But the real error is not so

much the emphasis on the long run, but on ignoring the fundamental fact that the problem is

not just intellectual error . The problem is that the intellectual elites benefit from the current

system; in a crucial sense, they are part of the ruling class. The process of Hayekian

conversion assumes that everyone, or at least all intellectuals, are interested solely in the truth,

and that economic self-interest never gets in the way. Anyone at all acquainted with

intellectuals or academics should be disabused of this notion, and fast. Any libertarian

strategy must recognize that intellectuals and opinion-moulders are part of the fundamental

problem, not just because of error, but because their own self-interest is tied into the ruling

system.

Why then did communism implode? Because in the end the system was working so badly that

even the nomenklatura got fed up and threw in the towel. The Marxists have correctly pointed

out that a social system collapses when the ruling class becomes demoralized and loses its

will to power; manifest failure of the communist system brought about that demoralization.

But doing nothing, or relying only on educating the elites in correct ideas, will mean that our

own statist system will not end until our entire society, like that of the Soviet Union, has been

reduced to rubble. Surely, we must not sit still for that. A strategy for liberty must be far more

active and aggressive.

Hence the importance, for libertarians or for minimal government conservatives, of having a

one-two punch in their armor: not simply of spreading correct ideas, but also of exposing the

corrupt ruling elites and how they benefit from the existing system, more specifically how

they are ripping us off. Ripping the mask off elites is "negative campaigning" at its finest and

most fundamental.

This two-pronged strategy is (a) to build up a cadre of our own libertarians, minimal-

government opinion-moulders, based on correct ideas; and (b) to tap the masses directly, to

short-circuit the dominant media and intellectual elites, to rouse the masses of people against

the elites that are looting them, and confusing them, and oppressing them, both socially and

economically. But this strategy must fuse the abstract and the concrete; it must not simply

attack elites in the abstract, but must focus specifically on the existing statist system, on thosewho right now constitute the ruling classes.

Libertarians have long been puzzled about whom, about which groups, to reach out to. The

simple answer: everyone, is not enough, because to be relevant politically, we must

concentrate strategically on those groups who are most oppressed and who also have the most

social leverage.

The reality of the current system is that it constitutes an unholy alliance of "corporate liberal"

Big Business and media elites, who, through big government, have privileged and caused to

rise up a parasitic Underclass, who, among them all, are looting and oppressing the bulk of

the middle and working classes in America. Therefore, the proper strategy of libertarians and paleos is a strategy of "right-wing populism," that is: to expose and denounce this unholy



alliance, and to call for getting this preppie-underclass-liberal media alliance off the backs of

the rest of us: the middle and working classes.

A RIGHT-WING POPULIST PROGRAM

A right-wing populist program, then, must concentrate on dismantling the crucial existingareas of State and elite rule, and on liberating the average American from the most flagrant

and oppressive features of that rule. In short:

l. Slash Taxes. All taxes, sales, business, property, etc., but especially the most oppressive

politically and personally: the income tax. We must work toward repeal of the income tax and

abolition of the IRS.

2. Slash Welfare. Get rid of underclass rule by abolishing the welfare system, or, short of

abolition, severely cutting and restricting it.

3. Abolish Racial or Group Privileges. Abolish affirmative action, set aside racial quotas,etc., and point out that the root of such quotas is the entire "civil rights" structure, which

tramples on the property rights of every American.

4. Take Back the Streets: Crush Criminals. And by this I mean, of course, not "white collar

criminals" or "inside traders" but violent street criminals – robbers, muggers, rapists,

murderers. Cops must be unleashed, and allowed to administer instant punishment, subject of

course to liability when they are in error.

5. Take Back the Streets: Get Rid of the Bums. Again: unleash the cops to clear the streets

of bums and vagrants. Where will they go? Who cares? Hopefully, they will disappear, that is,

move from the ranks of the petted and cosseted bum class to the ranks of the productive

members of society.

6. Abolish the Fed; Attack the Banksters. Money and banking are recondite issues. But the

realities can be made vivid: the Fed is an organized cartel of banksters, who are creating

inflation, ripping off the public, destroying the savings of the average American. The

hundreds of billions of taxpayer handouts to S&L banksters will be chicken-feed compared to

the coming collapse of the commercial banks.

7. America First. A key point, and not meant to be seventh in priority. The American

economy is not only in recession; it is stagnating. The average family is worse off now than itwas two decades ago. Come home America. Stop supporting bums abroad. Stop all foreign

aid, which is aid to banksters and their bonds and their export industries. Stop gloabaloney,

and let's solve our problems at home.

8. Defend Family Values. Which means, get the State out of the family, and replace State

control with parental control. In the long run, this means ending public schools, and replacing

them with private schools. But we must realize that voucher and even tax credit schemes are

not, despite Milton Friedman, transitional demands on the path to privatized education;

instead, they will make matters worse by fastening government control more totally upon the

private schools. Within the sound alternative is decentralization, and back to local, community

neighborhood control of the schools.



Further: We must reject once and for all the left-libertarian view that all government-operated

resources must be cesspools. We must try, short of ultimate privatization, to operate

government facilities in a manner most conducive to a business, or to neighborhood control.

But that means: that the public schools must allow prayer, and we must abandon the absurd

left-atheist interpretation of the First Amendment that "establishment of religion" means not

allowing prayer in public schools, or a creche in a schoolyard or a public square at Christmas.We must return to common sense, and original intent, in constitutional interpretation.

So far: every one of these right-wing populist programs is totally consistent with a hard-core

libertarian position. But all real-world politics is coalition politics, and there are other areas

where libertarians might well compromise with their paleo or traditionalist or other partners in

a populist coalition. For example, on family values, take such vexed problems as

pornography, prostitution, or abortion. Here, pro-legalization and pro-choice libertarians

should be willing to compromise on a decentralist stance; that is, to end the tyranny of the

federal courts, and to leave these problems up to states and better yet, localities and

neighborhoods, that is, to "community standards."



A NEW STRATEGY FOR LIBERTY

American political life has experienced a veritable transformation. As usually happens when we are in the midst of a radical social change, we are barely aware thatanything is happening, much less its full scope and dimension. In the words of BobDylan taunting the hated bourgeoisie in the 1960s: "You don't know what'shappening, do you, Mr. Jones?" Except that now the tables have been turned, and"Mr. Jones" is the comfortably ensconced member of the liberal and Beltway eliteruling this country.

The great and inspiring new development is that, for the first time in many a moon, agenuine grassroots right-wing people's movement is emerging throughout thecountry. This is a very different story from the Official Conservative and Libertarianmovement that we have known all too well for many years: a movement where well-funded periodicals, think tanks, and "public interest" law firms, snugly (and smugly)established mostly inside the Beltway, set down the Line unchallenged for thesubservient folks in the hinterlands.

Funding for these outfits comes mostly from big foundation and corporate donors;the role of the masses "out there" throughout the country is to touch their forelock and kick in with the rest of the dough. Often these Beltway organizations exist only asdirect-mail fundraising machines with the usual panel of celebrities on theirletterheads; the function of donations is to pay the salaries and to finance theluxurious housing for these institutions.

Those Beltway organizations that are really active conduct indirect lobbying on behalf of gradual, marginal reforms hoping to push Congress or the Executive onecentimeter to the right; the more important function, however, is to grant their majordonors one of the great prizes of Official Washington: access to leading politiciansand bureaucrats.

The published reports of these outfits are mainly designed not to advance The Cause, but to demonstrate to their donors the fact of such access: hence, countless picturesof think-tank executives shaking hands with Senator Dole, Alan Greenspan, or

whomever.

The major purpose of the conferences held by these institutions is not to advance thetruth or the free market in the public arena, but to demonstrate, once again, to themajor donors that they are capable of bringing in Greenspan or Dole to attend theirfunctions.

The stated excuse of these outfits, many of whom still claim abstract devotion to highlibertarian or conservative principle, is that the reason for their location inside theBeltway and for devoting their energies to minor and negligible reforms is that this isthe only way they can gain respectability in Washington.

But that, of course, is precisely the problem: change the word "respectability" to

"access," and the point becomes all too clear. For a long time, these Washington



organizations have not been part of the solution, however gradual or minor; they have been part of the problem: the domination of American life by Washington.

This sort of movement has been necessarily top-down, although many of these outfitslike to think of themselves as grassroots: the grassroots Americans, however, live to

serve the power elite, and the power elite lives to curry favor and access withLeviathan. That is why Samuel Francis's metaphor is apt about the Beltway conservative movement meeting inside a phone booth.

But in recent months, something brand new has happened. A grassroots, right-wingpopulist movement has been springing up all over the country, a movement that hasno connection whatever to Official Conservative elites. Having no connection, theBeltway conservatives can have no control over this new right-wing uprising amongthe people.

Since it is a genuine grassroots movement, it is necessarily fragmented, unsystematic,

and a bit chaotic. Also, since the dominant liberal media don't want to hear about it,and the Official Conservative movement is frightened of it, we hear very little of itsactivities.

While at this early stage the movement may be confused and inchoate, it has onemagnificent quality which gives it great intensity and abiding strength: a deep and

bitter hatred of the despotism exerted over us in so many hundreds of ways by thecentral government: hatred of politicians, of bureaucrats, and of Washington, D.C.

Note that this intense hatred, this reaction, this "backlash" against the drive towardcollectivism, is necessarily and totally out of synch with the Beltway strategy of

Official Conservative and Big-Government Libertarian organizations. Among thegrowing ranks of these grassroots rebels, this entire strategy and way of life isanathema. These heartland rebels are close to the spirit, not of blow-dried Beltway think-tankers, but of the patriots of the American Revolution.

They, in contrast even to the Reaganauts, are genuine revolutionaries; they are ready and willing to tell Washington, in no uncertain terms, to buzz off. To these new

American rebels, the ability to sip martinis with Bob Dole constitutes a heavy liability,not an asset. To these great people, having "access" to tyrants means that you areaiding and abetting tyrants.

The recent revolutionary activities have been manifold and widespread. Since we lack complete information, none of us knows their full extent. Probably the first task of right-wing populist intellectuals is to find out what is going on, to get an idea of thefull extent of this glorious phenomenon.

Some of these activities are as follows: an erupting "county militia" movement, in which, for example, entire counties are sworn-in as part of a militia so that they cleverly come under the rubric of the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms;an associated and extensive civil disobedience by county sheriffs to the hated anddespotic Brady bill; a Tenth Amendment movement: for example, both houses of theColorado legislature have passed a resolution empowering the governor to call out theNational Guard to block federal activities that violate the Tenth Amendment. Whatdoesn't? And there are similar efforts in every other state.



The Committee of the 50 States, a states' rights group, has been resurrected to pushthe Ultimatum Resolution, proclaiming the dissolution of the federal government

when the national debt reaches 6 trillion. The Committee is headed by themagnificent and venerable J. Bracken Lee, former mayor of Salt Lake City andgovernor of Utah. Lee, who would now be called a staunch paleo-libertarian,

repeatedly through his career called for abolition of the income tax, an end to theFederal Reserve, withdrawal from the United Nations, and the elimination of allforeign aid.

In addition, there are various flourishing separatist and secessionist movements: forexample, the desire of southwestern Nebraskans and northwestern Kansans to getout from under the despotic controllers and taxers of their "Eastern" big cities, suchas Omaha and Wichita. Staten Island wants to secede from horrible New York City,and Vermont wants out of the U.S.

Southern secessionists are on the march again, in such new organizations as the

Southern League and Peaceful Secession, and grassroots anti-immigration groups are booming in California, Texas, Florida, and other states. The growing and increasingly radical land-rights movement, fighting the confiscation of private property by federalagencies in cahoots with environmentalists, is active in the East as well as the West.

Finally, permeating all sectors of this variegated right-wing movement, there is ahealthy and intense abhorrence of the Federal Reserve. These heartlanders may notknow precisely what they want done in the field of money, but, happily, they are very firm on what they don't like. In wanting to sweep away the Fed they are right on themark. Can you imagine what these folks would think of a libertarian outfit that gloriesin its ability to hobnob with Greenspan?

And that, I think, is the major point of this essay. There has been a radical change inthe social and political landscape in this country, and any person who desires the

victory of liberty and the defeat of the Leviathan must adjust his strategy accordingly.New times require a rethinking of old and possibly obsolete strategies.

I was always opposed to the marginal reform strategy endemic to the Beltway think tanks. I always thought that any marginal and dubious short-run gains would beearned only at the price of a disastrous long-run abandonment of and thereforedefeat for the principles of liberty. But in the America existing before 1994, such aBeltway strategy was at least coherent and arguable.

Now, however, the Beltway strategy is absurd in the short as well as the long run.There is a new mood in America, a lasting change of heart among the conservativemasses. As the Marxists used to say, "the masses are in motion," and our first task isto stay with them and try to help their movement be more systematic.

No longer are the conservative masses content to send checks to the biggies in Washington, who, in return for their donations, will tell them what to think. Nolonger are they bowing to their betters who can assure them access to the Corridors of Power. Bless them, these heartland rebels don't want access; they want to sweep the

whole Moloch away.



Where does this marvelous and burgeoning new spirit come from? There was anobvious foreshadowing in the anti-politics and anti-Washington mood of 1992. Anexample is the flawed and incoherent Perot movement, the major virtue of which wasnot the erratic leader but the spirit of the rank-and-file militants, who were lookingfor some sort of anti-Washington Change. But that doesn't go very far in explaining

the new mass movement, which is far more right-wing, and far more intensely focused, than anything Perotvian two years ago.

No, it seems clear that the trigger for the emergence of this brand-new movement has been the total loathing welling up in America for President and Mrs. Clinton, theirpersons, their lives, their Cabinet, their entire rotten crew. In all my life, I have neverseen such a widespread and intense hatred for any president, or indeed for any politician.

Unlike attacks on poor Joe McCarthy, this is not a hatred whipped up by the elites.Quite the contrary, the liberal elites are desperately trying to cover for Clinton, and

are bewildered and appalled by the entire phenomenon. In a recent column, ThomasSowell noted the perplexity of the media, and replied, in effect, that the reason theClintons are widely "perceived" as power-hungry sleazes is because they are power-hungry sleazes.

Thus the movement erupted in reaction to all the objectively loathsome attributes of the Clintons and their associates – the stream of lies, evasions, crookery, sexscandals, and frantic attempts to run all of our lives. But quickly the hatred of thepersonal attributes of Clinton spilled over to his programs, to his ideology. Thus wehad the most powerful "nuclear fusion" in all of politics: the intense blending of thepersonal and ideological. The growing realization of the socialist tyranny involved in

all of Clinton's programs – a realization that finally cut through the rhetorical fog of the "Mr. New Democrat" – joined with and was greatly multiplied by the loathing forClinton the man.

During the 1992 elections, some of us worried that a Clinton administration, inaddition to being bad for America and for liberty, would also cripple the right-wingmovement strategically. For the usual pattern has been that Democraticadministrations are "good" for Beltway organizations because the conservativeheartland gets scared and pours money into their coffers. In that way a Clintonadministration would unfortunately strengthen the conservative and libertarianBeltway elites that have long been dominating and ruining the right-wing movement.

To some extent, this has of course happened; but more important is a new phenomenon that none of us predicted: that Clinton and his crew would be somonstrous, so blatant, so objectively hateful, that it would drive into being from

below a new and burgeoning real right-wing movement that hates all of Washington, whether the actual rulers or the Official Conservatives and Libertarians who bend theknee in behalf of access and possible piddling reform.

Given this, what is the proper strategy for liberty? The first thing is for any conservative or free-market group or institution to be principled, radical, andfervently anti-Washington, and to avoid like the plague Beltway-itis, either in form orcontent. That is, to denounce rather than cultivate the Corridors of Power, and to call



for principled and radical change rather than marginal reform, change that is clearly anti-Washington and anti-federal power.

Such proposals and programs should be designed, not for the eyes and ears of Beltway power, but to educate, inspire, and guide the extraordinarily sound instincts

of the new grassroots movement. We are entering an era in which, happily, theprincipled position is evidently the proper strategy. More than ever before, principleand strategy are fused, in behalf of the victory of liberty.

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Americas Ruling Class