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Gary Edwards

Arnold Ahlert: The Real American Divide - The Patriot Post - 0 views

patriotpost.us/44059

Angelo-Codevilla Ruling-Class Country-Class Patriotism

shared by Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton provided great examples of the Ruling Class' arrogant mindset. Pelosi believes, as she stated last week, that white, non-college-educated men who vote Republican have “voted against their own economic interests because of guns, because of gays, and because of God — the three G’s, God being the woman’s right to choose.” Clinton was worse. Regarding abortion on demand, she insisted last year that “deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” In other words, one embraces the progressive elitist viewpoint, or one is a religiously inspired bigot with a passé worldview that must be demolished. Thus it is no surprise these elitists conflate anything that dissents from their globalist agenda as a “world of wall-builders,” who have “already done great damage,” states The Economist. That damage includes the Brexit, the rise of nationalist (read: right-wing) parties, and “more electoral victories for closed-world types who pose the greatest threat since Communism.” In other words, elitists disdain national sovereignty and democratically determined destiny, logical responses to skyrocketing levels of elitist-enabled terrorism and uncontrolled immigration, and deeply felt concerns by non-elitists about a global economy that has devastated millions left behind in its wake.
  • The Ruling Class “solutions” for Country Class problems? “Let goods and investment flow freely, but strengthen the social safety-net to offer support and new opportunities for those whose jobs are destroyed,” The Economist states. “To manage immigration flows better, invest in public infrastructure, ensure that immigrants work and allow for rules that limit surges of people.” Codevilla explains what this really means, noting that “our Ruling Class' first priority in any and all matters, its solution to any and all problems, is to increase the power of the government — meaning those who run it, meaning themselves.” To achieve that end, new laws are longer than ever, “because length is needed to specify how people will be treated unequally.” Thus, these laws become “primarily grants of discretion,” because “all anybody has to know about them is whom they empower.” Codevilla adds, “This defines ‘crony capitalism.’”
  • If that sounds familiar, maybe it’s because WikiLeak emails reveal the DNC granted itself the sole discretion to empower Hillary Clinton’s presidential nomination, right from the beginning. Thus, when Hillary spoke of “bringing people together” during her speech at the convention, it was really about doing so on her and her fellow insiders' terms. And when she promised to get money out of politics, it can be assumed the billions of dollars that have flowed into the Clinton Foundation — dollars that conspicuously align themselves with a number of dubious initiatives — will remain exempt, even as another sham investigation of Clinton behavior conducted by an equally corrupted IRS lends an imprimatur of genuine concern to the spectacle. “If Americans, or at least a majority of them, have not completely lost their own self-regard as a free people, then the November election should turn out to be a referendum on the ‘ruling class,’ and a massive repudiation of Hillary Clinton’s sense of entitlement to be the first woman elected President of the United States,” writes American Thinker’s Salim Mansur. Perhaps. But traditional thinking dies hard. And a corrupt mainstream media — epitomized by CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer and Chief Political Analyst Gloria Borger drinking wine and celebrating with Democrat delegates at the convention’s conclusion — isn’t about to jeopardize their own Ruling Class status to provide the Country Class with any potentially unifying political insight. Which brings us to Donald Trump. In exclusive communication with The Patriot Post, Codevilla maintained there were no circumstances under which he could support Hillary or any other Democrat, but his view of Trump “is more unfavorable than ever.” He does, however, grant that Trump “is the lesser of two evils.” He sees both candidates as “identical in their disregard for the U.S. Constitution and in the establishment of a post-republican regime — an empire of the will, by of and for favored sectors of the ruling class.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • No doubt Codevilla’s take resonates with millions of Americans appalled by a broken, Ruling Class-dominated political system that produced both candidates. Yet realistically, we are faced with a binary choice, made by either commission or omission. And while Codevilla believes “there is no vehicle for opposition” as yet to a Ruling Class “represented by the establishment of both parties,” our own Mark Alexander warns that “the outcome of the November election will not only determine our president for at least the next four years, but also the composition of the Supreme Court for at least the next quarter-century.” That quarter century could be one in which a constitutionally contemptuous Supreme Court majority appointed by Hillary Clinton makes representative government obsolete, and eliminates any chance, short of armed revolution, for the Country Class to take America back from the Ruling Class. A nation where, as Ayn Rand put it, “The government is free to do anything it pleases, while the citizens may act only by permission.” A Trump presidency may be nothing more than a distasteful, bite-the-bullet
  • impediment to Ruling Class hegemony. But it is better than no impediment at all.
  • “While most Americans pray to the God who created us in His own image, our Ruling Class prays to themselves as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image.” —from The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo Codevilla, 2010. While many still frame the 2016 election in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, those divisions are losing their meaning. This election could be the first one in which Americans will either choose to continue abiding a globalist Ruling Class and their government-dominant, one-world agenda, or decide that national sovereignty, the Constitution and American exceptionalism and individualism are worth preserving. To be clear, nationalism does not equal protectionism, nativism or Islamophobia, nor is it solely embraced by know-nothing rubes unworthy of serious consideration — despite the ongoing efforts of the Ruling Class to paint it that way. Codevilla calls people who oppose the Ruling Class the Country Class, and he describes it as a diverse, often inharmonious group that “shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards as inept and haughty.”
  • Gary Edwards on 04 Aug 16
     
    ""While most Americans pray to the God who created us in His own image, our Ruling Class prays to themselves as saviors of the planet and as shapers of mankind in their own image." -from The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo Codevilla, 2010. While many still frame the 2016 election in terms of Democrats vs. Republicans, those divisions are losing their meaning. This election could be the first one in which Americans will either choose to continue abiding a globalist Ruling Class and their government-dominant, one-world agenda, or decide that national sovereignty, the Constitution and American exceptionalism and individualism are worth preserving. To be clear, nationalism does not equal protectionism, nativism or Islamophobia, nor is it solely embraced by know-nothing rubes unworthy of serious consideration - despite the ongoing efforts of the Ruling Class to paint it that way. Codevilla calls people who oppose the Ruling Class the Country Class, and he describes it as a diverse, often inharmonious group that "shares above all the desire to be rid of rulers it regards as inept and haughty." Ruling Class haughtiness, argues Codevilla, derives from "an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance," and engenders "a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins … and saints," all conveyed in an "in" language that serves as their "badge of identity." Irrespective of their professions, the Ruling Class is also united by the reality that "their road up included government channels and government money. … Hence, whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway in, America's Ruling Class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats." Just as critically, this "fraternity" can only be joined by one who Codevilla says "shares the manners, the tastes, and the i
Gary Edwards

Does Trump Trump? Angelo Codevilla on Our Present Moment | Power Line - 1 views

www.powerlineblog.com/...illa-on-our-present-moment.php

Angelo-Codevilla Trump ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15 - No Cached
  • Angelo Codevilla is a former staff member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University, and the author of more than a dozen fine books on politics, arms control, and intelligence (if I had to pick a favorite it might be The Character of Nations), including a fine translation of Machiavelli’s Prince published by Yale University Press. Most recently his essay-turned-book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It caught the attention of Rush Limbaugh and many others. It argues that our fundamental political problem is not “big government,” but the creation of a ruling class, inhabiting both parties, that is steadily increasing its authoritarian control over the nation. In a conversation a few months ago Angelo remarked, “The 2016 election is simple; the person who runs on the platform ‘Who do they think they are?’ will win.”
  • Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world.
  • Trump’s attraction lies less in his words’ grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do.
  • Moreover, Americans are becoming increasingly skeptical about their celebrities’ integrity. With good reason. McCain is just a minor example of a phenomenon that characterizes our ruling class: reputations built on lies and cover-ups, lives of myth protected by mutual forbearance, by complicitous journalists, or by records deep-sixed, including in in government archives.
  • As they lord it over us, they live lives that cannot stand scrutiny.
  • The point here is simple: our ruling class has succeeded in ruling not by reason or persuasion, never mind integrity, but by occupying society’s commanding heights, by imposing itself and its ever-changing appetites on the rest of us. It has coopted or intimidated potential opponents by denying the legitimacy of opposition. Donald Trump, haplessness and clownishness notwithstanding, has shown how easily this regime may be threatened just by refusing to be intimidated.
  • At increasing speed, our ruling class has created “protected classes” of Americans defined by race, sex, age, disability, origin, religion, and now homosexuality, whose members have privileges that outsider do not. By so doing, they have shattered the principle of equality – the bedrock of the rule of law. Ruling class insiders use these officious classifications to harass their socio-political opponents. An unintimidated statesman would ask: Why should not all “classes” be equally protected? Does the rule of law even admit of “classes”? Does not the 14th amendment promise “the equal protection of the laws” to all alike? He would note that when the government sets aside written law in favor of what the powerful want, it thereby absolves citizens any obligation to obey government.
  • Gary Edwards on 29 Jul 15
     
    "Does Trump trump? By Angelo M. Codevilla "In the land of the blind," so goes the saying, "the one-eyed man is king." Donald Trump leapt atop other contenders for the Republican presidential nomination when he acted on the primordial fact in American public life today, from which most of the others hide their eyes, namely: most Americans distrust, fear, are sick and tired of, the elected, appointed, and bureaucratic officials who rule over us, as well as their cronies in the corporate, media, and academic world. Trump's attraction lies less in his words' grace or even precision than in the extent to which Americans are searching for someone, anyone, to lead against this ruling class, that is making America less prosperous, less free, and more dangerous. Trump's rise reminds this class's members that they sit atop a rumbling volcano of rejection. Republicans and Democrats hope to exorcise its explosion by telling the public that Trump's remarks on immigration and on the character of fellow member John McCain (without bothering to try showing that he errs on substance), place him outside the boundaries of their polite society. Thus do they throw Br'er Rabbit into the proverbial briar patch. Now what? The continued rise in Trump's poll numbers reminds all that Ross Perot - in an era that was far more tolerant of the Establishment than is ours - outdistanced both Bush 41 and Bill Clinton before self-destructing, just by speaking ill of both parties before he self destructed. Republicans brahmins have the greater reason to fear. Whereas some three fifths of Democratic voters approve the conduct of their officials, only about one fifth of Republican voters approve what theirs do. If Americans in general are primed for revolt, Republican (and independent) voters fairly thirst for it. Trump's barest hints about what he opposes (never mind proposes) regarding just a few items on the public agenda have had such effect because they accord with
Gary Edwards

American Thinker: The Productive Class and the American Aristocracy - 1 views

www.americanthinker.com/...roductive_class_and_the_a.html

st-karnick ruling-class Angelo-Codevilla obammunism

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 10 - Cached
  • the ruling class and the country party.
  • In his excellent American Spectator article on "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution," Angelo Codevilla calls these two antagonistic and irreconcilable groups
  • the progressive aristocracy and the productive class.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • they are more than just political movements and are in fact separate cultures.
  • The culture of the progressive aristocracy is devoted to statism, whereas the productive class tends to hold classical liberal values.
  • the American leaders of the past, who came from truly diverse backgrounds and held a variety of beliefs while accepting the nation's founding values.
  • progressive aristocracy is based on commitment to a set of ideas. Foremost among these is hostility toward Christianity
  • Accountability and personal responsibility -- the sine qua non of liberty and of the American experiment -- are kryptonite to the ruling class.
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jul 10
     
    As the hostilities between the current government and the Tea Party movement have become increasingly rancorous, the division of American society into two cultures holding thoroughly incompatible worldviews has become obvious. In fact, the two forces are clearly on an unavoidable collision course. Although many people may understandably be most interested in knowing which side will prevail, I think an equally important and troubling question is precisely by what means the matter will be resolved. Will reason prevail and the people in power either have their agenda confirmed or step aside gracefully? Or will there be intransigence, increasing conflict, and even violence? I do not believe that the answer to that question is by any means obvious. In his excellent American Spectator article on "America's Ruling Class and the Perils of Revolution," Angelo Codevilla calls these two antagonistic and irreconcilable groups the ruling class and the country party. Although I agree with Codevilla's outline of the two groups, I prefer to characterize them as the progressive aristocracy and the productive class. In fact, I think that it's vitally important for those in the productive class to understand that what Codevilla calls the ruling party is an aristocracy, albeit a corrupt one. Differences in nomenclature notwithstanding, Codevilla's article is particularly useful in its lengthy descriptions of the two parties to the conflict, for they are more than just political movements and are in fact separate cultures. The culture of the progressive aristocracy is devoted to statism, whereas the productive class tends to hold classical liberal values.
Gary Edwards

As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voter... - 0 views

www.forbes.com/...illions-of-voters-are-orphaned

Angelo-Codevilla ruling-class ruling-class-elites rino-repubicans

shared by Gary Edwards on 22 Feb 13 - No Cached
  • Gary Edwards on 22 Feb 13
     
    "By Angelo Codevilla  (In August/July of 2012, Mr. Codevilla published another earth shaking analysis where he used the terms "ruling class" and "ruling elites".  This time he shakes it up exposing the Republican Party elites as part of the ruling class, consistently working against the interests of the millions of Americans who voted for them). On January 1, 2013 one third of Republican congressmen, following their leaders, joined with nearly all Democrats to legislate higher taxes and more subsidies for Democratic constituencies. Two thirds voted no, following the people who had elected them. For generations, the Republican Party had presented itself as the political vehicle for Americans whose opposition to ever-bigger government financed by ever-higher taxes makes them a "country class."  Yet modern Republican leaders, with the exception of the Reagan Administration, have been partners in the expansion of government, indeed in the growth of a government-based "ruling class." They have relished that role despite their voters. Thus these leaders gradually solidified their choice to no longer represent what had been their constituency, but to openly adopt the identity of junior partners in that ruling class. By repeatedly passing bills that contradict the identity of Republican voters and of the majority of Republican elected representatives, the Republican leadership has made political orphans of millions of Americans. In short, at the outset of 2013 a substantial portion of America finds itself un-represented, while Republican leaders increasingly represent only themselves."
Gary Edwards

Articles: Ruling Class Without a Clue - 0 views

www.americanthinker.com/...ling_class_without_a_clue.html

Angelo-Codevilla ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • We the people want a little free stuff.
  • The ruling class wants to seize and hold political power.
  • Usually, those vote-buying promises result in policies that damage the economy.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Promising free stuff is how you get elected.
  • There's only one way that the ruling class knows how to deal with the inevitable consequence of gunning the housing market with mortgage subsidies
  • That is the way to understand the global economic situation. It is governments trying to paper over their mistakes.
  • In the U.S. the government is trying to paper over a credit system that is still badly holed from the mortgage meltdown.
  • The result is that politicians and their officials are always involved in trying to band-aid over the distortions and the wounds they have inflicted on the economy in their crude bid for power.
  • Print lots of money to float the underwater mortgages.
  • What can we understand from all this news? It stands to reason. These ruling classes don't have a clue what they are doing.
  • In Europe the ruling class is trying to deal with the consequence of its 50-year hubris. The people, they decided after World War II, were a bunch of crypto-Nazis.
  • So the enlightened ruling class would federalize Europe to make sure that aggressive nationalism would never rear its ugly head again.
  • Think of the Chinese ruling class. The Chi-com rulers really want to bring China into the modern era, but they naturally feel that this is only possible under their wise leadership.
  • So they get exactly the crony capitalism we enjoy here in the United States, as the ruling class dribbles subsidies out to its supporters out in the provinces to keep them on-side while they fundamentally transform China.
  • The Fed wants to stop the presses, and it can, it will some day. But it doesn't want to bring on another panic. The trouble is that even talk about ending its quantitative easing leads to a market swoon.
  • As Angelo Codevilla writes, those NSA data mining efforts might really amount to something if the NSA had a clue what it was doing.
  • [T]he aftermath of 9/11, technology, inertia, and allergy to accountability gave the US government the capacity to capture and examine at will well nigh the whole electronic realm. It would very much like to do the protective job that President Obama and Karl Rove claim and may even believe it is doing. But there is no evidence that anyone has figured out how to sidestep the realities that prevent that.
  • In Codevilla's view, the U.S. government is still going what it decided to do in WWII. Collect everything and then decide what to do with it.
  • is the Fed fighting recession or fighting inflation?
  • Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13
     
    Good bullet analysis of how things work and why governments continue to get it wrong.  It comes as no surprise that the article turns out to be a quick summary of some deep thinking by Angelo Codevilla, the genius who coined the term "Ruling Class".  Linked at:  JUN 23, 2013 The Ruling Class Consensus On Domestic Spying http://www.libertylawsite.org/2013/06/23/the-ruling-class-consensus-on-domestic-spying/ At the end of the day, the Ruling Class El;ites hate the American Constitution, and will do whatever it takes to destroy the only Republic ever dedicated to individual liberty, freedom and the rule of law.
Gary Edwards

The Ruling Class Consensus On Domestic Spying | Online Library of Law and Liberty - 0 views

www.libertylawsite.org/...s-consensus-on-domestic-spying

Angelo-Codevilla ruling-class-elites

shared by Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • This means that the US government’s vast apparatus is almost completely useless against serious terrorists or criminals, and useful primarily to do whatever the government might choose to innocent persons.
    • Gary Edwards
      Gary Edwards on 25 Jun 13
       
      Bold statement, but then how did the Fort Hood massacre and Boston Marathon massacre occur?  Plenty of email and phone call evidence in both cases.  Yet the government was caught totally unaware.  I guess it really depends on who the watchers are watching.  Proof is slowly being gathered that the watchers are watching those whom the government elites seek to destroy through blackmail, intimidation (IRS anyone?), and breach of Constitutional rights (take your pick of any three letter government agency acronym you like).
  • Ever since the 1970s, the art of code-making has surpassed the art of code-breaking – period.
  • Hence, on the high end, anyone can purchase voice and internet communications software that are beyond the capacity of anyone to access without an electronic key.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • If collection is universal, the collectors don’t have to explain to others (or even to themselves) why they are targeting this person or group and not another. Possessing the data in secret, they can then decide in secret who they are really interested in.
  • That flight from responsibility is also why, in 1978, the intelligence agencies pressed Congress to pass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), under which the agencies submit their requests for detailed targeting, in secret, to a court that decides ex parte and in secret.
  • the FISA court. But that court acts not just in secret, but ex parte – hearing only one side.
  • The relevant question about the uses of the NSA programs, then, is simply “against whom, in the broad American public, is the US government likely to turn its animus?
  • Alas, the ruling class has shown itself all too able to treat domestic opponents as public enemies. But that is another story.
  • In the words of General Keith Alexander, director of NSA, this surveillance has “helped to prevent” “dozens of terrorist events.”
  • From Barack Obama to Karl Rove, the ruling class is in unison: The NSA’s collection of data on virtually all Americans is essential to preventing you from “being blown to smithereens on your morning commute”
  • Another, PRISM, gives access to all records of email, chat, photos, videos and file transfers from the servers of leading US internet companies.
  • Here are the facts.
  • These programs stand between Americans and terrorists. Worries that they will be misused are misplaced or downright kooky.
  • Project Constant Informant, which tracks essentially all American phone calls, allows matching the account holder’s identity with each call’s precise location in time and place.
  • anyone who has followed telecommunication technology and intelligence during the past three decades can only scoff at the claim that universal collection of telephone externals and access to internet traffic can thwart serious criminals or terrorists.
  • In fact, the expansion of the US government’s capacity to intrude on innocent communications happened just as technology enabled competent persons who intend to hide their communications to do so without fail.
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