Wednesday, August 4, 2010

**JP** 1050~*Toheen_e_Wafa*~Pak Old....


 


 

 


 


 

 

1050~*Toheen_e_Wafa*~Pak Old....

Dil k verane main

Ek shama hay ab tak roshan

Koi parwana magar ab na idhar aye ga

Zindagi beet gayi piyar main jalte jalte

Koi umeed bar ayi na koi baat bani

Jagmagaya na setara koi armanoon ka

Ham ne dil ko bhi jalaya to seya raat bani

Diljaloon par koi mahshar sa guzar jaee ga

Jin ki dharkan main suni

Ham ne wafaoon ki sada

Akhar_e_kaar wohi ban gaye

Pathar k sanam

Na saji hathoon pe mahndi

Na baji shyhnai

Ab to karta huwa apni hi wafa ka matam

Piyar maksal ki taraf khaak basar jaee ga

Kitne gate huwe armanoon ki barsaat k baad

Aas ki jheel main lahraee the kuch neel kanwal

Kiya khabar thi k woh mahfel hi ujar jaee gi

Jis main gai thi kabhi ham ne mohabbat ki ghazal

Apna har nagma flahoon main bikhar jaye ga

Kitna behes huwa karte naheen ahlewafa

Jane kiya soch k toheen_e_wafa ki tu ne

Koi jhonka bhi jise chou na saka tere bagair

Apne hathoon se wohi shama bujha de tu ne

Kiya khabar thi tera ahsaas bhi mar jaye ga

Ban k parwana kabhi tu na idhar aye ga

~@~@~R*u*k*h*s*a*n*a~@~@~



(Her)ontdek Internet Explorer 8! Vertrouwd eenvoudig.

Poor plumber

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Re: Iran Propaganda Debunked in Under Seven Minutes

Robert Einhorn, the State Department official who oversees the
enforcement of sanctions against Iran and North Korea, told reporters
in Seoul on Tuesday that the U.S. has no choice but to pressure Iran
because earlier offers to negotiate were rebuffed.
"Pressure is not an end in itself," Einhorn said.
"Instead, sanctions are intended to bring Iran's leaders to the
conclusion that their country would be better served by ending its
noncompliance with its international obligations and starting to
address serious concerns about Iran's nuclear intentions."
Iran says its nuclear program is designed to generate electricity, not
build weapons.
Stuart Levey, the Treasury Department's under secretary for terrorism
and financial intelligence, said sanctions against some Iranian
organizations and senior officials are meant to complicate the groups'
efforts to support extremist movements in the Mideast.
"Iran has long been recognized as the world's most active state
sponsor of terrorism, and Iran is by far the most prolific funder of
terrorist organizations in the world," Levey said.
On Tuesday the top Democrat and ranking Republican on the House
Foreign Affairs Committee said they are forming a working group to
ensure that a set of U.S. sanctions signed into law by Obama on July 1
are fully implemented and effectively enforced.
Reps. Howard L. Berman, D-Calif., and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla.,
said in a joint statement that they believe the July 1 sanctions are
already limiting Iran's access to international markets.
"We will continue to pressure and isolate Iran until it terminates its
illicit nuclear weapons activities," they said. "A nuclear-armed Iran
is unacceptable."
The sanctions announced by Levey expand the list of individuals and
groups in Iran with whom Americans are not permitted to do business.
The sanctions also freeze any assets of the organizations and
officials that are under U.S. jurisdiction.


Read more: http://www.theolympian.com/2010/08/03/1324468/us-sanctions-iranians-said-to.html#ixzz0veh2Md5l
----
it's no surprise that all these are jews
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, while not jewish, is an Israel supporter

know the enemy
On Aug 4, 10:46 am, "M. Johnson" <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Iran Propaganda Debunked in Under Seven MinutesPosted byThomas Woodson August 4, 2010 09:32 AM
> Featured on a panel at the University of California, Riverside, Scott Horton ofAntiwar Radiocalmly and confidently debunks the accusations against Iran.  This video gives excerpts of his comments.  You want to watch this video, I promise.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGBlq0uCx64&feature=player_embedded

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**JP** Job:Recruitment Executive -LAHORE ONLY

Recruitment Executive is required in Lahore.
 
Degree in social sciences or HR...excellent communication skills is a must.
Fresh canidates can apply at practitioner.hr@gmail.com mention "Rec Exe" is in subject line .spread the word!

Regards,
Global Career Consultancy
"The Resource People"



Subscribe to receive latest Job Notifications:

Blog: http://cvarchive.wordpress.com/
YahooGroup: http://finance.groups.yahoo.com/group/gcc_verticals/
GoogleGroup: http://groups.google.com/group/CVArchive

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**JP** Responsible ??



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**JP** Someone should balance it too ( eye for eye.... )






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**JP** Praise to MUSHARRAF for free Media



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Iran Propaganda Debunked in Under Seven Minutes


Iran Propaganda Debunked in Under Seven Minutes
Posted by Thomas Woods on August 4, 2010 09:32 AM

Featured on a panel at the University of California, Riverside, Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio calmly and confidently debunks the accusations against Iran.  This video gives excerpts of his comments.  You want to watch this video, I promise.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jGBlq0uCx64&feature=player_embedded

Re: Codevilla, North, and the Ruling Class

class warfare will get you nowhere

choose sides carefully

On Aug 4, 9:20 am, "M. Johnson" <micha...@america.net> wrote:
> Codevilla, North, and the Ruling ClassPosted byCharles Burrison August 4, 2010 06:01 AM
> Dr. Gary North'sinsightful examinationof Professor Angelo M. Codevilla's brilliant essay,"America's Ruling Class And the Perils of Revolution,"adds a further dimension to our understanding of its powerful impact.  As I have said ina previous LRC blog,I believe this essay is the most important that I have ever read.
> One of the most exciting elements of Codevilla's article is how he stands Marxist economic class theory on its head.  Marxists believe that the basis of all history is the class struggle.  This conflict is based on the antagonism resulting from control of the material means of production at the economic base of society.  One's class membership or "class consciousness" is defined by this economic  relationship.  "Ideologies" or belief-systems are shaped by these material productive forces, not by conscious thought processes.  Codevilla  moves beyond the narrow "economic class" terminology most analysts and pundits misuse, in describing two antagonistic classes based on opposing sociocultural world-views which define how they perceive economic relationships.  In Marxoid lingo, it is the "superstructure" defining "the economic base."
> At the root of his analysis is how each class sees political power the use of coercion or state-applied violence to control others and obtain wealth, status, hegemony, or domination.  Basically this is Libertarianism 101.  But Codevilla is no Libertarian.  He is, as Gary North keenly observes, "America's smartest conservative political analyst," a view I have also held since I briefly studied with him at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute's Western Summer School at Thomas Aquinas College in 1975.
> Codevilla's two classes, "the ruling class," and "the country class," (or the political elite versus virtually everyone else in society) are attitudinal mind-sets more cultural than economic.  But this is much more than "the culture war" Pat Buchanan or Kevin Phillips discussed in the past.  It is the arrogant presumption on the part of the governing elite that they are better than their inferiors, that "the elite is neat and the masses are _____."  And what are asses but dumb beasts of burden which labor for their masters.  This is comparable to thearistocratic disdain of the peasantry in pre-Revolutionary Francefound in Charles Dickens'sA Tale of Two Cities.Angelo Codevilla traces this arrogant posture of the elite back to its origins in progressivism.  Dr. North is entirely correct in his discussion of Codevilla's analysis of progressivism and its secular roots in the Darwinian presumption of the natural selection basis of creation.  But I would put the source of this elitist scientism back even further to the Enlightenment.  There is a dark side of the Enlightenment and its social engineering progeny that many libertarians (particularly those enamored by Ayn Rand's militant atheism) do not acknowledge.  They continue to blindly hold to the secular mythology that the Enlightenment was entirely about bringing truth, reason, tolerance, and light to the miserable masses held in bondage and superstitious oppression by Throne and Altar.  A wide range of dedicated scholars such as James Billington, Michael Burleigh, Henri de Lubac, John Gray, Terry Melanson, andF. A. Hayekhave documented the emergence of ersatzgnostic political religionsas outgrowths of the Enlightenment.  First a stridency emerged from clandestine Free Masonic enclaves such asthe Parisian La Loge des Neuf Soeurs, the Grand Orient (and in Weishaupt'sIlluminism) which influenced the savage course of anti-clerical genocide in the French Revolution and later in Comtian Positivism and Marxist dialectical materialism all of which saw Christianity, particularly Roman Catholicism, as its sworn deadly enemy.
> While Codevilla slammed both modern political parties in America as corrupt tools of the ruling class, he took specific aim at the Democrats in this essay.  (He has, as in a recent address to the Philadelphia Society, also concentrated on the Bush regime and the GOP in language reminiscent of the"Red State Fascism"detailed by Lew Rockwell.)  From Woodrow Wilson to Barack Obama, Democratic Party leaders who have occupied the White House have been characterized by a haughty elitism endemic to progressivism.  I believe the key volume to unlocking and understanding the establishment mind, and particularly this elitist temperament, remains Ur-progressive Walter Lippmann'sA Preface To Morals.
> With this in mind, take another look at this very prescient April 15, 2008 article,"Candidate On A High Horse,"focusing upon then candidate Barack Obama by syndicated columnist George Will.  It contains one of the most concise yet perceptive analyses of this phenomena, showing the destructive elitist roots of the progressive agenda, and how the so-called "party of the common man" actually holds everyday working and middle-class Americans and their basic values in contempt.
> Celebrated academic elitists who had a life-long hatred of capitalism and bourgeois culture such as Institutionalist/Keynesian economist John Kenneth Galbraith and former Communist historian Richard Hofstadter, are singled out for their influential  contributions in furthering this deadly contagion by Will:"The emblematic book of the new liberalism was The Affluent Society, by Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith.  He argued that the power of advertising to manipulate the bovine public is so powerful that the law of supply and demand has been vitiated.  Manufacturers can manufacture in the American herd whatever demand the manufacturers want to supply.  Because the manipulable masses are easily given a 'false consciousness' (another category, like religion as the 'opiate' of the suffering masses, that liberalism appropriated from Marxism, four things follow:"First, the consent of the governed, when their behavior is governed by their false consciousness, is unimportant.  Second, the public requires the supervision of a progressive elite which, somehow emancipated from false consciousness, can engineer true consciousness.  Third, because consciousness is a reflection of social conditions, true consciousness is engineered by progressive social reforms.  Fourth, because people in the grip of false consciousness cannot be expected to demand or even consent to such reforms, those reforms usually must be imposed, for example, by judicial fiats."The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981.  Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims the indispensable category in liberal theory.  The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree."Obama's dismissal is:  Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program.  Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America."Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders a 'paranoid style' of politics rooted in 'status anxiety,' etc.  Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension."This is exactly the same diagnosis Codevilla made in his article discussing "the Authoritarian Personality" and the "country class,"  an earlier Marxofreudian version of Hofstadter's 'paranoid style' smear.
> Angelo M. Codevilla is our generation's Tom Paine.  He has authored a "Common Sense" analysis and call to action against a hubristic ruling class that debases our currency and our culture.   They are putting our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor at risk of insolvency and destruction.  Will Americans, as in 1776, answer this challenge?

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**JP** imagine if you are 5 years old





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Re: U.S. mulls legalizing classes of undocumented aliens in absence of immigration reform

high level officials within the Obama
administration may be considering ways to legalize classes of
undocumented
immigrants in case Congress does not deal with formal legalization for
the
estimated 10.8 million immigrants without papers***
---
they should be tied to a tree in the square and whipped for days

we know who they are and where they live

On Aug 4, 9:44 am, Travis <baconl...@gmail.com> wrote:
> U.S. mulls legalizing classes of undocumented aliens in absence of
> immigration reform<http://homelandsecuritynewswire.com/us-mulls-legalizing-classes-undoc...>
>
> Published 3 August 2010   *http://tinyurl.com/24z8sjr*
>
> *An internal U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo, titled
> "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform," **
> (attached)** indicates that high level officials within the Obama
> administration may be considering ways to legalize classes of undocumented
> immigrants in case Congress does not deal with formal legalization for the
> estimated 10.8 million immigrants without papers***
>
> It is not likely that Congress would pass a comprehensive immigration reform
> this year, so the Obama administration is considering ways it could act
> without congressional approval to achieve many of the objectives of the
> initiative, including giving permanent resident status, or green cards, to
> large numbers of people in the country illegally.
>
> ProPublica's Marcus Stern
> writes<http://www.propublica.org/article/obama-administration-considers-bypa...>
> that
> the ideas were outlined in an unusually frank draft
> memo<http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/memo-on-alternatives-to-comp...>prepared
> for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, director of the federal agency that handles
> immigration benefits, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). The
> memo lists ways the government could grant permanent resident status to tens
> of thousands of people and delay the deportation of others,
> potentially indefinitely.
>
> "In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend benefits
> and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance
> and regulations," said the memo, which was prepared by four senior officials
> from different branches of USCIS.
>
> The *Miami Herald*'s Alfonso Chardy
> notes<http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/02/1757040/immigration-memo-may-be...>
> that
> one group that could receive green cards are the almost 400,000 current
> holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who include Salvadorans,
> Haitians, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans.
>
> The memo says young students who could qualify for green cards under pending
> legislation known as the DREAM Act could be granted deferred action, an
> immigration measure that delays deportation.
>
> Another option for potential DREAM Act beneficiaries, the memo says, would
> be to "move forward" to 1996 — or another date — the registry provision of
> immigration law that makes eligible for green cards undocumented immigrants
> present in the United States since before 1 January 1972.
>
> Besides listing possible options for TPS holders and DREAM Act candidates,
> the memo also lists other options for multiple categories of undocumented
> immigrants as well as legal workers, professionals, and investors.
>
> Stern notes that the 11-page document was made public last Thursday by
> Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who with six other senators wrote to
> Obama<http://www.propublica.org/documents/item/congressional-letter-to-pres...>more
> than a month ago, asking for his assurance that rumors that some sort of
> reprieve was in the works for millions of illegal immigrants were not true.
>
> Christopher Bentley, a USCIS spokesman, told Stern that the agency would not
> comment on details of the memo, which he described as an internal draft that
> "should not be equated with official action or policy of the Department…We
> continue to maintain that comprehensive bipartisan legislation, coupled with
> smart, effective enforcement, is the only solution to our nation's
> immigration challenges."
>
> Bentley said that internal memos help the agency "do the thinking that leads
> to important changes; some of them are adopted and others are rejected" and
> that "nobody should mistake deliberation and exchange of ideas for
> final decisions."
>
> "To be clear," he wrote Stern in an e-mail, the Obama administration "will
> not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation's entire
> illegal immigrant population."
>
>  ExecutiveMemo.pdf
> 3361KViewDownload

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Nancy Pelosi's Swamp Thing








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U.S. mulls legalizing classes of undocumented aliens in absence of immigration reform









 

U.S. mulls legalizing classes of undocumented aliens in absence of immigration reform

Published 3 August 2010   http://tinyurl.com/24z8sjr

An internal U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS) memo, titled "Administrative Alternatives to Comprehensive Immigration Reform," (attached) indicates that high level officials within the Obama administration may be considering ways to legalize classes of undocumented immigrants in case Congress does not deal with formal legalization for the estimated 10.8 million immigrants without papers

It is not likely that Congress would pass a comprehensive immigration reform this year, so the Obama administration is considering ways it could act without congressional approval to achieve many of the objectives of the initiative, including giving permanent resident status, or green cards, to large numbers of people in the country illegally.

ProPublica's Marcus Stern writes that the ideas were outlined in an unusually frank draft memoprepared for Alejandro N. Mayorkas, director of the federal agency that handles immigration benefits, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services (USCIS). The memo lists ways the government could grant permanent resident status to tens of thousands of people and delay the deportation of others, potentially indefinitely.

"In the absence of Comprehensive Immigration Reform, CIS can extend benefits and/or protections to many individuals and groups by issuing new guidance and regulations," said the memo, which was prepared by four senior officials from different branches of USCIS.

The Miami Herald's Alfonso Chardy notes that one group that could receive green cards are the almost 400,000 current holders of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) who include Salvadorans, Haitians, Hondurans, and Nicaraguans.

The memo says young students who could qualify for green cards under pending legislation known as the DREAM Act could be granted deferred action, an immigration measure that delays deportation.

Another option for potential DREAM Act beneficiaries, the memo says, would be to "move forward" to 1996 — or another date — the registry provision of immigration law that makes eligible for green cards undocumented immigrants present in the United States since before 1 January 1972.

Besides listing possible options for TPS holders and DREAM Act candidates, the memo also lists other options for multiple categories of undocumented immigrants as well as legal workers, professionals, and investors.

Stern notes that the 11-page document was made public last Thursday by Senator Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa), who with six other senators wrote to Obamamore than a month ago, asking for his assurance that rumors that some sort of reprieve was in the works for millions of illegal immigrants were not true.

Christopher Bentley, a USCIS spokesman, told Stern that the agency would not comment on details of the memo, which he described as an internal draft that "should not be equated with official action or policy of the Department…We continue to maintain that comprehensive bipartisan legislation, coupled with smart, effective enforcement, is the only solution to our nation's immigration challenges."

Bentley said that internal memos help the agency "do the thinking that leads to important changes; some of them are adopted and others are rejected" and that "nobody should mistake deliberation and exchange of ideas for final decisions."

"To be clear," he wrote Stern in an e-mail, the Obama administration "will not grant deferred action or humanitarian parole to the nation's entire illegal immigrant population."


 


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Two Interesting Maps







 


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The end of the United States?









The end of the United States?

There has been a lot of discussion over the years, mostly by the kooks and nuts, about the collapse of the United States. It's always been great fodder for novels and movies, but no one really took any of that talk seriously…Until very recently.

Now, what could cause the collapse of the U.S? There are a number of possibilities, but the biggest one would be the collapse of the economic system. Basically, the United States goes bankrupt.

Another would be one or more states telling the Federal Government to go pound sand and essentially, (If not practically), seceding from the Union.

Lets take a look at the first one shall we? The economic collapse of the US. To begin with, I am not an expert in economics, just a guy who has to keep a household budget. I know that if I spend more then I take in I'm going to be in a world of hurt real quick.

The United States has been spending more money then it takes in for nearly a century. The ball really took off under the Roosevelt administration with his New Deal fiasco. The next major spending spree was under the Johnson Administration with his Great Society disaster.

The second problem is the massive over-regulation of the American economy. This began under Teddy Roosevelt and was greatly expanded under the Franklin Delano Roosevelt administration. The FDR administration used the Commerce Clause to essentially take total control of the US economy.

This was a complete reversal of the generally accepted view of the Clause, which was meant to insure the smooth flow of goods between the states. Under FDR it became a means to exercise totalitarian control of the economy, to the detriment of the nation. (See the forgotten man)

What is generally not known, since it isn't taught, is that the economy in the United States was a lot worse then in the rest of the world. Not that the rest of the world was doing well, but they were recovering by the mid '30′s. Because of the policies of the Roosevelt administration, the United States went into an even deeper depression instead, and it wasn't ended until WW2.

Since the Roosevelt administration, both parties have been spending like there was no tomorrow, however the Democrat party was by far the worst offender. The Republican party and least had some clues on economics since a large segment came from the private sector. With the collapse of the USSR and the end of the Cold War, both parties thought that cutting the military would be a great idea. The problem was the Democrats under William Jefferson Clinton basically gutted the military.

The other problem is the Liberal/Progressive idea that all money belongs to the government and that taxes have no effect on economic development. With this idea along with the Democrats tendency to regulate all aspects of American life, the Democrats passed what was then the largest tax increase in U.S. History.

The result was the blowout of the Democrats from Congress.

When that happened Clinton was forced to move to the center and the results were a massive increase in the economy.

In 2000, George W. Bush became president. I won't go into the various controversies of his election, other can do that.

When Bush came in he looked around and saw what a disaster our military had become. So he started to rebuild. He also indulged in his inner RINO and started ramping up spending and regulations to the detriment of the nation.

The Islamic terror attack on September 11, 2001 threw a big wrench into Bush's plans. Overnight nearly a trillion dollars was knocked out of the economy. Bush understood that tax cuts were needed to allow the economy the liquidity it needed to repair its self. He was able to push through a series of tax cuts, however the Democrats demanded that they only be good for 10 years, and then expire in December 2010.

Bush agreed to this and the tax cuts did their job. Unfortunately, he also let the Republican Congress under Tom Delay and then Dennis Hastert spend valuable tax money on useless projects. The upshot of all this corruption was the takeover of the house and senate by the Democrats in 2006.

Bush also saw a problem coming with the housing mortgage industry, specifically Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Several times he tried to get some sort of fix in but was stymied every time by the likes of Barney Frank, Christopher Dodd, Maxine Waters and other hard left democrats. At the time no one understood that the Democrats were using these two entities as their personal piggy banks.

In late 2007 the economy started to fail. I was personally out of work for most of 2008. In the summer of 2008 fuel prices suddenly took off for no good reason. Gas hit $4usd/gal and people had to make decisions on being able to get to work or paying the mortgage and credit cards.

By late 2008 the housing bubble popped and the economy basically crashed. General Motors and Chrysler were pretty much bankrupt. Ford had been dealing with its problems and had been able prepare its self for the downturn.

Several investment companies failed and the U.S. treasury began cooking up a deal to "fix things." The fixes involved bailouts of some companies that didn't deserve them, (Not that ANY did), and the forced sale/liquidation of others. Amazingly, the companies that the bailouts seemed to help were those with senior managers doing "Public Service" in the U.S. Government.

In November 2008 Barack Obama was elected the next President.

When he took office, things were bad, Once Obama settled in, he made things worse. A more incompetent and narcissistic president would be hard to find. Obama with the help of Speaker of the house Pelosi and Majority Leader Reid opened the taps on the treasury and spent trillions of dollars we don't have. The American people told them to stop, but they would not listen. The general theme in Washington was "You are to ignorant to understand what wonderful things the Democrats were doing for you."

With all the spending on bogus "stimulus" packages and phoney "Shovel ready" jobs programs, real jobs began disappearing at a frightening rate. Obama and the Democrats said that without all the spending, the unemployment rate would go over 8%. It's now at 9.5% and in some areas over 25%.

In midsummer, people realized that the Bush tax cuts were due to expire and it suddenly set in that taxes for everyone were about to go through the roof. Of course the Obama administration, in typical progressive style, refuses to understand that if a company has no money it isn't going to hire people.

Now, the Democrats are looking at losing both the house and potentially the senate in this election cycle. They are desperate to ram through as much of their agenda as they can irregardless of the wishes of the American people. It has reached the point of self delusion.

Now, the economic collapse.

If it happens, it will probably occur either in late 2011 or in 2012. What might happen? To begin with, no one will buy the bonds the United States sells in order to pay for all the programs both parties have created. This means we might monetize the debt. What is involved in monetizing the debt? Simple. The United States will start printing money. In other words, they will inflate the economy and reduce the value of people's savings. The worst case scenario is what's happened in the Wiemar Republic and is now happening in Zimbabwe. You money is not worth the paper its printed on.

This will start a vicious circle. Companies won't be able to buy inventory and people won't be able to buy their product. Prices will skyrocket. Unemployment will shoot through the roof as business fail. The social programs that the Progressives and their RINO friends love so much? They won't be able to pay for them and will literally have no choice but to shut them down.

Another option is the United States simply repudiates the debt. This means they tell all the debt holders, like China, that "Sorry, we're bankrupt and we ain't paying you back. Have a nice day!" If that happens, we're looking at a probable global depression.

In the United States, you would probably see states that had done their best to keep their fiscal houses in order breaking away from the federal government and issuing their own currency. More then likely these states may band together. It will not be a good time. In order to survive, they would probably end all the welfare payments and tell people to get to work. Those that don't would either starve or be forced to leave.

For the states that are on fiscal "Death's Door" so to speak, we're probably looking at total and complete collapse as the haves flee and the have nots do what they always do. Riot and make demands.

These states are governed by some of the most incompetent and useless morons in existence. They are the ones who ran their states into the ground and are absolutely terrified of the thought that they might actually have to work. As their states start spiraling down, they will start confiscating every penny they can get to maintain their sinecures. Once they finally fail, more then likely they will flee to another country or get lynched. This will also include some of the more left wing city governments as well.

In this scenario, you will see a death toll approaching millions. The states that have natural resources and the ability to develop them, will probably make it. Those states with no resources or states that do not have the will to develop them, will quickly slide into total chaos.

My guess is Texas, Ohio and most of the southern states will pull through. States that are doomed? New York, California, Hawaii, etc.

Now the second possible way the United States could collapse is states literally seceding from the Union ala the old Confederacy.

Why would a state pull out of the Union? The simple reason is a federal government that has become, for all intents and purposes, authoritarian/totalitarian and no longer respecting states rights. We are extremely close to that point now, and may reach it a lot sooner then we do an economic collapse.

What is bringing this on is Arizona's recent new anti-illegal immigration law, S.B. 1070. This law basically makes a federal law enforceable at the state level. This law is very popular among Americans, but is hated by the Political class. (Democrats and RINO's) Obama has ordered Attorney General Eric Holder to sue Arizona to have the law overturned.

Most honest legal scholars believe the law is constitutional. The problem is that the case was heard in front of a Clinton Appointed left wing judge. This progressive rump swab, Judge Susan Bolton, ruled the main part of the law was unconstitutional. She demonstrated that she doesn't care what the constitution actually says on the matter, nor does she care what is happening on the border.

This ruling caused writer Jeffrey Kuhner to opine in the Washington Times to suggest that Arizona should:

"stand on the bedrock principles of states' rights and democratic self-government and insist that S.B. 1070 go into effect despite the federal ban. This would set up a constitutional showdown between Mrs. Brewer and Mr. Obama, Arizona and Washington. What would the Justice Department do: carry Mrs. Brewer off in handcuffs and throw her in prison? In other words, the people of Arizona should engage in peaceful civil disobedience."

Mr. Kuhner goes on to say,

"In the future, many states – including Arizona – may decide they have no other option but to break away from the union. The choice is becoming starkly apparent: devolution or dissolution."

I doubt that the Arizona government is quite ready to make that announcement. However, the Obama administration has demonstrated it's utter and complete contempt for the Constitution, the rule of law or anything other then turning this nation into a socialist country.

The BP oil well blowout in the Gulf of Mexico loudly showed just how bad Washington has become. To begin with, it appears that the rig sank due to excessive amounts of water poured on it. This caused the pipe to the cutoff valve to rip out and finish off the valve. As of this posting, the investigation/coverup is ongoing.

After the oil started pouring out. BP and the gulf states started looking to Washington to get skimmer boats in, barriers up and to start burning the oil, all meant to minimize the environmental damage. Instead the Obama administration blocked foreign nations from coming in with personnel and equipment to help clean up the mess. They did this as a bone to their Union supporters who have bought and paid for the Democrats in office.

When the oil started approaching the shores of Louisiana, Governor Jindal started asking for for booms to be laid down and sand berms to be built to keep the oil from reaching shore. Instead the Environmental Protection Agency ordered all berms and booms to be stopped until the impact of using them could be determined. The Coast Guard was offered booms from a company in Maine, but turned them down as "Not meeting standards." It turned out they not only met standards, they surpassed them.

The Coast Guard also ordered a number of skimmer barges that Louisiana had deployed back into port because they didn't have enough life jackets and fire extinguishers on board. What they could have done was tell them to get this stuff when they came into port after skimming up the oil or bringing out the equipment for them.

These and other things the Obama administration did caused Governor Jindal to blow his stack. He was so angry at what Washington was doing that he almost ordered the berms to be built and the boats back out and to hell with what the EPA and the Coast Guard said. Governor Jindal has been ripping into Obama and the Federal government ever since.

In Texas, the EPA has ordered a fair chunk of the oil industry to shut down "Because they don't meet Federal air quality standards." The Feds have also tried to shut down all oil production in the Gulf and also are denying permits to coal mines. The upshot of all this will be at least a 1-2 point increase in the unemployment rate.

It's beginning to look like these rules and regulations are being done to wreck the economy and then allow Obama to declare "Emergency measures" and rule by decree. Paranoid? This too is starting to come into the main stream from the fringes.

All of these actions may cause states to start reasserting their 10th amendment rights and stop following the diktats from Washington. Of course, the Obama administration along with the political class could not abide this and would start moving to suppress the states, possibly even arresting the governor(s) and imposing martial law.

That would be the trigger for a full blown succession movement and in all probability the start of the second American Civil war. If that occurs, the odds of the "rebels" getting and using a nuke are near 100%. Bye bye Washington if that happens.

The United States in now at a moment in time that hasn't been seen since 1860. The nation is split so badly that there is no middle ground. We have a government that is totally unresponsive to the people and is actually a threat to the freedoms, liberty and economic health of America.

Can this be turned around? Yes, but it will require drastic action and leadership that the current crop of idiots doesn't posses. Frankly, I don't see anyone on the national level who could come in and clear out the swamp that is the Federal Government. It is possible that a Constitutional Convention may be called for the first time since the original one over 200 years ago. This would open another can of worms, but it might just throw the fear of God into the political class and and force them to return to our foundations.

Honestly? I don't see this happening.

Of the two scenarios I've listed, I think it will be the collapse of the economy that will happen. God help us all.

 



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Right Over There




 

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Re: Codevilla, North, and the Ruling Class

"After all, Republicans had been happy enough to approve of similar things under Republican administrations. Differences between Bushes, Clintons, and Obamas are of degree, not kind. ... No prominent Republican challenged the ruling class's continued claim of superior insight, nor its denigration of the American people as irritable children who must learn their place. The Republican Party did not disparage the ruling class, because most of its officials are or would like to be part of it."

America's Ruling Class -- And the Perils of Revolution
By Angelo M. Codevilla
from the July 2010 - August 2010 issue

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

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

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

Never has there been so little diversity within America's upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America's upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and "bureaucrat" was a dirty word for all. So was "social engineering." Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday's upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

Today's ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters -- speaking the "in" language -- serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America's ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

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


The Political Divide

Important as they are, our political divisions are the iceberg's tip. When pollsters ask the American people whether they are likely to vote Republican or Democrat in the next 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 identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them 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 a fourth 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 Republican voters, 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 13.5 percent 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 the ruling class. Today, few speak well of the ruling class. Not only has it burgeoned in size and pretense, but it also has undertaken wars it has not won, presided over a declining economy and mushrooming debt, made life more expensive, raised taxes, and talked down to the American people. Americans' conviction that the ruling class is as hostile as it is incompetent has solidified. The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.

While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes. But only the realization was new. The ruling class had sunk deep roots in America over decades before 2008. Machiavelli compares serious political diseases to the Aetolian fevers -- easy to treat early on while they are difficult to discern, but virtually untreatable by the time they become obvious.

Far from speculating how the political confrontation might develop between America's regime 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 here is 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 from a place where people could expect to live without bowing to privileged classes to one in 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 and David 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 new class 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 members of 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 Palo Alto, California, to Boston's Beacon Hill as well as in opulent university towns from Princeton to Boulder. But they are no wealthier than many Texas oilmen or California farmers, or than neighbors with whom they do not associate -- just as the social science and humanities class that rules universities seldom associates with physicians 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 people demographically is that, whether in government power directly or as officers in companies, their careers and fortunes depend on government. They vote Democrat more 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 the same sources as the millions of teachers, consultants, and government employees in the middle ranks who aspire to be the former and identify morally with what they suppose to be the latter's grievances.

Professional prominence or position will not secure a place in the class any more than mere money. In fact, it is possible to be an official of a major corporation or a member of the U.S. Supreme Court (just ask Justice Clarence Thomas), or even president (Ronald Reagan), and not be taken seriously by the ruling class. Like a fraternity, this class requires above all comity -- being in with the right people, giving the 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, the interests of the class, gives lip service to its ideals and shibboleths, and is willing to accommodate 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 paraphrases of a book published in 1974, you can claim (perhaps correctly) that your plagiarism was "inadvertent," and you can count on the Law School's dean, Elena Kagan, to appoint a committee including former and future Harvard president Derek Bok that issues a secret report that "closes" the incident. Incidentally, Kagan ends up a justice of the Supreme Court. Not one of these people did their jobs: the professor did not write the book himself, the assistant plagiarized instead of researching, the dean and the committee did not hold the professor accountable, and all ended up rewarded. By contrast, 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 academic achievement. To see something closer to an academic meritocracy consider France, where elected officials have little power, a vast bureaucracy explicitly controls details from 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 to Harvard and Princeton and Stanford? Didn't most of them get good grades? Yes. But while getting into the Ecole Nationale d'Administration or the Ecole Polytechnique or the dozens of other entry points to France's ruling class requires outperforming others in blindly graded exams, and graduating from such places requires passing exams that many fail, getting into America's "top schools" is less a matter of passing exams than of showing up with acceptable grades and an attractive social profile. American secondary schools are generous with their As. Since the 1970s, it has been virtually impossible to flunk out of American colleges. And it is an open secret that "the best" colleges require the least work and give out the highest grade point averages. No, our ruling class recruits and renews itself not through meritocracy but rather by taking into itself people whose most prominent feature is their commitment to fit in. The most successful neither write books and papers that stand up to criticism nor release their academic records. Thus does our ruling class stunt itself through negative selection. But the more it has dumbed itself down, the more it has defined itself 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, and dysfunctional unless properly constrained. How did this replace the Founding generation's paradigm that "all men are created equal"?

The notion of human equality was always a hard sell, because experience teaches us 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 human equality made sense to our Founding generation because they believed that all men are made in the image and likeness of God, because they were yearning for equal treatment 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 different breeds of animals and plants produce inferior or superior results, slave owners were citing 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 beings or, in the young Karl Marx's formulation, that ethical thought is "superstructural" to material reality. By 1853, when Sen. John Pettit of Ohio called "all men are created equal" "a self-evident lie," much of America's educated class had already absorbed the "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 and improving 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 religious fervor 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 evolved of all, were the improvers.

Thus began the Progressive Era. When Woodrow Wilson in 1914 was asked "can't you let anything alone?" he answered with, "I let everything alone that you can show me is not itself moving in the wrong direction, but I am not going to let those things alone 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. By such upper-middle-class waters, progressives who imagined themselves the world's examples 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 badly by depriving the U.S. government of the power to reshape American society. Nor was Wilson 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 the Progressives in the American people's eyes. Their international schemes had brought blood and promised more. Their domestic management had not improved Americans' lives, but given them a taste of arbitrary government, including Prohibition. The Progressives, for their part, found it fulfilling to attribute the failure of their schemes to the American people's backwardness, to something deeply wrong with America. The American people had failed them because democracy in its American form perpetuated the worst in humanity. Thus Progressives began to look down 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 opened in the interwar years. Some Progressives joined the "vanguard of the proletariat," the Communist Party. Many more were deeply sympathetic to Soviet Russia, as they were 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 because they promised energetically to transcend their peoples' ways and to build "the new man." Above all, our educated class was bitter about America. In 1925 the American Civil 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 one might have called the Chautauqua class to drive home the point that Americans who believed in the Bible were willful ignoramuses. As World War II approached, some American Progressives supported the Soviet Union (and its ally, Nazi Germany) and others Great Britain and France. But Progressives agreed on one thing: the approaching war should be blamed on the majority of Americans, because they had refused to lead the League of Nations. Darryl Zanuck produced the critically acclaimed movie [Woodrow] Wilson featuring Cedric Hardwicke as Senator Henry Cabot 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 began the process that turned them into rulers. FDR described America's problems in technocratic terms. America's problems would be fixed by a "brain trust" (picked by him). His New Deal's solutions -- the alphabet-soup "independent" agencies that have 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 common Americans. Believing itself "scientific," this Progressive class sought to explain its differences from its neighbors in "scientific" terms. The most elaborate of these attempts was Theodor Adorno's widely acclaimed The Authoritarian Personality (1948). It invented a set of criteria by which to define personality traits, ranked these traits 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 not liberal Democrats were latent fascists. This way of thinking about non-Progressives filtered down to college curricula. In 1963-64 for example, I was assigned Herbert McCloskey's Conservatism and Personality (1958) at Rutgers's Eagleton Institute of Politics as a paradigm of methodological correctness. The author had defined conservatism 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. (My class 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-Marxist notion that human judgments are "epiphenomenal" products of spiritual or material alienation, 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. They absorbed it osmotically, second -- or thirdhand, from their education and from companions. Truly, after Barack Obama described his opponents' clinging to "God and guns" as a characteristic of inferior Americans, he justified himself by pointing out 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, truths that 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 before they took power.


The Agenda: Power

Our ruling class's agenda is power for itself. While it stakes its claim through intellectual-moral pretense, it holds power by one of the oldest and most prosaic of means: patronage and promises thereof. Like left-wing parties always and everywhere, it is a "machine," that is, based on providing tangible rewards to its members. Such parties often provide rank-and-file activists with modest livelihoods and 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 all problems, 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 and tornadoes, 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. Let us now look at what this means in our time.


Dependence Economics

By taxing and parceling out more than a third of what Americans produce, through regulations 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 on sellers 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 endowing some in society with power to force others to sell cheaper than they would, and forcing others yet to buy at higher prices -- even to buy in the first place -- modern government 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 make detailed 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's value for all.

Laws and regulations nowadays are longer than ever because length is needed to specify 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 be treated 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 would receive what benefits (e.g., public employee unions and auto workers) and who would 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 countless boards and commissions arbitrarily to protect some persons and companies, while ruining others. Thus in 2008 the Republican administration first bailed out Bear Stearns, then let Lehman Brothers sink in the ensuing panic, but then rescued Goldman Sachs by infusing cash into its principal debtor, AIG. Then, its Democratic successor used similarly naked discretionary power (and money appropriated for another purpose) to give major stakes in the auto industry to labor unions that support it. Nowadays, the members of our ruling class admit that they do not read the laws. They don't have to. Because modern laws are primarily grants of discretion, all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.

By making economic rules dependent on discretion, our bipartisan ruling class teaches that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support. Thus in the 1990s and 2000s, as Democrats and Republicans forced banks to make loans for houses to people and at rates they would not otherwise have considered, builders and 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 with the ruling class at the bottom and at the top were bailed out. Similarly, by taxing the use of carbon fuels and subsidizing "alternative energy," our ruling class created arguably 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 ensuing diversions of wealth exist exclusively because of subsidies. The prospect of legislation that would put a price on carbon emissions and allot certain amounts to certain companies set off a feeding frenzy among large companies to show support for 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 created are by definition creatures of subsidies -- that is, of privilege. What effect creating such privileges may have on "global warming" is debatable. But it surely increases the number of people dependent on the ruling class, and teaches Americans that satisfying that class is a surer way of making a living than producing goods and services that people want to buy.

Beyond patronage, picking economic winners and losers redirects the American people's energies to tasks that the political class deems more worthy than what Americans choose for themselves. John Kenneth Galbraith's characterization of America as "private wealth amidst public squalor" (The Affluent Society, 1958) has ever encapsulated our best and brightest's complaint: left to themselves, Americans use land inefficiently in suburbs and exurbs, making it necessary to use energy to transport them to jobs and shopping. Americans drive big cars, eat lots of meat as well 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 desires even though the ruling class knows that justice lies in improving the community and the planet. The ruling class knows that Americans must learn to live more densely and close to work, that they must drive smaller cars and change their lives to use less energy, that their dietary habits must improve, that they must accept limits in how 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 class deems worthier. So, ever-greater taxes and intrusive regulations are the main wrenches by which the American people can be improved (and, yes, by which the ruling 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 to purchase health insurance. The money thus taken and directed is money that the citizens themselves might have used to pay for medical care. In exchange for the money, the government promises to provide care through its "system." But then all the boards, commissions, guidelines, procedures, and "best practices" that constitute "the system" become the arbiters of what any citizen ends up getting. The citizen might 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 boards and 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 plan to force citizens who own Individual Retirement Accounts (IRAs) to transfer those funds 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 trade private ownership and control of retirement money for a guarantee as sound as the government itself? Is it not clear that the government knows more about managing retirement 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 by enumerating rights that the government may not infringe. ("Congress shall make no law..." 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 the citizenry'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" Constitution in which restrictions on government give way to "positive rights" -- meaning charters of government power.

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

In America, the process by which party has become (almost) as important began with the Supreme Court's 1962 decision in Baker v. Carr which, by setting the single standard "one man, one vote" for congressional districts, ended up legalizing the practice of "gerrymandering," concentrating the opposition party's voters into as few districts 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 who represent 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 on elected 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 is ubiquitous and long-standing -- government has designated certain individuals, companies, and organizations within each of society's sectors as (junior) partners in elaborating laws and administrative rules for those sectors. The government empowers the persons it has chosen over those not chosen, deems them the sector's true representatives, and rewards them. They become part of the ruling class.

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 "the doctors" even though the vast majority of America's 975,000 physicians opposed it. Those who run the AMA, however, have a government contract as exclusive providers 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 in line, while the impracticality of doing without the billing codes tamps down rebellion in the 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, the National Association of Chiefs of Police -- whose officials depend on the administration 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 by employers and government. Prototypical is the Service Employees International Union, which grew spectacularly by persuading managers of government agencies as well as of publicly funded private entities that placing their employees in the SEIU would relieve them of responsibility. Not by being elected by workers' secret ballots did the SEIU conquer workplace after workplace, but rather by such deals, or by the union 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 the Democratic Party, which it recycles in greater power over public employees. The union'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 in today's America insofar as he is part of the hierarchy of a sector organization affiliated 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 fined except by a jury of his peers for having violated laws passed by elected representatives, started disappearing when the New Deal inaugurated today's administrative state -- in which bureaucrats make, enforce, and adjudicate nearly all the rules. Today's legal-administrative texts are incomprehensibly detailed and freighted with provisions crafted exquisitely to affect equal individuals unequally. The bureaucrats do not enforce the rules themselves so much as whatever "agency policy" they choose to draw from them in any given case. If you protest any "agency policy" you will be informed that it was formulated with input from "the public." But not from the likes of you.

Disregard for the text of laws -- for the dictionary meaning of words and the intentions of 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 the people who wrote and ratified it could not have foreseen, it has become conventional wisdom among our ruling class that they may transcend the Constitution while pretending 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's decision whether or not to terminate her pregnancy." The court gave no other constitutional reasoning, period. Perfunctory to the point of mockery, this constitutional talk was to reassure the American people that the ruling class was acting within the Constitution's limitations. By the 1990s federal courts were invalidating amendments to state constitutions passed by referenda to secure the "positive rights" they invent, because these expressions of popular will were inconsistent 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 every American to purchase health insurance, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi replied: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" No surprise then that lower court judges and bureaucrats take liberties with laws, regulations, and contracts. That is why legal words that say you are in the right avail you less in today's America than being on the right side of the persons who decide what they want those words to mean.

As the discretionary powers of officeholders and of their informal entourages have grown, the importance of policy and of law itself is declining, citizenship is becoming vestigial, 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 lives than 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. It believes that the Christian family (and the Orthodox Jewish one too) is rooted in and perpetuates the ignorance commonly called religion, divisive social prejudices, and repressive gender roles, that it is the greatest barrier to human progress because it looks to its very particular interest -- often defined as mere coherence against outsiders 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 than marriage. The institution of no-fault divorce diminished the distinction between cohabitation and marriage -- except that husbands are held financially responsible for the children they father, while out-of-wedlock fathers are not. The tax code penalizes marriage 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 parading their affairs. For example, in 1997 the Democratic administration's secretary of defense and the Republican Senate's majority leader (joined by the New York Times et al.) condemned the military's practice of punishing officers who had extramarital affairs. While the military had assumed that honoring marital vows is as fundamental to the integrity of its units as it is to that of society, consensus at the top declared that insistence on fidelity is "contrary to societal norms." Not surprisingly, rates of marriage in America have decreased as out-of-wedlock births have increased. The biggest demographic consequence has been that about one in five of all households are women alone or with children, in which case they have about a four in 10 chance of 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's most faithful voters.

While our ruling class teaches that relationships among men, women, and children are contingent, it also insists that the relationship between each of them and the state is fundamental. That is why such as Hillary Clinton have written law review articles and books advocating a direct relationship between the government and children, effectively abolishing the presumption of parental authority. Hence whereas within living memory school nurses could not administer an aspirin to a child without the parents' 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 the government may and often does object to how parents raise children. The ruling class's assumption is that what it mandates for children is correct ipso facto, while what 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' right to homeschool their children against the ruling class's desire to accomplish what Woodrow Wilson so yearned: "to make young gentlemen as unlike their fathers as possible."

At stake are the most important questions: What is the right way for human beings to live? By what standard is anything true or good? Who gets to decide what? Implicit in Wilson's words and explicit in our ruling class's actions is the dismissal, as the ways of outdated "fathers," of the answers that most Americans would give to these questions. This dismissal of the American people's intellectual, spiritual, and moral substance 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 likeness of God and that we are subject to His and to His nature's laws, the enlightened ones know that we are products of evolution, driven by chance, the environment, and the will to primacy. While the un-enlightened are stuck with the antiquated notion that ordinary human minds can reach objective judgments about good and evil, better and worse through reason, the enlightened ones know that all such judgments are subjective 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 right to pronounce definitive, "scientific" judgment on whatever it chooses. When the government 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's temperatures are rising "like a hockey stick" from millennial stability -- a conclusion on which billions of dollars' worth of decisions were made -- to investigate the possibility of fraud, the University of Virginia's faculty senate condemned any inquiry into "scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards" claiming that demands for data "send a chilling message to scientists...and indeed scholars in any discipline." The Washington Post editorialized that the attorney general's demands for data amounted to "an assault on reason." The fact that the "hockey stick" conclusion stands discredited and Mann and associates are on record manipulating peer 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 distinction between 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 as socially 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 produces new "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 direct the lives not only of Americans but of foreigners as well. George W. Bush's 2005 inaugural statement that America cannot be free until the whole world is free and hence that America must push and prod mankind to freedom was but an extrapolation of the sentiments of America's Progressive class, first articulated by such 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 forcibly to tinker with the innards of foreign bodies politic as to protect America. Indeed, they conflate the two purposes in the face of the American people's insistence to draw a bright line between war against our enemies and peace with non-enemies in whose affairs we do not interfere. That is why, from Wilson to Kissinger, the ruling class has complained that the American people oscillate between bellicosity and "isolationism."

Because our ruling class deems unsophisticated the American people's perennial preference for decisive military action or none, its default solution to international threats has been to commit blood and treasure to long-term, twilight efforts to reform the world's Vietnams, Somalias, Iraqs, and Afghanistans, believing that changing hearts 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 embroiled America, wars that have achieved nothing worthwhile at great cost in lives and treasure, 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 Wilson began this double game in 1919, when he assured Europe's peoples that America had mandated him to demand their agreement to Article X of the peace treaty (the League of Nations) and then swore to the American people that Article X was the Europeans' non-negotiable demand. The fact that the U.S. government had seized control of transatlantic cable communications helped hide (for a while) that the League scheme was merely the American Progressives' private dream. In our time, this double game is quotidian on the evening news. Notably, President Obama apologized to Europe because "the United States has fallen short of meeting its responsibilities" to reduce carbon emissions by taxation. But the American people never assumed such responsibility, and oppose doing so. Hence President Obama was 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 while glossing 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 him and his friends -- had shown "arrogance and been dismissive" toward them, and to the world because President Truman had used the atom bomb to end World War II. So President Clinton apologized to Africans because some Americans held African slaves until 1865 and others were mean to Negroes thereafter -- not himself and his friends, of course. So assistant secretary of state Michael Posner apologized to Chinese diplomats for Arizona's law that directs police to check immigration status. Republicans engage in that sort of thing as well: former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev tells us that in 1987 then vice president George H. W. Bush distanced himself from his own administration by telling him, "Reagan is a conservative, an extreme conservative. All the dummies and blockheads are with him..." This is all about a class of Americans distinguishing itself from its inferiors. It recalls the Pharisee 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 the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, 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. It has no privileged podiums, and speaks with many voices, often inharmonious. It shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards inept and haughty. It defines itself practically in terms of reflexive reaction against the rulers' defining ideas and proclivities -- 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, and religious practice. While the country class, like the ruling class, includes the professionally accomplished and the mediocre, geniuses and dolts, it is different because of its non-orientation to government and its members' yearning to rule themselves 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 what anyone perceives as imbalance or grievance. Hence they tend to oppose special treatment, whether for corporations or for social categories. Rather than gaming government regulations, they try to stay as far from them as possible. Thus the Supreme Court's 2005 decision in Kelo, which allows the private property of some to be taken by others with better connections to government, reminded the country class that government is not its friend.

Negative orientation to privilege distinguishes the corporate officer who tries to keep his company from joining the Business Council of large corporations who have close ties with government from the fellow in the next office. The first wants the company to grow by producing. The second wants it to grow by moving to the trough. It sets apart the schoolteacher who resents the union to which he is forced to belong for putting the union's interests above those of parents who want to choose their children's schools. In general, the country class includes all those in stations high and low who are aghast at how relatively little honest work yields, by comparison with what just a little connection with the right bureaucracy can get you. It includes those who take the side of outsiders against insiders, of small institutions against large ones, of local government against the state or federal. The country class is convinced that big business, big government, and big finance are linked as never before and that ordinary 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 against infringing its prejudices. Averse to wheedling, they tend to think that exams should play a major role in getting or advancing in jobs, that records of performance -- including academic ones -- should be matters of public record, and that professional disputes should be settled by open argument. For such people, the Supreme Court's 2009 decision in Ricci, upholding the right of firefighters to be promoted according to the results of a professional exam, revived the hope that competence may sometimes still trump political connections.

Nothing has set the country class apart, defined it, made it conscious of itself, given it whatever coherence it has, so much as the ruling class's insistence that people other than themselves are intellectually and hence otherwise humanly inferior. Persons who 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 say that the issues of modern life are too complex for any but themselves. Most are insulted 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 the world'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 are worth imitating, it dislikes the idea of adhering to "world standards." This class also takes 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 every measurable way. Few vote for the Democratic Party. You do not doubt that you are amidst the country class rather than with the ruling class when the American flag passes by or "God Bless America" is sung after seven innings of baseball, and most people show reverence. The same people wince at the National Football League's plaintive 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 equality the foundation of Americanism. Others just hate snobs. Some parts of the country class now follow the stars and the music out of Nashville, Tennessee, and Branson, Missouri -- entertainment complexes larger than Hollywood's -- because since the 1970s most of Hollywood's products have appealed more to the mores of the ruling class and its underclass clients than to those of large percentages of Americans. The same goes for "popular music" and television. For some in the country class Christian radio and TV are the lodestone of sociopolitical taste, while the very secular Fox News serves the same purpose for others. While symphonies and opera houses around the country, as well as the stations that broadcast them, are firmly in the ruling class's hands, a considerable part of the country class appreciates these things for their own sake. By that very token, the country class's characteristic cultural venture -- the homeschool movement -- stresses the classics across the board in science, 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 the peculiar ways in which the ruling class impacts its concerns. Independent businesspeople are naturally more sensitive to the growth of privileged relations between government and their competitors. Persons who would like to lead their community rue the advantages that Democratic and Republican party establishments are accruing. Parents of young children and young women anxious about marriage worry that cultural directives from on high are dispelling their dreams. The faithful to God sense persecution. All resent higher taxes and loss of freedom. More and more realize that their own agenda's advancement requires concerting resistance to the ruling class across the board.

Not being at the table when government makes the rules about how you must run your 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's nightmare. But what to do about it? In our time the interpenetration of government and business -- the network of subsidies, preferences, and regulations -- is so thick and 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 grant of privilege. Just as no manufacturer can hope to reduce the subsidies that raise his fuel costs, no set of doctors can shield themselves from the increased costs and bureaucracy resulting from government mandates. Hence independent business's agenda has been to resist the expansion of government in general, and of course to reduce taxes. Pursuit of this agenda with arguments about economic efficiency and job creation -- and through support of the Republican Party -- usually results in enough relief to discourage more vigorous remonstrance. Sometimes, however, the economic argument is framed in moral terms: "The sum of good government," said Thomas 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 violate arbitrarily the first principle of association." In our time, more and more independent businesspeople have come to think of their economic problems in moral terms. But few 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 things that American communities could decide for themselves, America's thirst for self-governance reawakened. The fact that public employees are almost always paid more and have more generous benefits than the private sector people whose taxes support them only sharpened the sense among many in the country class that they now work for public employees rather than the other way around. But how to reverse the roles? How can voters regain control of government? Restoring localities' traditional powers over schools, including standards, curriculum, and prayer, would take repudiating two generations of Supreme Court rulings. So would the restoration of traditional "police" powers over behavior in public places. Bringing public employee unions 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 its employees, restoring it involves primarily deciding that any number of functions now performed and the professional specialties who perform them, e.g., social workers, are superfluous or worse. Explaining to one's self and neighbors why such functions and personnel do more harm than good, while the ruling class brings its powers to bear 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 excluding parents from their children's education. Americans reacted to these challenges primarily by sorting themselves out. Close friendships and above all marriages became rarer between persons who think well of divorce, abortion, and government authority over children and those who do not. The homeschool movement, for which the Internet became the great facilitator, involves not only each family educating its own children, but also extensive and growing social, intellectual, and spiritual contact among like-minded persons. In short, the part of the country class that is most concerned with family matters has taken on something of a biological identity. Few in this part of the country class have any illusion, however, that simply retreating into private associations will long save their families from societal influences made to order 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 than legislation.

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 response to Supreme Court rulings -- convinced many among the vast majority of Americans who 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 in public affairs, they are deluged by accusations of being "American Taliban" trying to set up a "theocracy." Let members of the country class object to anything the ruling class 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 with the "science" of which the ruling class is the sole legitimate interpreter. Because aggressive, intolerant secularism is the moral and intellectual basis of the ruling class's claim to rule, resistance to that rule, whether to the immorality of economic subsidies 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's intellectual and moral core. This lies beyond the boundaries of politics as the term is commonly understood.


The Classes Clash

The ruling class's appetite for deference, power, and perks grows. The country class disrespects its rulers, wants to curtail their power and reduce their perks. The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above 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 want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side's vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side -- especially the ruling class -- embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side's view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash 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. Breaking them, establishing other founts of authority, other ways of doing things, would involve far more than electoral politics. Though the country class had long argued along with Edmund Burke against making revolutionary changes, it faces the uncomfortable question common to all who have had revolutionary changes imposed on them: are we now to accept what was done to us just because it was done? Sweeping away a half century's accretions of bad habits -- taking care to preserve the good among them -- is hard enough. Establishing, even reestablishing, a set of better institutions and habits is much harder, especially as the country class wholly lacks organization. By contrast, the ruling class holds strong defensive positions and is well represented by 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 the coherence to establish one. In the short term at least, the country class has no alternative but to channel its political efforts through the Republican Party, which is eager for its support. But the Republican Party does not live to represent the country class. 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 it failed to stop Reagan, it saddled his and subsequent Republican administrations with establishmentarians who, under the Bush family, repudiated Reagan's principles as much as they could. Barack Obama exaggerated in charging that Republicans had driven the country "into the ditch" all alone. But they had a hand in it. Few Republican voters, 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 conflicted as today's Republicans, those Republican politicians who really want to represent it will either reform the party in an unmistakable manner, or start a new one as Whigs like Abraham Lincoln started the Republican Party in the 1850s.

The name of the party that will represent America's country class is far less important than what, precisely, it represents and how it goes about representing it because, for the foreseeable future, American politics will consist of confrontation between what we might call the Country Party and the ruling class. The Democratic Party having transformed itself into a unit with near-European discipline, challenging it would seem to require empowering a rival party at least as disciplined. What other antidote is there 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 and naturally leads further in the direction toward which the ruling class has led. Any country 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 has no 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 a Democratic official or member of the ruling class speak on public affairs without reiterating the litany of his class's claim to authority, contrasting it with opponents who 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 such patent frauds as ethanol mandates, the pretense that taxes can control "climate change," and the outrage of banning God from public life. More important, such a serious party would have to attack the ruling class's fundamental claims to its superior 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 electoral success are obliged to follow them.

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, 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 from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own "revolution from above" to reverse the ruling class's previous "revolution from above," it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country 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 Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national 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 is practical, if at all, if done simultaneously, both because subsidies are morally wrong and economically counterproductive, and because the country cannot afford the practice 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 and ratifying 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 the government favors some groups of citizens is easier to make than that against any such arrangement. Without too much fuss, a few obviously burdensome bureaucracies, like the Department of Education, can be eliminated, while money can be cut off to partisan enterprises such as the National Endowments and public broadcasting. That sort of thing is as necessary to the American body politic as a weight reduction program is essential to restoring the health of any human body degraded by obesity and lack of exercise. Yet shedding fat is the easy part. Restoring atrophied muscles is harder. Reenabling the body to do elementary tasks takes yet more concentration.

The grandparents of today's Americans (132 million in 1940) had opportunities to serve on 117,000 school boards. To exercise responsibilities comparable to their grandparents', today's 310 million Americans would have radically to decentralize the mere 15,000 districts into which public school children are now concentrated. They would have to take responsibility for curriculum and administration away from credentialed experts, and they would have to explain why they know better. This would involve a level of political articulation of the body politic far beyond voting in elections every two years.

If self-governance means anything, it means that those who exercise government power must depend on elections. The shorter the electoral leash, the likelier an official to have his chain yanked by voters, the more truly republican the government is. 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 these officials good. Only citizens' understanding of and commitment to law can possibly reverse the patent disregard for the Constitution and statutes that has permeated American life. Unfortunately, it is easier for anyone who dislikes a court's or an official'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 motives destroys 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, Barack Obama, and other persons of liberty and property without further process of law for having violated the following ex post facto law..." and larded this constitutional monstrosity with an Article III Section 2 exemption from federal court review? When the affected members of the ruling class asked where Congress gets the authority to pass 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 the Congress's constitutional authority to mandate individuals to purchase certain kinds of insurance: "Are you kidding? Are you kidding?" The point having been made, the Country Party could lead public discussions around the country on why even the noblest purposes (maybe even Title II of the Civil Rights Bill of 1964?) cannot be allowed to trump the Constitution.

How the country class and ruling class might clash on each item of their contrasting agendas 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, that the revolution it continues to press upon America is sustainable. For its part, the country class's greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it. America has been imposed on enough.



Editor's Note: This version corrects an error that appears the print edition of this article, which incorrectly lists Barack Obama as a research assistant to Laurence Tribe in 1984. He in fact was an assistant to Tribe in 1988-89.

Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University.

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