An Indictment of the Ruling Class

Reading the tone of the reporting of the election aftermath it looks like the usual suspects want President Trump to give up on the rather evidently stolen election.

Let's concede that, in the recounts and the Trump lawsuits that our Democratic friends will be able to cover up the dead bodies enough to get through to January 20 and the inauguration of Joe Biden.

But let us rehearse the Chris Chantrill narrative of why you ain't seen nothin' yet.

First of all, the cheating. Normal humans only start to cheat when things are going unexpectedly wrong. It can't be true that my business is losing money! It can't be true that the voters think they are getting screwed by the ruling class! So, a little thumb on the scales ought to get us through the current unpleasantness.

Second, the "deplorable phenomenon." Of course, ruling classes have always thought that the people they ruled were yahoos. Else why would the rulers be the rulers and the ruled the ruled? But the truth is that rulers tend to "overdetermine" their virtues, which are, after all, not universal but only present in a few exceptional individuals in the ruling class. The rest of it is ruling-class conceit. And so almost everything that a ruling class does is a manifestation of its conceit and its disdain for the lower orders.

Third, "the natives are restless." One of the points that Gaetano Mosca makes in The Ruling Class is that a good ruling class is always sensitive to the tides and passions among the masses. It knows that one of its biggest jobs is to keep the people more-or-less content. One of the strengths of the British colonial system was its recognition that when "the natives are restless" then the imperial regime needed to pay attention. But our ruling class has declared war on the basket of deplorables, because racist-sexist-homophobe, and counts it a virtue to humble and humiliate the plebs.

Fourth, naked self-dealing. Of course, a ruling class has to take care of its own, but any sensible ruling class knows that there are limits. In particular there is the injunction of the British actress Mrs. Patrick Campbell:

My dear, I don't care what they do, so long as they don't do it in the street and frighten the horses.

There are a whole bunch of issues on which the ruling class is indulging itself and making things a lot worse for the average Joe. As in

Issue	Ruling Class	Commoners
Climate change	Jobs for gentry	makes energy more expensive.
Environmentalism	Jobs for gentry	makes houses more expensive.
Feminism	Gentry women feel good	turns world upside down for commoner women
Sexual Revolution	Bit of fun in college	turns world upside down for commoner women
LGBT	Gentry gets creative about sex	er, what?
Mortgage subsidies	Increases value of gentry homes	makes housing less affordable.
Education	Inside track on private ed.	puts education in hands of teachers' unions.
Mass transit	OK for gentry neighborhoods	makes it harder for suburb-to-suburb commuting.
Building codes	Enforces gentry- style luxury	makes housing more expensive
Diversity	Jobs for gentry	disfavors white working class
Student loans	OK for professional class	makes college unaffordable

The consequence of all these issues is that the educated ruling class soars above all the problems, because of various advantages, but the ordinary schmuck is left holding the baby.

My feeling is that our ruling class has literally no idea how it oppresses and exploits the ordinary Commoner American. The main reason is that the ruling-class's belief system, its religion, declares that the current ruling class of the educated gentry is the best thing since sliced bread.

But I like to use the "oppressed peoples, allies, and white oppressors" moral framework to show how deluded this is. First of all, just how oppressed are the blacks, Latinos, women, LGBTs supposed to be? Not very, I submit, because discrimination is illegal. And how oppressive are the white oppressors? Who are they, anyway? Since the whole educated class these days seems to be Democrats, down for the struggle, that leaves home builders, small business people, fundamentalist Christians, white males that drive trucks. And they are supposed to be powerful? And how noble are the "allies?" If you ask me, the allies are the people that have declared certain groups as oppressed, and other groups as oppressors, but they are the practically perfect people in every way with the power to make things right.

There's a famous saying, by Talleyrand:

He who has not lived in the eighteenth century before the Revolution does not know the sweetness of life and can not imagine that there can be happiness in life.

Yes. No doubt life is pretty sweet for our educated ruling class. But it ain't so sweet for many of the Commoners and even for the Clients of the ruling class. Maybe it doesn't matter.

Or maybe it does.