Daily Verse | Obadiah 15
“The day of the Lord is near
for all nations.
As you have done, it will be done to you;
your deeds will return upon your own head.”
Welcome to Wednesday, friends. Now that striped pants are back in fashion, I’ll have to fight my dog to get mine back.
I hadn’t read much of Angelo Codevilla’s work, but did recognize his name when it was announced that he’d died at age 78 after being hit by a car a couple of days ago. Several opinion writers and bloggers shared their sadness over his death and their estimate of him as a ‘great and good’ man. Many of them also linked to influential articles that he’d written, proclaiming that,
It is hard to overstate the importance and brilliance of Angelo. If you only knew him by his many books and columns (including this 2015 piece he wrote for Power Line on Trump’s significance and prospects), it would be sufficient to establish his greatness. But he was also at the storm center of key aspects of American intelligence and foreign policy going back more than 40 years.
The sense of significant loss piqued my curiosity, and I clicked through several of his articles. One of them, “Clarity in Trump’s Wake” struck such a chord with me, that I want to encourage you to read the entire thing. It’s a long treatise on what he says is now “a classic oligarchy” that rules America and how that oligarchy came to be.
The reason the article resonates with me so powerfully is that he shades with clarity the contours of our current predicament that we all know is there, but can’t precisely put our fingers on. Here is how he starts:
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the American republic’s system of equal justice. That much is clear.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive, identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist, adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from the people through their representatives. In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions.
In that self-referential sense, the United States of America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our predicament is its only virtue.
Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.” But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and empowered our burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities.
After explaining how the amalgamation of politics and corporations had slowly built the oligarchy, Codevilla explains the significance of Donald J. Trump.
By 2015, the right side of America’s challenge to the budding oligarchy was inevitable. Trump was not inevitable. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas) had begun posing a thorough challenge to the “stakeholders” most Americans disrespected. Candidate Trump was the more gripping showman. His popularity came from his willingness to disrespect them, loudly. Because the other 16 Republican candidates ran on different bases, none ever had a chance. Inevitably, victory in a field so crowded depended on when which minor candidate did or did not withdraw. There never was a head-to-head choice between Trump and Cruz.
Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being. Since Cruz’s candidacy represented the same threat, it almost certainly would have drawn no less intense self-righteous anger. Nasty narratives could have been made up about him out of whole cloth as easily as about Trump.
But Trump’s actual peculiarities made it possible for the oligarchy to give the impression that its campaign was about his person, his public flouting of conventional norms, rather than about the preservation of their own power and wealth. The principal consequence of the ruling class’ opposition to candidate Trump was to convince itself, and then its followers, that defeating him was so important that it legitimized, indeed dictated, setting aside all laws, and truth itself.
He then goes on to explain how the Peking Lung Pox gave the oligarchy the vehicle they needed to increase their power over the average citizen and eventually leveraged it into gaming the 2020 presidential election.
Only in a few one-party Democratic states was universal vote-by-mail established by law. Elsewhere, especially in the states sure to be battlegrounds in the presidential election, mail-in voting was introduced by various kinds of executive or judicial actions. Questions of right and wrong aside, the Constitution’s Article II section 1’s words—“Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct”—makes such actions unconstitutional on their face. Moreover, in these states—Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin—the counting of votes in the most populous counties is firmly in the hands of Democratic Party bosses with a well-documented history of fraud.
To no one’s surprise, the 2020 presidential election was decided by super-majorities for the Democratic candidate precisely from these counties in these states. Yes, Trump’s percentage of the vote fell in certain suburbs. But Trump received some 11 million more votes in 2020 than four years earlier, and nearly doubled the share of votes he received from blacks. The Democrats’ gain of some 15 million votes came exclusively from mail-in ballots, and their victory in the Electoral College came exclusively from the supermajorities piled up in these corrupt counties—the only places where Trump’s share of the black vote was cut by three-quarters. Did people there really think so differently?
And then this:
The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them. Neither Congress nor any state’s legislature legislated any of this. Rather, the several parts of America’s economic, cultural, and political establishment are waging this war, uncoordinated but well-nigh unanimously.
Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74 million fellow citizens might end. The people in the oligarchy’s corporate components seem to want only to adorn unchallenged power with a reputation for “wokeness.” For them, causing pain to their opponents is a pleasure incidental to enjoying power’s perquisites. The Biden family’s self-enrichment by renting access to influence is this oligarchy’s standard.
As I said, it’s a long but powerful article. I’ve given you a taste of small portions of it to whet your appetite for the whole thing. It confirms your worst fears about what has happened in America — we are no longer a constitutional republic but in name only. We are being ruled by a cabal of elites in business, science, the courts, social media, entertainment and, of course, politics.
According to Codevilla, the central hope of overthrowing the ruling elite is this:
Increasingly, conservative Americans live as if under occupation by a hostile power. Whoever would lead them should emulate Charles de Gaulle’s 1941 basic rule for la résistance: refrain from individual or spontaneous acts or expressions that produce only martyrs. But join with thousands in what amount to battles to defeat the enemy’s initiatives, weaken his grip on power, and prepare his defeat. Thus, an aspirant to the presidency in 2024, in the course of debunking the narrative by which the oligarchy seized so much power over America, might lead millions to violate restrictions placed on those who refuse to wear masks. Or, as he pursues legislative and judicial measures to abolish the compulsory racial and gender sensitivity training sessions to which public and private employees are subjected, he might organize employees in a given sector unanimously to stay away from them in protest. They can’t all be fired or held back.
My thought: we must try.
