My latest American Thinker piece "Trying to Think Ahead" got noticed by Instapundit and by Lucianne.com. And it got 558 comments so far. In the piece I merely asked why, if Dems are The Emerging Democratic Majority, they need to cheat. Surely a noble and confident aristocracy of intellect does not need to descend to the mass production of ballots.
And even if a charlatan like Trump should win a couple of presidential elections the ruling class still rules, right? No need to call in the Spanish Inquisition and cancel everyone for WrongThink.
In fact, of course, things are not as well as they might be in the court of the ruling class. The rulers seem to be giving off signals that, as the Brits say, they have "lost the plot."
That is certainly my view. If you look at Joe Biden's agenda, "Build Back Better" is just part of the anodyne globalists-know-best agenda of the World Economic Forum. And "systemic racism" is part of the ruling class's desperate attempt to keep the black mamas voting Democrat -- and hand out goodies to educated blacks.
Then I thought even deeper, that Build Back Better (and climate change) is a politics pandering to supra-national educated globalists, while systemic racism is pandering to sub-national ethnic tribes.
There is nothing in the Democratic agenda for ordinary Commoner Americans. There is nothing for ordinary nationalists, citizens of the nation-state of the United States of America.
Now I would say that a ruling class that has no interest in pandering to the great middle sector of American voters has got a screw loose, and possibly may not be long for this world.
I think of the way the French aristocrats are portrayed in the TV series John Adams. They are all powdered and bewigged and gorgeously attired, both men and women.
But our pal Benjamin Franklin, ambassador from the rebel American colonists to the court of Louis XVI, is dressed in homespun, does not wear a wig, and wears a coonskin hat that he sent home for. He is playing a role: the crude frontiersman -- he, the genius that connected lightning with the sparks from electrostatics, the natural leader that organized the first public library in Philadelphia. Ben Franklin was playing the part of the Commoner to those fancy-pants Frenchie aristocrats.
Of course, Donald Trump, real-estate magnate, also plays the part of the Commoner. I wonder why?
Now, I'm about two-thirds of the way through Mosca's Ruling Class. His basic line is that all societies since whenever have been governed by a minority, a ruling class, because it must be so. Every ruling class must come up with a "political formula," a justification for its role as the ruling minority that every ruling class invents to meet the "need, so universally felt, of governing and knowing one is governed not on the basis of mere material or intellectual force, but of the basis of a moral principle." A ruling class must persuade the rubes that it is not just in it for itself, but cares about the people.
In the old days, the political formula would be that the king is the Lord's Anointed -- and yes, in 1953 at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth, she was Anointed by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But in the United States the political formula is different. Our President rules on a formula that he is the people's choice, and the people chose him because he cares about people like you and me. Our educated ruling class rules on the formula that it is the educated class, the knowledgeable class, the caring class, that has the knowledge and the wisdom to run the complicated and sophisticated government that is so necessary in the modern age. Yahoos like Trump need not apply.
Notice the little glitch in the Matrix here? What if you are elected president and you stole the election? That is what the Dems and the ruling class have been saying about Trump and Russia Russia Russia. And that is the little problem that a President Biden might have going forward.
And what if you are a ruling class that is not very educated, not very knowledgeable, not very caring, and makes big mistakes like creating the Great Society that has marginalized the poor, that has bombed out the manufacturing sector, that cranked up a housing bubble that nearly wiped out the financial system and hurt the very people it was designed to help: minorities without the means to come up with a decent down payment on the home of their dreams?
What if you get elected president and your agenda is all about Jobs for Gentry in climate change and "systemic racism" and college debt forgiveness for wokies and nothing for the broad mass of Americans?
What if an ordinary American might well feel that the current ruling class rules on the basis "merely of material and intellectual force," because shut up peasants? And that there was no "moral principle" that he could see to justify the ruling class's use of force?
See the problem?
My gut feeling, you noble lords, you Bidens and Harrises and Schumers and Pelosis and all the ships at sea, is that you really have no idea that every ruling class must persuade the ordinary people that it does not rule merely for its own interest and power, but to recognize and promote the interests of ordinary people, the ordinary people that we saw so clearly in the Trump Car Parades and Trump Boat Parades this summer and fall.
Now I don't know whether the Trump agenda of build the wall, check the ChiComs, end the wars, and Frack Baby Frack, is really in the long term interest of America and the world. Time will tell on that.
But you can certainly say that Donald Trump, like no presidential candidate in recent history, really focused his agenda like a laser on flattering and persuading ordinary American Commoners that he understood them and would rule America in their interest.
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