Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020"

How can one begin to deal with the prophecies of Angelo Codevilla's "Revolution 2020" just out at American Mind?

Where he says that, whether they intended it or not, America's ruling class has declared the Deplorables beyond the pale and therefore ordained a totalitarian future in which nobody will be allowed to dissent from the orthodoxy, or hold an opinion at odds with the orthodoxy, or hold a job if they they are not orthodox.

The point is that Donald Trump represents an inchoate rebellion against the supremacy of the ruling oligarchy:

More and more, America’s ruling class, shaped and serviced by an increasingly uniform pretend-meritocratic educational system, claimed for itself monopoly access to truth and goodness, and made moral as well as technical-intellectual contempt for the rest of Americans into their identity’s chief element. That, along with administrative and material power, made our ruling class the gatekeeper to all manner of goods.

Because, of course, to oppose the oligarchy's "monopoly access to truth and goodness" is the very definition of Satanic evil. And it must be stamped out, in every detail of its satanic systemic racism.

And, of course, once you get the whip in your hand, there is no end to it.

Affirmation of one’s own superiority by punishing inferiors is an addictive pleasure. It requires ever stronger, purer doses of infliction, and is inherently beyond satisfaction.

Codevilla laughs at the pompous notion of the "resistance" to Trump's 2016 election by the ruling class. Yes, of course, the ruling class resisted; it is still resisting.

In fact, the election’s outcome had resulted from the general population’s resistance to the ruling class further solidifying its oligarchy.

And, let us be clear, this resistance of the general population is barely organized or led by anyone. It is inchoate, instinctive, organic.

The warrant for the ruling class oligarchy's power has always been its self-image as certified experts, as truth-telling scientists, its moral concern for "education, to well-being for the poor and disadvantaged, to a healthy natural environment, and to public health." And of course, it moral stand against racial and sexual oppression.

But each and all of these campaigns produced mostly the ostensible objectives’ opposites while increasing the numbers of the oligarchy’s members and their wealth and power[.]

In other words, the oligarchs have wrecked education, demolished the poor, used environmentalism to oppress ordinary people, and used oppression narratives to oppress the deplorables. No wonder the deplorables are rising up.

As with Crane Brinton's notion in An Anatomy of Revolution, the need for totalitarian domination arises from just this failure, of political action failing to achieve its promises -- even producing "the ostensible objetctives' opposites." When your revolution fails to create the Promised Land, that's when you have the choice to admit your failure or double down.

But the ruling class has a problem. The mostly peaceful protesters of the Summer of 2020 have inadvertently made it clear that their real enemy in not Donald Trump but the whole race of deplorable Commoners.

For the ruling class, the electoral problem is that the intersectional coalition’s actions and demands have made far too explicit that crushing Donald Trump is only incidentally its objective—that crushing the spirit of independence in America’s “deplorable” population is its essential objective. 

But, if Trump wins in 2020 and the Republicans maintain their position in Congress, what then?

The greatest benefit that would come from the Left’s defeat in the 2020 election is the possibility that it may become possible to convince the ruling class, if not the intersectionals, that such accommodation is the best deal they can get. But the intersectionals are violent enemies—who must be dealt with as such. Fortunately, there are more spoiled children among them than heroes.

So, the question is whether the oligarchy, the educated Gentry, decides on a truce with the deplorables, to let them go on being deplorable if they don't make too much trouble, or whether the oligarchy truckles to the "intersectional" extremists and goes for broke. Right now, I'd say that the Chucks and the Nancys are finding the AOCs and AntiFas a bit to hot to handle. So there is the temptation to loose them upon the American people as a whole.

And maybe it would work, for a while. But as I say, "there is no such thing as justice, only injustice." What prompts people to form a head of rebellion is perceived injustice.

Oh, and there is one other thing, that women expect to be protected. If you don't protect them, dear oligarchs, then they will look for another protector.

And I suspect that our oligarchic rulers have no idea, literally No Idea, of the depth and breadth of the injustice they have loosed upon the land. Rulers seldom do, until the peasants with pitchforks show up at the door.