By Angelo Codevilla
On January 1, 2013 one third of Republican congressmen, following
their leaders, joined with nearly all Democrats to legislate higher
taxes and more subsidies for Democratic constituencies. Two thirds voted
no, following the people who had elected them. For generations, the
Republican Party had presented itself as the political vehicle for
Americans whose opposition to ever-bigger government financed by
ever-higher taxes makes them a “country class.” Yet modern Republican
leaders, with the exception of the Reagan Administration, have been
partners in the expansion of government, indeed in the growth of a
government-based “ruling class.” They have relished that role despite
their voters. Thus these leaders gradually solidified their choice to no
longer represent what had been their constituency, but to openly adopt
the identity of junior partners in that ruling class. By repeatedly
passing bills that contradict the identity of Republican voters and of the majority of Republican elected representatives, the
Republican leadership has made political orphans of millions of
Americans. In short, at the outset of 2013 a substantial portion of
America finds itself un-represented, while Republican leaders
increasingly represent only themselves.
By the law of supply and demand, millions of Americans, (arguably a
majority) cannot remain without representation. Increasingly the top
people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand
submission as did the royal courts of old. This marks these political
orphans as a “country class.” In 1776 America’s country class responded
to lack of representation by uniting under the concept: “all men are
created equal.” In our time, its disparate sectors’ common sentiment is
more like: “who the hell do they think they are?”
The ever-growing U.S. government has an edgy social, ethical, and
political character. It is distasteful to a majority of persons who vote
Republican and to independent voters, as well as to perhaps one fifth
of those who vote Democrat. The Republican leadership’s kinship with the
socio-political class that runs modern government is deep. Country
class Americans have but to glance at the Media to hear themselves
insulted from on high as greedy, racist, violent, ignorant extremists.
Yet far has it been from the Republican leadership to defend them.
Whenever possible, the Republican Establishment has chosen candidates
for office – especially the Presidency – who have ignored, soft-pedaled
or given mere lip service to their voters’ identities and concerns.
Thus public opinion polls confirm that some two thirds of Americans
feel that government is “them” not “us,” that government has been taking
the country in the wrong direction, and that such sentiments largely
parallel partisan identification: While a majority of Democrats feel
that officials who bear that label represent them well, only about a
fourth of Republican voters and an even smaller proportion of
independents trust Republican officials to be on their side. Again:
While the ruling class is well represented by the Democratic Party, the
country class is not represented politically – by the Republican Party
or by any other. Well or badly, its demand for representation will be
met.
Representation is the distinguishing feature of democratic
government. To be represented, to trust that one’s own identity and
interests are secure and advocated in high places, is to be part of the
polity. In practice, any democratic government’s claim to the obedience
of citizens depends on the extent to which voters feel they are party to
the polity. No one doubts that the absence, loss, or perversion of that
function divides the polity sharply between rulers and ruled.
Representation can be perverted. Some regimes (formerly the
Communists, and currently the Islamists) allow dissent from the ruling
class to be represented only by parties approved by the ruling class.
Also, in today’s European Union the ruling class’ wide spread and
homogeneity leaves those who do not like how their country is run with
no one to represent them. Though America’s ruling class is neither as
narrow as that of Communist regimes nor as broadly preclusive as that of
the European Union, the Republican leadership’s preference for acting
as part of the ruling class rather than as representatives of voters who
feel set upon has begun to produce the sort of soft pre-emption of
opposition and bitterness between rulers and ruled that occurs necessarily wherever representation is mocked.
To see how America’ country class can be represented, let us glance
at how the current division of American politics into a ruling class and
a country class came about and why it is inherently unstable.
Ins and Outs
Those who attribute the polarization of American politics to the
partisan drawing of congressional districts at the state level have a
point: The Supreme Court’s decision in Baker v. Carr (1962)
inadvertedly legalized gerrymandering by setting “one man one vote” as
the sole basis of legitimacy for drawing legislative districts.
Subsequent judicial interpretations of the 1965 Voting Rights Act demanded that
districts be drawn to produce Congressmen with specific features. No
surprise then that Democratic and Republican legislatures and governors,
thus empowered, have drawn the vast majority of America’s Congressional
districts to be safe for Democrats or Republicans respectively. Such
districts naturally produce Congressmen who represent their own party
more than the general population. This helped the parties themselves to
grow in importance. But the U.S. Senate and state governments also have
polarized because public opinion in general has.
Political partisanship became a more important feature of American
life over the past half-century largely because the Democratic Party,
which has been paramount within the U.S. government since 1932,
entrenched itself as America’s ruler, and its leaders became a ruling
class. This caused a Newtonian “opposite reaction,” which continues to
gather force.
In our time, the Democratic Party gave up the diversity that had
characterized it since Jeffersonian times. Giving up the South, which
had been its main bastion since the Civil War as well as the working
classes that had been the heart of its big city machines from Boston to San Diego,
it came to consist almost exclusively of constituencies that make up
government itself or benefit from government. Big business, increasingly
dependent on government contracts and regulation, became a virtual
adjunct of the contracting agents and regulators. Democrats’ traditional
labor union auxiliaries shifted from private employees to public.
Administrators of government programs of all kinds, notably public
assistance, recruited their clientele of dependents into the Party’s
base. Democrats, formerly the party of slavery and segregation, secured
the allegiance of racial minorities by unrelenting assertions that the
rest of American society is racist. Administrators and teachers at all
levels of education taught two generations that they are brighter and
better educated than the rest of Americans, whose objections to the
schools’ (and the Party’s) prescriptions need not be taken seriously.
It is impossible to overstate the importance of American education’s
centralization, intellectual homogenization and partisanship in the
formation of the ruling class’ leadership. Many have noted the
increasing stratification of American society and that, unlike in
decades past, entry into its top levels now depends largely on
graduation from elite universities. As Charles Murray has noted,
their graduates tend to marry one another, perpetuating what they like
to call a “meritocracy.” But this is rule not by the meritorious, rather
by the merely credentialed – because the credentials are suspect. As Ron Unz has
shown, nowadays entry into the ivied gateways to power is by co-option,
not merit. Moreover, the amount of study required at these universities
leaves their products with more pretense than knowledge or skill. The
results of their management– debt, decreased household net worth,
increased social strife – show that America has been practicing negative
selection of elites.
Nevertheless as the Democratic Party has grown its constituent parts
into a massive complex of patronage, its near monopoly of education has
endowed its leaders ever more firmly with the conviction that they are
as entitled to deference and perquisites as they are to ruling. The host
of its non-governmental but government-financed entities, such as
Planned Parenthood and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, argue
for government funding by stating, correctly, that they are pursuing the
public interest as government itself defines it.
Thus by the turn of the twenty first century America had a bona fide ruling class that transcends government and sees itself at once as distinct from the rest of society – and as the only element thereof that may act on its behalf. It rules – to use New York Times columnist David Brooks’ characterization of Barack Obama
– “as a visitor from a morally superior civilization.” The civilization
of the ruling class does not concede that those who resist it have any
moral or intellectual right, and only reluctantly any civil right, to do
so. Resistance is illegitimate because it can come only from low
motives. President Obama’s statement that Republican legislators – and
hence the people who elect them – don’t care whether “seniors have
decent health care…children have enough to eat” is typical.
Republican leaders neither parry the insults nor vilify their
Democratic counterparts in comparable terms because they do not want to beat the ruling class, but to join it in solving the nation’s problems. How did they come to cut such pathetic figures?
The Republican Party never fully adapted itself to the fact that
modern big government is an interest group in and of itself, inherently
at odds with the rest of society, that it creates a demand for
representation by those it alienates, and hence that politicians must
choose whether to represent the rulers or the ruled. The Republican
Party had been the party of government between the Civil War and 1932.
But government then was smaller in size, scope, and pretense. The
Rockefellers of New York and Lodges of Massachusetts
– much less the Tafts of Ohio – did not aspire to shape the lives of
the ruled, as does modern government. Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal
largely shut these Republicans out of the patronage and power of modern
government.
By the late 1930s, being out of power had begun to make the
Republicans the default refuge of voters who did not like what the new,
big government was doing. Some Republican leaders – the Taft wing of the
Party – adopted this role. The Rockefeller wing did not. Though the
latter were never entirely comfortable with the emerging Democratic
ruling class, their big business constituency pressed them to be their
advocate to it. A few such Republicans (e.g. Kevin Philips The Emerging Republican Majority)
even dreamed during the Nixon-Ford Administration of the 1970s that
they might replace Democrats at the head of the ruling class. But the
die had been cast long since: Corporations, finance, and the entitled
high and low – America’s “ins” – gravitated to the Democrats’ permanent
power, while the “outs” fled into the Republican fold. Thus after WWII
the Republican Party came to consist of office holders most of who
yearned to be “ins,” and of voters who were mostly “outs.”
This internal contradiction was unsustainable. The Republican
leadership, regarding its natural constituency as embarrassing to its
pursuit of a larger role in government, limited its appeal to it. Thus
it gradually cut itself off from the only root of the power by which it
might gain that role. Thus the Republicans proved to be “the stupid
party.”
In 1960 Barry Goldwater began the revolt of the Republican Party’s
constituent “outsider” or “country class,” by calling for a grass-roots
takeover of the Party. This led to Goldwater’s nomination for President
in 1964. The Republican Establishment maligned him more vigorously than
did the Democrats. But the Goldwater movement switched to Ronald Reagan,
who overcame the Republican Establishment and the ruling class to win
the Presidency by two landslide elections. Yet the question: “who or
what does the Republican Party represent” continued to sharpen because
the Reagan interlude was brief, because it never transformed the Party,
and hence because the Bush (pere et fils) dynasty plus
Congressional leadership (Newt Gingrich was a rebel against it and
treated a such) behaved increasingly indistinguishably from Democrats. Government grew more rapidly under these Republican Administrations than under Democratic ones.
In sum, the closer one gets to the Republican Party’s voters, the
more the Party looks like Goldwater and Reagan. The closer one gets to
its top, the more it looks like the ghost of Rockefeller. Consider 2012:
the party chose for President someone preferred by only one fourth of
its voters – Mitt Romney, whose first youthful venture in politics had
been to take part in the political blackballing of Barry Goldwater.
One reason for the Republican Party’s bipolarity is the centripetal
attraction of the ruling class: In the absence of forces to the
contrary, smaller bodies tend to become satellites of larger ones.
Modern America’s homogenizing educational Establishment and the ruling
class’ near monopoly on credentials, advancement, publicity, and money
draws ambitious Republicans into the Democrats’ orbit. That is why for
example a majority of the Republican Establishment, including The Wall Street Journal and the post-W.F. Buckley National Review supported
the 2008 Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and its premise that big,
well-connected enterprises are “too big to fail” - which three fourths
of the American people opposed vociferously. For these Republican
cognoscenti vox populi is not vox dei, but the voice
of idiots. Accordingly, after the 2010 elections produced a large
contingent of Senators and Congressmen pledged to oppose measures such
as the TARP, former Senate Republican majority leader Trent Lott
expressed confidence that Washington would soon break the new members to
its ways, that pledges to voters would count for little against the
approval or disapproval of prestigious personages, against the profit to
be made by going along with the ruling class and the trouble that comes
from opposing it.
That trouble is daunting. Whoever chooses to represent the country
class might have right and reason on their side. Nevertheless they can
be certain that the ruling class media will not engage those reasons but
vilify the persons who voice them as ignorant, irresponsible, etc.
Asserting moral-intellectual superiority, chastising and intimidating
rather than persuading opponents is by no means the least of the ruling
class’ powers. “It’s the contempt, stupid!” But the Republican
leadership has proved stupid enough to deal with the contempt as the
Pharisee in the Temple dealt with sin: “I thank thee Lord that I am not
like other Republicans…”
Some Democrats seem to believe that taking these Republicans unto
themselves while deeming the remainder “unworthy,” withdrawing
“tolerance toward [their] regressive opinions,” will crush serious
opposition. Maybe. Surely however, incorporating the Republican
Establishment into the ruling class leaves the dissidents free
coherently to pursue their own vision, and with a monopoly of opposition.
In two-party systems, the opposition eventually wins. Considering that,
according to a 2013 Pew poll, 53% of Americans view the government as a
threat to their welfare and liberties (up from 36% in 1995 and that a
third of those who feel that way are Democrats); considering that
government’s very legitimacy decreases as government grows in size, that
victory may come sooner rather than later.
To Represent
Because of the aforementioned, the political representation of
America’s country class is fragmentary. But the uniformity of the ruling
class’ pressure on the fragments is pressing them toward similar
responses and perhaps unity.
It matters less whether two thirds of Republican congressmen vote
against their leaders as they did on January 1, 2013 out of conviction
or because their constituents demand it. Fact is, Republican leaders
become less significant with every passing year because they have no way
of reversing the intellectual trends from above or the popular pressure
from below. Recent Presidential elections have shown that contemporary
Establishment Republicans elicit scarce, unenthusiastic support even
from longtime Republican voters because they are out of synch with their
flock. In short, the Republican leadership finds itself in a position
analogous to that of Episcopal bishops: They own an august label and
increasingly empty churches because they have been chasing off the
faithful priests and congregations.
This of course is what happened to the Whig party after 1850. After
it became undeniable that party leader Henry Clay’s latest great
compromise had sold the party’s principles cheap, the most vigorous
Whigs, e.g. New York governor William Seward and national hero John C.
Fremont – joined by an obscure Illinois ex-congressman named Abraham
Lincoln whose only asset was that he reasoned well – looked for another
vehicle for their cause. In 1854, together with representatives of other
groups, they founded the Republican Party. Today the majority of
Republican congressmen plus a minority of senators – dissidents from the
Party but solid with their voters – are the natural core of a new
party. The name it might bear is irrelevant. Very relevant are sectors
of America’s population increasingly represented by groups that sprang
up to represent them when the Republican leadership did not.
This representation is happening by default. It is aided by the
internet, which makes it possible to spread ideas to which the
educational Establishment gives short shrift and which the ruling class
media shun. In short, the internet helps undermine the ruling class’
near-homogenization of American intellectual life, its closing of the
American mind. Not by reason but by bureaucratic force majeure had
America’s educational Establishment isolated persons who deviate from
it, cutting access to a sustaining flow of ideas that legitimize their
way of life. But the internet allows marginalized dissenters to reason
with audiences of millions. Ideas have consequences. No surprise then
that more and more of Republican elected officials seem to think less
like their leaders and more like their voters.
The internet also spread the power to organize. Already in the 1970s
Richard Viguerie had begun to upset the political parties’ monopoly on
organization by soliciting money from the general public for causes and
candidates through direct mail. The internet amplified this technique’s
effectiveness by orders of magnitude, making it possible to transmit
ideas and political signals while drawing financial support from
millions of likeminded people throughout the country. Thus informed with
facts and opinion, sectors of the country class have felt represented
and empowered vis a vis the ruling class. Those on the
electronic distribution list of the “Club for Growth,” for example, are
at least as well informed on economic matters as any credentialed policy
maker. The several pro-life organizations have spread enough knowledge
of embryology and moral logic to make Roe v. Wade, which the
ruling class regards as its greatest victory, a shrinking island in
American jurisprudence and society. The countless Tea Parties that have
sprung up all over have added their countless attendees to networks of
information and organization despite the ruling class’ effort to
demonize them. The same goes for evangelicals, gun owners, etc. Though
such groups represent the country class fragmentarily, country class
people identify with them rather than with the Republican Party because
the groups actually stand for something, and represent their adherents
against the ruling class’ charges, insults, etc.
Since America’s first-past-the-post electoral system produces
elections between two parties, it was natural for any and all groups who
oppose the ruling class to gravitate to the Republican Party. But the
Party’s leaders, reasoning that “they have nowhere else to go,” refused
to notice that voters were lending their votes out of allegiance to
causes rather than to the Party, and that Republican candidates
increasingly sought votes through the medium of groups that advocate
these causes rather than through the Party Establishment. It was shocked
when candidates won Republican primaries by aligning themselves with
such groups, against the Party itself. The flood of votes that such
groups energized in 2010 signified that the groups, not the Party, had
come to represent opposition to the ruling class. But post 2010, the
Republican leadership continued to pretend to be the county class’
representative while not actually representing it. Its donors buried
opposition to Mitt Romney in attack ads and picked its own kind of
candidates wherever it could.
After the leadership’s electoral disaster of 2012 and its subsequent
pathetic fecklessness the only vision of a possible future in Republican
ranks – the only programmatic and organizational coherence –was among
the Party’s dissident majority in the House and dissident minority in
the Senate. By 2013 it was less meaningful to ask what the
leadership would do with the dissidents than what the dissidents would
do with the leadership. The answer seemed to be: increasingly to
ignore it, to go one’s own way; more and more, to go along with
conscience and with voters. By 2013 as their numbers continued to grow
without counter trend, it was difficult to imagine how the leadership
might reduce their numbers.
At the same time, the groups that represent the country class’ pieces
were mounting and winning more primary challenges to Establishment
Republicans. The establishment responded with its main asset: money. The New York Times reported
a concerted effort by the Party’s biggest donors led by longtime Bush
staffer Karl Rove (yes, the Rockefeller wing) to support Establishment
candidates in the primary process. But establishment candidates are
already better funded than dissidents, usually massively so. The
establishment candidates who have survived dissident challenges have
seldom done it through sheer cash, but rather by fuzzing the differences
between themselves and the dissidents. Designating themselves formally
as “establishment,” was almost sure to hurt them. Moreover to set up the
Republican establishment as a separate caucus invites the dissidents to
unite and present themselves united as an alternative. That is the
natural path to the dissidents forming a new party while Republican
leadership dissolves into the Democratic party. In sum, the value of the
label “Republican” is problematic.
The instrument and its use
A new party is likely to arise because the public holds both
Republicans and Democrats responsible for the nation’s unsustainable
course. Indebtedness cannot increase endlessly. Nor can regulations pile
on top of regulations while the officials who promulgate them – and
their pensions – continue to grow, without crushing those beneath. Nor
can the population’s rush to disability status and other forms of public
assistance, or the no-win wars that have resulted in “open season” on
Americans around the world, continue without catharsis. One half of the
population cannot continue passively to absorb insults without pushing
back. When – sooner rather than later – events collapse this house of
cards, it will be hard to credibly advocate a better future while
bearing a label that advertises responsibility for the present. Why
trust any Republican qua Republican?
To represent the country class, to set about reversing the ills the
ruling class imposed on America, a party would have to confront the
ruling class’ pretenses, with unity and force comparable to that by
which these were imposed. There will be no alternative to all the
country class’ various components acting jointly on measures dear to
each. For example: since the connection between government and finance,
the principle that large institutions are “too big to fail,” are dear to
America’s best-connected people who can be counted on to threaten
“systemic collapse,” breaking it will require the support of sectors of
the country class for which “corporate welfare” is less of a concern
than the welfare effects of the Social Security
system’s component that funds fake disability and drug addiction –
something about which macroeconomists mostly care little – and vice
versa. Similarly the entire country class has as much interest in
asserting the right of armed self-defense as does any gun owner, because
the principle of constitutional right is indivisible. Nothing will
require greater unity against greater resistance than ending government
promotion of abortion and homosexuality. Yet those whose main concerns
are with financial probity cannot afford continuing to neglect that
capitalist economics presupposes a morally upright people. All this
illustrates the need for, and the meaning of, a political party:
disparate elements acting all of one and one for all.
Diversity is not a natural barrier to pursuing common interests.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Democratic party included every unreconstructed
segregationist in the South, as well as nearly all Progressives in
university towns like Hyde Park, Illinois and Madison, Wisconsin –
people who despised not only the segregationists but also the Catholic
Poles, Italians, and Irish from Milwaukee to Boston whose faith and
habits were as foreign to them as they were to Southerners. Yet all
understood that being mutually supportive of Democrats was the key to
getting what they wanted.
The common, unifying element of the several country class’ sectors is
the ruling class’ insistence, founded on force rather than reason, that
their concerns are illegitimate, that they are illegitimate.
The ruling class demonizes the country class piece by piece. Piece by
piece it cannot defend itself, much less can it set the country on a
course of domestic and international peace, freedom and solvency. None
of the country class’ politically active elements can, by themselves,
hope to achieve any of their goals because they can be sure that the
entire ruling class’ resources will be focused on them whenever
circumstances seem propitious. In 2012 for example, the Constitutional
right to keep and bear arms seemed politically safe. Then, one disaster
brought seemingly endless resources from every corner of the ruling
class to bear on its defenders. The rest of the country class’
politically active elements stood by, sympathetically, but without a
vehicle for helping. Each of these elements should have learned that
none can hope for indulgence from any part of the ruling class. They can
look only to others who are under attack as they themselves are.
Far be it from a party that represents the country class to ape what
it abhors by imposing punitive measures through party line votes covered
by barrages of insults: few in the country class’ parts want to become a
ruling class. Yet the country class, to defend itself, to cut down the
forest of subsidies and privileges that choke America, to curb the
arrogance of modern government, cannot shy away from offending the
ruling class’ intellectual and moral pretenses. Events themselves show
how dysfunctional the ruling class is. But only a political party worthy
of the name can marshal the combination of reason, brutal images, and
consistency adequately to represent America’s country class.
Angelo M. Codevilla is Professor Emeritus of international
relations at Boston University and a fellow of the Claremont Institute.
1 comment:
*ouch*
For the last few days I've been looking in your blog for a funny place trying to find one good humor post, one silly and goofy and NOT-SO-Serious post, with huge irony and LOL laughter... to use it to wish you a Happy Birthday... But all your posts have been heart wrenchingly soaked in dark truth, soul aching, spirit destroying posts of life as it is and pain of the mankind facing the destruction of humanity and America lately... *ouch Mo* Lighten up, dear soul...
You do know you also have an amazing sense of humor, wit, irony, silliness and factual humors, and heart as big as this earth than anyone I have ever known... Why not enlightened us with that side of you Angel...
Promise to do so... and give us some of that life, love and laughter we know of you...
You gotta promise to try to post at least one of those very funny, very witty, humorous posts of your with and funny bones every day. At least one a day... You gotta promise... This is way too dark, way to often... You also sparkle with life love and laughter... try to shine some of that beauty on your blog... Please...
So mnay of us have come to see so little of witty, funny, silly humorous side of you lately, dear soul... You have become Soo brutally honest, harsh and serious... Painfully lighting the dark edges of humanity soul and its evil...yikes...
Promise... Promise to blog Only one post of God, light, life and happiness a day... Promise...
You don't have to give up your crusade...
;-)
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