The Codevilla article in the Spectator raises the same issue as this post. He argues that what his article terms the “ruling class” has decided to cross the Rubicon and march on the Republic. The article says:
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. …
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.
He answers the question I ask in the first paragraphs of this post — have hostilities been declared? — in the affirmative. Codevilla’s only doubt is whether the “ruling class” has the resources to prevail. Codevilla says, “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.”
I have been kinder than Codevilla; I don’t know for sure whether the revolution from the top he refers to is really underway. But on the other hand I’ve argued that if it is — if the fight is on, then it will take the form of a race to build rival coalitions around rival visions. His article is an assertion that kind of conflict is underway. This post is about what to do if it is.
What Codevilla misses is the sense that the “ruling class” if it has been forced to roll the iron dice, acts out of a fear that its historic window is closing, driven not only ambition, but by self preservation. One of the roots of the current crisis is the de-mediating nature of modern technology. The gatekeepers are becoming obsolete. Not only that, but even small groups of people have acquired a modicum of hard power.
In retrospect 9/11 must have scared the elite in a totally different way from its effect on flyover country. Flyover country saw it as simple attack on America. The elite must have seen it in part as a warning that control could be lost. The psychological response of the Europeans and Obama is consistent with a desire to re-wrap the world in rules fearing the American anger as much as the Muslim hatred. There was no distinction between the two. Both were equally disruptive of the settled order. For if Muslim hatred could generate such effects, what would happen if American individuals or small groups rose in symmetrical response? The thought did not bear thinking.
It is important to factor the destabilizing effect of technology into the analysis because it suggests that if the conflict exists, it is not a war of choice on the part of the elites but one of necessity. This also implies that the elites are not leading a ‘revolution’ from the top as Codevilla believes they are; on the contrary they a reaction. The old order is fighting for its life, not just against al-Qaeda and similar outfits, but in principle against anything that directly acts in the political and cultural sphere.
If so then sheer initiative, simple self-rule, simple entrepreneuralism and innovation is rebellion itself. This explains the curious antipathy to the Tea Parties, despite their staid, almost boring nature. They are incendiary. In way they are ‘like’ al-Qaeda to a mind whose obsession is ‘enlightenment’ and ‘control’. Take that point of view and see how natural it is to think of Christianists and Tea-Baggers in the same light as Hezbollah. Self-organization in itself becomes subversive when the viewpoint chosen is from the top.
