The View from the Window of the Ruling Class Club

Over at The Atlantic they know that something is wrong. Goldwater, Reagan, Bush, Trump. Really, darling, how can anyone stand it? 

So George Pasker has written about "How America Fractured into Four Parts:" Free America, Smart America, Real America, Just America.

Over at Free America we have the coalition of traditionalists, anti-Communists, and libertarians. Although traditionalism and anti-Communism have died out, libertarianism is still strong: people still read Ayn Rand. By the way, did you know that Barry Goldwater was a segregationist?

Then there is Smart America, the folks in the knowledge economy,

salaried professionals in information technology, computer engineering, scientific research, design, management consulting, the upper civil service, financial analysis, law, journalism, the arts, higher education. 

They are smart and know how to play the credentials game, for themselves and their children.

Then there is Real America, whose members believe in the "idea that the authentic heart of democracy beats hardest in common people who work with their hands." Sarah Palin is the archetype, and Trump is the modern pied-piper. From time to time, Real America has been interracial, but that always dissolves because "white supremacy."

Real America has always needed to feel that both a shiftless underclass and a parasitic elite depend on its labor. In this way, it renders the Black working class invisible.

By the way, here is Packer's view of Trump.

Throughout his adult life, Trump has been hostile to Black people, contemptuous of women, vicious about immigrants from poor countries, and cruel toward the weak. 

Really? I had no idea.  

Finally there is Just America. It sees through the lies of Free America and Smart America. It sees "the country is less a project of self-government to be improved than a site of continuous wrong to be battled."

It does the hard, essential thing that the other three narratives avoid, that white Americans have avoided throughout history. It forces us to see the straight line that runs from slavery and segregation to the second-class life so many Black Americans live today—the betrayal of equality that has always been the country’s great moral shame, the heart of its social problems.

So, it stands to reason that the ruling class should back the truth-seekers of Just America and teach the rest of America a lesson. On with The Project!

What is clear to me is the "tell." There is no discussion of the ruling class as actors in this play. They are the Brit colonialists up at Shimla drinking their gin-and-tonics at the club, and worrying that "the natives are restless." The only time that "Progressives" are mentioned is when Packer states that

Progressives, shocked by the readiness of half the country to support this hateful man [Trump], seized on racism as the single cause and set out to disprove every alternative.

Oh really! I had no idea! That our ruling class used "racism" as a club to beat back the monstrous challenge to their divine right to rule.

But this was too simplistic, says Packer. "Racism is such an irreducible evil" that it allowed Progressives to ignore the "grievances of their compatriots down in the lowlands" etc.

See what is going on here? A little ideological leak from Mt. Olympus, giving us peasants a brief look at what our rulers are really thinking. Hey, what's a ruler to do when the peasants start grumbling?

Now I interpret Packer's Four Americas as four reactions to a century of Progressive rule by the educated ruling class.

I'd say that Free America is a principled objection to the top-down administrative state with its programs-for-all and its regulatory ethos, both from a traditional humans-as-social-animals perspective and from a markets perspective.

I'd say that Smart America is people doing what they are told: get an education, get a credential, and take your place in the ordered hierarchy that the rulers have designed for you. It works pretty well for the cognitive elite.

I'd say that Real America is people that have fallen out of the system, the grand plan of the Olympian progressive gods, and they look to an older America for inspiration.

I'd say that Just America is people that know that something is wrong, but being creatures of the system, have no ideological tools to critique the society that progressives have created and grown except the lefty rubbish that they have been carefully taught. They want more of the same, the sweeties, because that's all they know.

This is the point at which I like to bring up my chart of government spending since 1900.

I just suggest to all the world that when you look at government spending growing from 7 percent of GDP to the present 35ish percent (leaving out the various peaks responding to wars and crises) on all kinds of top-down programs you are bound to say to yourself: Hmm, I'll bet that at least half of that growth is a bad idea that doesn't make America a juster or more prosperous society, but just Makes Things Worse.

It doesn't take genius or conspiracy theory to come to this notion. Anyone that has lived in the world knows that there are lots of good ideas abroad in the world, but not so many good ideas that actually work.

God only knows what it is going to take to fix America, especially when we see the ruling class spinning such fanciful tales to itself.