Archives
Thursday, April 16, 2009
The New Patricians
Link: 
It's tough to know where to begin. Which is pretty much the case with everything that's been happening since "The One" was sworn in in January. So many basic aspects of American life are being thrown under the wheels of the runaway left-wing train that focusing on any single abuse is automatically backpage trivia. Who could care when the economy is crashing and our new leader is busily remaking the world as well as the country?
That's a continuing dilemma here at InstaPunk. Expressing outrage about this or that individual act of semingly arbitrary vandalism appears somehow petty. The enormity of the threat to the nation as a whole is really the only story worth writing about.
What does it matter that the president screws up repeatedly in every public appearance, even though public appearances seem to constitute his only executive activity? What does it matter that he has launched huge and reckless change initiatives in almost every sector of our national life, creating the possibility of collapse through simple system overload even before one considers the wisdom or lack of it associated with each monumental change? What does it matter that his Secretary of State is already exposed as a glorified housewife with no experience or native competence in foreign affairs? What does it matter that his Treasury Secretary continues to operate out of an empty office building while ostentatiously refusing to consult the various officially designated advisers and sages who have real-world experience in the markets being seized and bullied by the federal government? What does it matter that absolutely none of the math in his combination rescue/redistribution plan for the U.S. economy adds up to anything but generations of debt and decline for the greatest nation on earth? What does it matter that our tyro president arrogantly insults our allies and bows obsequiously to enemies who laugh unambiguously in his face -- and by implication ours? What does it matter that day by day he is pushing Israel toward certain and U.N.-approved annihilation? What does it matter that every single one of his legal appointments is driving the U.S judicial system toward the abandonment of our own constitution in favor of international precedents and organizations that would mortally wound American sovereignty?
Every single thing is a drop in the bucket in today's political environment, but each of them would have been a front-page crisis, not to say scandal, a generation ago. It's an exercise in the deliberate creation of chaos. Throw absolutely fucking everything up in the air at the same time and exploit the fact that too much is going on to permit people to focus effectively on anything.
But I am going to focus on one thing today. Because it's highly symbolic of the cultural revolution that threatens to subjugate ordinary American citizens permanently. And also because it's a darkside view of the "hope and change" rhetoric this administration is using to buy time for its destructive agenda. They have cast their intentions in terms of class warfare (however much they disingenuously disavow the nomenclature). They claim to be bringing about social justice for the little people by punishing the rich and greedy who have stolen everyone else's opportunity. This is a crock.
What we're looking at is a process whose best point of comparison isn't the New Deal or European fascism or Stalinism but ancient Rome. We're witnessing the creation of two permanent new classes, the Patricians and the plebeians. Of the United States of America.
It differs as much from traditional American economic stratification as it does from feudal European aristocracy. In the American system, there were checks and balances. Belonging entailed no particular moral obligations or expectations; robber barons were welcome. But you could lose the money and privilege through acts of profligacy and subside into the middle class. You could also join the economic aristocracy by earning your own brand new fortune in dozens of different ways. Social acceptance might take a generation or two, but it could be achieved. New Money could become Old Money. In the European system, classes were defined by property ownership, inherited titles, and scrupulously maintained family trees. There was an expectation of at least superficial virtue -- exemplified by education and 'noblesse oblige.' And one could opt out of the power politics of the day. Aristocracy did not mandate any particular role in government. It was simply a birthright.
The Roman class system combined the worst features of both of these. As with the European aristocracy, the class divisions were permanent. But the concept of 'noblesse oblige' was defunct by the time the republic gave way to the empire. By then, the Patricians were fully engaged in the most ruthless power politics of the day. If anything, the moral expectations were higher for plebeians than for their born betters. As in the American system, one could become a Patrician, not easily to be sure, though the criteria were not substantive accomplishment but a devouring thirst for power at any cost. Class mobility with no requirement for virtue or achievement. Think of untitled Kennedys carousing their way to inherited U.S. Senate seats.
Precisely. What we're living through now ( ironically, given the anti-American spin of the destroyers) is the death of the American republic and the birth of the American Empire, a continuously declining but still remarkably powerful player on the world stage ruled by Patricians in every discipline that has some relation to political power. The comparison to the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire is especially apt. The Patricians contrived to retain the respect and admiration earned by republican institutions long after they had scooped out all the virtue of the original institution and replaced it with raw power, ruthlessness, and intimidating pomp. The institutions of empire became in many ways the opposite of what had first elevated them to greatness. By the time anyone noticed, it was too late.
If you want to see who the new Patricians are in the nascent post-republican American Empire, look to the institutions that have become the opposite of what made them great in the first place. I can think of four principal ones. (You may be able to come up with others on your own.) These are the people -- and their descendants -- who will be "taken care of" regardless of what happens to the rest of us, until at least the day when the remaining pie is too small to carve up without jettisoning a Patrician or two, which can take a very very long time, let me assure you.
Professional Politicians. Think Kennedys, Rockefellers, Jacksons, Bayhs, Tafts, Clintons, Bushes, Romneys, and Pelosis. Families that have become political families with an expectation of being elected to office not for what they have done, but for what their last names are. The total war that has been conducted against the Bushes is, in fact, imperial politics. Caesar had to destroy Pompey to consolidate his power. It was a Patrician skirmish that required harnessing the outrage of powerless plebeians to resolve. How they cheered when Pompey's head was finally skewered on a pike above the walls of Rome. How little good it did them in the long run. But note that this phenomenon is relatively new in American politics. Yes, there were two Adamses, two Harrisons, two Roosevelts, but they never became "dynasties," and we were never so crushed by their deaths that we insisted on naming their wives or daughters to the offices they vacated. There's already talk of running Michelle Obama for president after Barack finishes his two terms. Where does that come from? Joe Biden's aide is now a placeholder in his senate seat awaiting the election of one of his sons to give Delaware its Patrician heir. Democracy, my ass.
And what of all the tax cheats smoothly confirmed by the U.S. Senate for key roles in the Obama administration. We have to pay our taxes. The man in charge of the dreaded Internal Revenue Service doesn't. The Patricians who boss us around don't. It's hard to arrive at any other conclusion than that they are simply better than we are. We must be virtuous. They can be merely "better."
Not to mention the two score and mounting total of lobbyists who've gotten waivers from an Obama administration that vowed not to hire any lobbyists and is now appointing them left and right (not so much the latter, literally speaking). But, hell, they're in the power circle, and we're just dumb-asses. I guess we are.
The Elite Universities. These were the original bastions of American liberalism. Their names became beacons of free speech, tolerance for dissenting views, academic freedom, the marketplace of ideas. Today, they have become the exact opposite of that. They suppress free speech on a systematic basis, protect Islamic terrorists and sympathizers, conspire actively in the increasingly inevitable annihilation of Israel, enforce "speech codes" and totalitarian reeducation programs targeting white males, and via Affirmative Action, actively discriminate against more qualified white people, men, and (as they have shamefully always done) Jews. Why do they get away with it? Because they provide the studies and surveys and findings that justify the legislation political Patricians use to acquire greater control over our economy, healthcare, environment, nutrition, vices, private freedoms, political philosophies, and religious affiliations. They're the Patrician "learning" that feeds the soaring autocracy of the Empire. Protected.
Celebrities. There was once a place called Hollywood where the purveyors of mass entertainment saw it as their responsibility to promote an image of virtue, marital fidelity, patriotism, and products that were wholesome for all ages. Some of the "stars" that came out of that system actually lived up to these impossible ideals and were more beloved by the public because people can detect phonies. They knew that James Stewart was an authentic and brave war hero, that Katherine Hepburn was a brilliant emancipated woman, that Cary Grant really was a gentleman's gentleman, that Humphrey Bogart really was an independent tough guy, and that Gary Cooper really was Gary Cooper. But celebrity today has become the iconic definition of the new Patrician class. There's nothing so awful they won't do in public and expect a pass on. Because they're Patricians. Above us. Above the law. Above all the plebeian requirements of civil behavior. We're expected to love them anyway. Which we do. We let multi-millionaire high school dropouts influence our votes in political elections. We let pampered divas throw public temper tantrums about world issues they've heard about from their agents and other pampered divas. We buy tickets to the concerts of moron rock stars who are openly campaigning for candidates almost as rich as they are, as if both were somehow plugged into our lives and our needs. We cheer. Which is what makes us plebeians.
The Mainstream Media. In many ways, this is the worst of all. (Did you watch the video? Go do it now, if you haven't already.) After all, we expect politicians to lie. We have native, and utterly well founded, distrust of eggheads whose opening presumption is that they're smarter than those of us who actually have to earn a living. And we do understand, at some level, that movie stars, professional athletes, and musicians aren't exactly experts about real life. But one of the great American stories -- a source of immense national pride, really -- is the maturation of the independent American free press from its lowly origins in colonial times, through the rank yellow journalism days of the nineteenth century, to the paragon of objective "just the facts" reporting that underpinned The New York Times slogan, "All the news that's fit to print." I've written about this before, here and in honest-to-God newspapers, and I'm continually amazed that when I raise the subject of bias, people who claim to be classical American liberals (and even some conservatives) defend what's happening now by citing appalling journalistic excesses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As if they're happy to be in that poisoned company. As if their avowed belief in human moral progress is really a disposable pose that never mattered anyway. As long as the yellow journalism of today accords with their own economic assumptions or political viewpoints.
But it's worse even than that. Far worse. That's why Rome is once again the only suitable comparison. The American news media created a new, far higher standard of what journalism is as a profession, and they rode that standard to absolutely unprecedented authority, wealth, privilege, and power. They became, in effect, another branch of the United States government, the ultimate check against the arrogance of the executive, the judiciary, and the legislative branches. On the strength of their commitment to truth and honesty, we permitted them the economic exception of becoming an oligopoly on the nation's airwaves and monopolies in dozens of major cities and towns. It was their profession of virtue that procured for them this exalted status in the republic. And now they have become imperial Rome.
The Patrician Press. They sit in their expensive aeries in New York and dispense with all pretense at objectivity. They actually sneer at all the journalistic standards that earned them the aerie in the first place They contemptuously ignore stories that don't agree with their politics. They nakedly, shamelessly persecute people whose politics they oppose. And no matter what they do, no matter how much the market detects their moral bankruptcy and punishes them for it, they still have their resolute defenders, their indefatigable defenders who are certain they know better than the plebeians who reject them and argue that their corrupt shenanigans must be subsidized by the government, in the name of the people's need to know.
That's the significance of the video above. The august upper class of the mainstream media is nothing but a social club. A Patrician sinecure. It won't matter if they all go bankrupt, as they eventually will. Somehow they will merge seamlessly with the Patrician government whose attainment to absolute power would never have occurred without them. They're the makers of truth, regardless of facts. They get to decide who is "media" and who is a seditious propagandist (Limbaugh and Ziegler, take note.) They are Patricians. And ominously, they straddle all the other categories. They are simultaneously politicians, activist representatives of elite universities, celebrities, and, of course, the highest paid sleazy yellow journalists any nation ever had.
God save us from all of them. How does it feel to be a plebeian?
Oh, did I forget to give you the definition of a plebeian? We're everybody else. The ones who pay the bills while the Patricians smirk and bask in their own glory.
