Yes, I’m Still Here, and Some Suggested Reading

I made it back from my Northern safari on Monday, and followed that with a run to the ancestral lands this week, so that I could take care of some family business. I’m currently in another bookstore coffee shop, having finished off a farm-raised mocha frappuccino — it hardly seemed sporting, but I couldn’t just let it linger. I also had the opportunity last night to have dinner with a couple of my dearest, longest friends. Time well spent, but I look forward to returning to the spouse and spawn.

Speaking of time well spent, Angelo M. Codevilla has a piece at The American Spectator that is well worth your time. His argument is that there is a profound disconnect between the political/”ruling” class and the rest of us, and that those rulers’ intraclass similarities and allegiances are ultimately more important than such things as party distinctions:

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.

I don’t think this is terribly surprising — the sort of worldshrinking we’ve seen in terms of the spread of, say, popular culture, operates on a retail as well as a wholesale level. Just as chain stores homogenize the retail landscape or MTV homogenized popular music, we see a similar homogenization of elites — which ties into points like the disappearing diversity at elite colleges.

Codevilla’s piece is interesting, and examines such features as the elite’s efforts at self-justification, the similarity between elite attitudes and those of other anti-egalitarians (including, notably, the early Progressives), and that class’s agenda (self-maintenance and power) and tactic (the culture of dependency).

In contrast, Codevilla also describes what he calls the “country class,” which is placed in a sort of binary opposition to the elites and is marginalized/otherized by them. While this sort of binary opposition is suspect, it is useful as a shorthand way of considering the topic. Codevilla’s ideas about how all this may play out is interesting and useful as well. The piece is long, but you should read the whole thing, as they say.

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