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Modern Feudalism
Those who debate politics and current events have had increasing difficulty describing what they see. The terms we’ve used in the past (liberal vs conservative, Democrat vs Republican, and so on) seem to be less helpful these days. I have long thought that the real division in our country was more ‘rural vs urban’ rather than ‘Republican vs Democrat.’ But I’m starting to think that we have devolved from the egalitarian republic designed by our forefathers into something not unlike the European feudal systems which our forefathers were trying to escape.
Until recently, I have read arguments supporting this view of ‘elites vs everybody else’ with some skepticism, because I didn’t really understand what exactly that division was (I still don’t) and I didn’t consider being lectured to about global warming by a professor at the University of Nowhere as a phenomenon worth discussing. Who cares who those people are or what they think? But for some reason, Roger Stone’s recent arrest had a big impact on me. I think that was a significant event in our nation’s history. Either that or I’m just now catching on to what’s been happening for a long time.
I viewed his arrest as significant for a few reasons. Certainly not because Roger Stone is important (he’s not) and not because he is falsely accused (it appears that at least some of the charges against him have some merit.). He was released on bail a few hours later, so nothing interesting happened while he was in custody, either. This arrest wasn’t even a surprise for Mr. Stone. He had reportedly already agreed to come in to be booked, with his attorney present, whenever they called him. He knew what was coming, and had already agreed to cooperate.
What I found so significant (and terrifying) was that his arrest involved the cooperation and coordination of three very powerful forces: First, the FBI, who apparently made the decision to arrest Mr. Stone. Second, a SWAT team of some kind that made what should have been a routine arrest of a wealthy elderly man look like a military operation, including military uniforms and weapons. And then the third participant in this event is what I find most concerning: CNN. A military unit is told by our federal government to invade the home of an American citizen. CNN is offered a chance to participate. And they agree to participate in this coordinated attack? That borders on astonishing.
In the first Gulf war, reporters for “60 Minutes” famously refused to help the American military by telling them what they had seen, saying that their ethics as reporters forbade them from taking sides in any conflict. They portrayed themselves as simply neutral observers – cosmopolitan citizens of the world with no allegiances except to the truth. However, many people have viewed our news media as anti-American for years, often with very good cause. So the media claims to be neutral, and many others claim that they are anti-American. But no one in recent memory has claimed that our media are pro-American, actively aiding the efforts of the American government.
And now CNN is cooperating with the FBI and its military units. Why?
The simple answer is that elite career government bureaucrats and the media view Republicans as more evil, and more of a threat, than Muslim terrorists or foreign nations who are professed enemies of the United States. If the FBI had organized a military raid on the home of Hillary Clinton to take her and her email servers into custody in the middle of the night, I doubt that CNN would have agreed to cooperate. Of course, such a scenario is ridiculous. Which, of course, is my point.
Donald Trump is hard to like. He’s a man of many talents, but also of many flaws. I used to think that he was generating such hatred from the media and other components of the Democrat political machine partially because he had recently changed from Democrat to Republican, but also because they didn’t like him as a person any more than I did. But I’m starting to think that’s not right.
Trump is extremely wealthy. He’s a very powerful man, but he’s just not one of them. He’s not one of the elites. He looks on them with disdain, and he’s very vocal and crude about it. He doesn’t look like Mitt Romney. He doesn’t talk like Bill Clinton. He didn’t work his way up the political structure like Nancy Pelosi. He enjoys, and overindulges in, fast food. He puts ketchup on his steaks. He just walked in off the streets from Queens (not the upper east side of Manhattan) and took over – forcefully. Despite his wealth, he’s not an elite, and he must be removed like a cancer. No matter how damaging the cure is, the elites must do everything possible to rid themselves of this cancer. Imagine it from their point of view. It sort of makes sense.
It makes sense to Mueller and his supporters. It makes sense to the FBI. It makes sense to those who run the military extensions of federal agencies. It makes sense to Hillary Clinton. And, it apparently makes sense to CNN and our media.
The Republican party presents itself as representing the interests of the middle class. Small businessmen, factory workers, farmers, construction workers, etc. The Democrat party presents itself as representing the interests of the less fortunate. The homeless, illegal immigrants, various minority groups, etc. It seems odd that when those two parties combine to form a government, that what we end up with is a government that represents the interests of the elites, against all the groups that both parties supposedly represent. How does that happen?
What brought all this up is an article at “The Federalist” sent to me by @12handicap this morning. The author, Jesse Kelly, states that America has become so impossibly divided that it actually makes sense to divide the country into two parts. He even has a map in which he proposes new boundaries of these two new countries.
It’s typical, in times of peace and prosperity, for factions to argue about topics of less and less importance, and eventually for countries to be divided into smaller and smaller pieces to allow for more homogeneity and less internal conflict. And then, when times of war and crisis inevitably come along, it is just as typical for these formerly bickering neighbors to join together and form huge alliances, putting aside their internal conflicts to better deal with external threats. So I view a certain amount of this type of bickering to be expected during times of plenty, such as this.
But Mr. Kelly’s map got me thinking. If the true divisions in our society are the elites vs everyone else, where on earth would you redraw those boundaries?
The three organizations that cooperated in the raid on Mr. Stone’s home – FBI, SWAT team, and CNN – all three of those organizations recruit members from all over the country. “The elite” is such a vague term that I’m not really sure what it means. And I’m certainly not sure what it’s geographical boundaries would be.
Which means I’m not sure how this can be fixed.
The more entrenched “the elites” become in their position against the American people, the less likely it seems that we can return to the typical partisan arguments of the past. We may have already reached the point that Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt dreamed of – the point where elections don’t really matter all that much.
And if that’s the case, we can’t vote them out. And we can’t redraw boundaries, because this is not a geographical phenomenon. This train would appear to have no brakes.
You can understand why some feel that the “Just burn it all down” strategy is our only viable option at this point. Hillary Clinton’s role model, Saul Alinsky, promoted radical destruction of the status quo to lead to the inevitable revolution. As a conservative, such drastic actions make me uncomfortable. But cancer treatment can be much worse than uncomfortable sometimes.
So what do you think? Has American politics devolved into ‘elite vs everyone else’ as some have been suggesting for some time? If so, can this be fixed? Or is Mr. Kelly right – this just cannot end well, and we should start to think about how to carefully dismantle the United States? Not a happy thought.
I was having a great day – watching my kid play basketball on national TV, enjoying a beer, trying to decide what to snack on. And then @12handicap sends me a link. And now I’m in a crummy mood.
Thanks, @12handicap. Thanks a lot.
We even lost the dang basketball game…
Published in General
Not to repeat myself, but —
Politics is downhill from culture. (Andrew Breitbart)
Law enforcement is downhill from politics. (Jack Dunphy, heavily paraphrased)
And yes, the process is the punishment.
In other words, law enforcement is now enforcing the culture through extrajudicial means.
I don’t know what you call this except early despotism.
Well no link to a map was available that I can find on the Federalist story.
Two organizations would be more accurate. The FBI has their own SWAT team, no comma is necessary between FBI and SWAT Team.
Well, Neo. You could take the blue pill and go back to your beer and all will appear well. However, you can take the red pill and ……………
In 1980 I was in a legal battle with the National Labor Relations Board. One of my exculpatory wittinesses was a mentally challenge young man. The NLRB actually kidnaped him off the street and interrogated him for two hours in the back of a van. Ironically it was his testimony that cleared me. One of the agents said off the record that they believed him because he was too stupid to lie. He was terrified. They had guns and yelled a lot. So I guess these things aren’t all that new.
The elites hate Trump, because they hate us.
Jesse Kelly’s map is not right. It really is more about powerful, cosmopolitan cities against the rest–coastal vs. flyover. We are on the road to serfdom.
Some of Mueller’s senior people came from the FIB and knew about the fraudulent aspects of the FISA applications. So Mueller’s investigation is at least partially an obstruction of justice to hide or downplay the widespread illegal actions of the intelligence agencies in the 2016 election (and prior to that in spying on opponents of the Iran deal).
I have been recently thinking that those dystopian future movies like “Hunger Games” may be prophetic. Power and wealth are more and more concentrated in coastal (and a few other) urban locales. Traditional morality and religious folks seem to still hold a plurality in the flyover country of the Midwest, South, and Mountain West. It seems like this conflict will reach a climax some time in the future. I often wonder how it will play out for my children and (future) grandchildren in the years to come.
I sometimes wonder if it will take that long.
It seems to be happening more and more often, tough.
Law enforcement intimidation should be safe, legal, and rare.
We are a nation of about 350 million people. The elite and fellow travelers believe that we can be run like a small Scandinavian country of 5 to 10 million people. What they miss is the homogeneous nature of those small countries. If it works for 5 million, it should for 350 million the reasoning goes. The problem is that the US is not a homogeneous people; never was. As Charles Cooke noted, ( and also Alan Bloom in his “Closing of the American Mind”), becoming an American citizen is unique compared to, say becoming a French citizen. You do not become a Frenchman because you gain French citizenship, but you are an American when you become a citizen.
It doesn’t work for the small Scandinavian counties either. The Danes are cracking down on immigrants and refugees that do not assimilate, making manditory schooling in Denmark’s culture.
As with all totalitarian ideas, those of us that don’t get with the program need to be either re educated or eliminated. The left talks the opposite of what they do. They talk about diversity, but want homogeneousness, defined by them.
I find the Roger Stone SWAT tactics smacks of show trial lessons for others. You are reading these incidents correctly.
I’ve seen the elites in the US described as people who are professionals, usually educated in the Ivy League, with higher incomes, who tend to marry each other and whose children invariably end up going to an Ivy League school after a prestigious prep school. They are in the Washington DC orbit and all their friends are elites. They have no friends or significant contacts outside this bubble.
Naturally, they all tend to think alike. They have a monstrous sense of entitlement, and anything that threatens their prestige and privilege, like the election of someone who is not one of them as President, is met with unalloyed hostility.
These are the people who make up the deep state, which, I suspect, is not a formal, organized thing. These people are bound together by their shared attitudes and values, and their number one priority is maintaining their privilege for themselves and their offspring. They are, in Marxist terms, a class, the state class, and they have their class interests. If the state class becomes too powerful, Marxists have warned, then it will channel wealth and resources for their own benefit to the detriment of others. It will dominate and control decision making by the government rendering the will of the people irrelevant. How ironic that was Marxists, among others, who warned of this.
Contrary to later students of Marxism, Marx and Engels themselves tended to ignore the threat of an emerging state class. They preferred to think that communists would stay true to the ideal of communism and allow the state to wither away once capitalism and private property were vanquished. But that’s not what happened in the USSR at all. The state class grew up and became very powerful, taking all sorts of resources and wealth for themselves to the detriment of others. They were called the nomenklatura, and they greatly weakened the Soviet state and most likely contributed significantly to its downfall. It retrospect we can see that this is what will happen with any government that puts too much power into the hands of a bureaucracy. The emergence of a powerful state class that sucks the life blood out of a nation is inevitable when the central government takes control of too much.
The solution in the US is to strip the power from the federal government and allow it only the power it needs to provide essential, necessary services. There is so much — education, health, housing,environment, commerce, energy, more of law enforcement, and even much of welfare — that could be done at the state level. This would give rise to other problems, but at least we would avoid the threat of being ruled by an unaccountable, uncaring, and self-centered national oligarchy.
Oh I am not condoning it. However IMHO police in general are a better class of people than 50 years ago. Less bad apples. I think the selection process is better and more rigorous testing and training. The problem we are considering starts with the politicians.
I’m hearing this from a lot of corners, you’re not alone in being really disturbed about how that raid went down.
Very good description. One thing new to me in your description is that part about Marx warning against a self-interested state class. I hadn’t known that. I read a lot of histories written by leftnik, academic historians who seem to be familiar with Marxist ideas and their Marxist brethren. (I hardly ever read Marxists because they tend to be boring.) The historians I read often do excellent work, but when it comes to understanding their own positions in the deep state, or how the ruling class (deep state) of which they are a part is prone to self-interested corruption in looking out for its own, it’s as if the phenomenon never existed. So if Marx had warned about it, it’s even more surprising to me that they can be so oblivious to the problem.
Like I said in another thread, if something like that happened to me, I would dial 911, give my address and report a home invasion in progress. With luck, the Feds would not have notified local authorities, and some fun would ensue.
Afterwards I would maintain I had no idea that those out there claiming to be Federal agents actually were federal agents because why would any adult working for the Feds believe a no-knock, pre-dawn raid appropriate for arresting someone charged with a white-collar crime. The only assumption a reasonably prudent individual could reach was that it was someone pretending to be Federal agents.
I would also file whatever official oppression under color of law charges I could, For that matter, Roger Stone’s attorney should be filing an official oppression under color of law complaint.
Think about this – the FBI is a federal law enforcement agency which has lately suffered great harm to its reputation. Then think about how high an operation like this had to go for approval. And then realize that:
It’s hard to fathom how senior officials could not see how this looks to most Americans.
The only conclusion is that this sort of thinking is so embedded in the professional class of the federal government that senior officials can’t see the problem. Since the Lois Lerner fiasco it’s been obvious that there are senior non-appointed feds that no longer work for the people. I think we have probably passed the tipping point. Nothing but wholesale dismantling of federal agencies can fix this.
If someone with a gun breaks into my house, I will shoot them if I can.
If they keep doing this, some of them will go badly. Then you have an old man accused of some white collar crime that came up for political reasons – and now he’s guilty of murder.
What that SWAT team does is dangerous. To their victims, and to themselves.
In general, you wouldn’t take risks like that unless there is a very, very good reason to do so. I wonder what the FBI would say that reason is in this case?
Very good point. Hard to fathom, indeed. Have these people never been to America? Have they never met an American?
Actually, it was later Marxists (and non-Marxists) who warned about this with regard to Western governments. Marx and Engels discussed it (the Asiatic Mode of Production), but they didn’t think it applied to the West, apparently. Wishful thinking perhaps.
They did emphasize that once established this form of rule can sustain itself indefinitely.
“Elites vs everybody else” is not, IMO, the whole story.
There are a lot of people who are by no means “elite” who are fervent supporters of the who “progressive” worldview.
For example: starvation-wage adjunct professors, with very minimal chance of ever gaining tenure or any form of employment security.
For example: people with pretty-worthless degrees and big student loans, who are barely holding it together while working at some retail job or doing low-paid contracting.
The class divisions in America at present are, I think, as much horizontal as vertical.
That’s why it’s better to say “ruling class” than “elites.” Because every ruling class has dependents, groupies, and other hangers on who benefit from the system, even though they aren’t themselves rulers. The king’s valet is often going to take the king’s side in a conflict, because when the king is overthrown, his job goes, too.
The only way to do this is to grow comfortable in selecting nobodies and everymen.
Trump is an everyman, in spite of his wealth. He’s akin to the Beverly Hillbillies.
We also need to reject any extra-constitutional measure that becomes an undue burden on private businessmen when they pursue a government leadership role. Releasing tax documents was for career politicians. And we absolutely should proceed to make career politicking more grotesque than the everyman leader.
Even when they don’t benefit, and have little prospect of benefiting….like ruined aristocrats obsessed with their hereditary titles, because they don’t have much else.
I was just listening to Stone’s description of the events that transpired at his home. Seventeen armed vehicles? Two amphibious crafts in the canal near his home? Dragging his deaf wife out onto the street in her nightgown?
They’ve taken all of his money so he can’t even launch his own defense.
As he said in the interview, this is about a process nonviolent “crime.”
I’m floored.
I can’t believe my fellow Americans employed by these agencies participated in this attack on an American citizen.
I haven’t been this upset since Janet Reno kidnapped Elian Gonzales in the dead of night.
What has happened to my country.
I wondered about this too. I wonder if, during the briefing before this attack, if anyone in that room raised their hand and asked why on earth they were launching a military attack against a non-violent elderly man. A citizen of the United States.
I wonder if the organizers of this attack considered what would happen if the man or his wife got shot during the home invasion. Or if the elderly man had a gun, and if he happened to shoot one of his assailants? What happens then? Why exactly are we using lethal force, on someone who has agreed to come in with just a phone call?
Did anyone involved in this operation voice any of these concerns?
Maybe we’ll find out when the media do their investigatory reporting.
Good one! Don’t ever lose your sense of humor.
Who’s reading Ricochet? Saw this on the Hot Air homepage:
Way to go, Doctah!
How much money am I paying every year to promote Ricochet on Instapundit, Powerline, Hotair, etc? What am I doing?
Just kidding. I’m having fun. That’s what I’m doing.