How do we shed light on the party of the ruling class?
Charles Murray's Coming Apart documents the growing alienation among adults with differing levels of formal education. This lack of connectedness has grown in tandem with government expansion to generate a de facto ruling class that is profoundly out of touch with small-town America. In this interview, Murray explains how some Americans are chafing under this recent development:
[A]gain and again you've had people who were experts who were advocating and passing policies that ordinary people looked at and said, "This is absolutely nuts." ... Another problem with the experts — and I think that this gets to a lot of the visceral anger that people have — is that the experts have been recommending policies for other people for which they do not have to bear the consequences.
People in the managerial class are unaware of these consequences because they rely on bogus studies legitimized by a clerisy of media columnists and college professors who never met a big government program they did not like. This passage from "America's Ruling Class" by Angelo Codevilla sums up the nature of this groupthink:
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.
According to Codevilla, these values are shared by establishment politicians from both parties, but only the modern Democrat Party openly embraces them. This is why today's mainstream Democrats are backed by the most powerful corporate forces in post-industrial society. The unholy alliance between big government and big business became a permanent fixture of the political landscape during the New Deal, but thanks to the left's special relationship with the media and higher education, few Democrat voters are aware of this development.
How do we shed light on the party of the ruling class? Where can we reliably compare and contrast the effects of Democrat and Republican policies on common Americans? Since Washington, D.C. is a moral swamp where Deep State bureaucrats use all means at their disposal to destroy all adversaries to the ruling class, more can be learned at the state level.
Small businesses are in a sense the "canary in the coal mine" because they lack the resources and social connections to reasonably navigate burdensome regulations. The owners of these businesses also tend to have an independent streak that does not sit well with many of the credentialed elites who regulate them. The tight correlation between political affiliation and small business friendliness presented in Table 1 and Graphs 1 and 2 torches any reasoned case for Democrats representing ordinary Americans.
Full Article by Antonio R. Chaves @ American Thinker
The Enemy Within: A Story of the Purge of American Intelligence
The dystopic view that democracy is dead is not a new idea. What might disturb you is where this design germinated from.
“Western Europe has only 20 to 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship, and whether the dictation comes from a politburo or a junta will not make that much difference.” – Willy Brandt (German Federal Chancellor, right before he stepped down in 1974)
Believe it or not, but the dystopic view that democracy is dead is by no measure a new idea. However, what might disturb you is where this design, in its contemporary form, really germinated from.
The idea that democracy is in a crisis and needs to be replaced with a new form of “governance” did not originate from the outcries of an oppressed people demanding their rights to a decent life. We are not presently seeing an organic, grassroots process in reforming how government, that is, democracy will be “improved” upon. Rather, what we are seeing is a controlled disintegration of the very thing we think we are trying to uphold, and this destruction has been in the works for over 45 years. Read More