Two Views of Our Ruling Class and Its Power

If you are like me you are always looking for reports of cracks and infirmities in our ruling class. To keep hope alive!

But the question is: is the ruling class on its last legs, or cunningly playing us all for mugs?

Or, to put it directly, has Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau just administered the coup de grace to the Canadian truckers? Or has he displayed a fatal weakness and overreaction that will bring the rule of the Canadian educated crashing down in the weeks and months ahead?

The Zman has a piece out at Taki's that presents the rulers -- and particularly the media -- as all part of a seamless coordinated monster. He mentions Joe Sobran writing twenty years ago about The Hive. Exactly:

The managerial class is now an organism. It now has collective awareness in the class-consciousness sense, but none of the subsystems are aware of themselves as integrated parts of this organism.

Thus its propaganda, its policy, its reaction to events, everything about it is as natural as a coordinated hive of bees. The ruling class doesn't need to tell its functionaries what to do or what to say. They already know, instinctively.

On the other hand, Victor Davis Hanson views the elite bubble as a weakness.

Our elites like Trudeau and Newsom seem angry they are unfairly underappreciated by their clueless beneficiaries. The latter supposedly never appreciate the needed remedies for climate change, the thought cleansing required to eliminate systemic racism, and the mind reprogramming demanded for true diversity, equity, and inclusion thinking. 

Or is it like this?

On stage, a petulant cast of clueless Justin Trudeaus and bumbling Joe Bidens simply cannot fathom why few anymore are listening to them.

My view is that both Zman and Hanson are right. Our rulers do indeed act like a Hive, instinctively knowing what to say and do to guard and protect their power.

Until.

I've been reading a biography of Andrew Mellon, banker and industrialist and Secretary of the Treasury in the Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover administrations. And Mellon didn't know what to do as thousands of banks were going under in 1930, 1931, and 1932. Of course his liberal biographer, David Cannadine, Hive member, contrasts the cluelessness of Mellon with the all-knowing all-successful Roosevelt. 

And that's the point. When the economy in going good, ordinary people just go about their business while the ruling class builds castles in the air "tackling" climate change and "fighting" systemic racism.

But when inflation hits ten percent, and gasoline is up 50 percent and the people are harassed by a blizzard of COVID regulations and ukases from the laptop class, that's when ordinary people rise up and dump the old rulers for new ones.

Not because they know what the rulers did wrong. Or because they know what needs to be done. But because the only thing The People can do when everything seems to be going wrong is to dump the rulers and try new ones. 

That's what they did in 1932, when clueless Mellon didn't know what to do. Looking over the blizzard of projects that Roosevelt's brain trust came up with, I'd say that only two were worth a dime. First, was an Emergency Banking Act that printed a bunch of money so that banks could meet heavy withdrawals, and banks wouldn't fail any more. And the second was going off the Gold Standard. All the rest, the NRAs, the CCCs, the TVAs? Baloney and nonsense on stilts and Jobs for Gentry.

The point is: will the same ruling-class rejection happen in 2022 and 2024? The answer is simple. We Don't Know.

And if we kick out the current ruling class from executive power, will it make a difference? We Don't Know.

But we do know this. The century-old ruling-class doctrine of wise top-down regulation and organization goes right against the Science™. Because the science today says that the universe works not by mechanical organization but by creative emergence, lots of people trying new ideas and the good ones surviving and making a fortune for their inventors.

As in: Elon Musk thinks that his reusable Starship spaceship and booster system can replace current jet passenger transportation, and do it cheaper. Is he right? We Don't Know. But stay tuned...