Angelo Codevilla (1943–2021)

This book nails it. The problem in Washington isn't a Democrat problem or Republican problem, it is a Ruling Class problem. The Ruling Class, as the author so ably defines them, are detached from the lives of the average American, the Country Class. They rule from on high.

"The Ruling Class is keener to reform the American peoples' family and spiritual lives than their economic and civic ones."

The baker forced to bake cakes for a wedding, anyone?

As government burrows further and further into show more the lives of the people it will awaken the Country Class, we can see this happening in American right now. People are tired of being told how to live. But, as Codevilla writes, "Does the Country Class really want to rule itself, or is it just whining for milder taskmasters?" We've seen this before, from the Declaration of Independence, "...all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed." Do we have the courage, as the Founders did?

"The County Class' greatest difficulty will be to enable a revolution to take place without imposing it."

Are we up to the task? show less

"The Ruling Class" presciently discusses (in 2010) the very circumstances which now prevail in the USA. Mr. Codevilla is blessed with extraordinary insight and his perception of American society is spot on. He divides the country into the Ruling Class and the Country Class (you and me) and he explores and analyzes the characteristics of both and the reasons for tension between the two.

The Ruling Class is Bill Maher and HIllary Clinton and Chuck Schumer and Meryl Streep and Al Sharpton and show more Lena Dunahm and Rolling Stone Magazine and the New York Times and the Washington Post and Hollywood and all of commercial television and radio and newspapers and magazines and the National Endowment for the Arts and the Public Broadcasting Corporation and Janet Yellen and Stanley Fischer and Robert Reich and the Anti-Defamation League and the SPLC and B'nai B'rith and others of their ilk. Their base belief is that they are the best and the brightest and that anyone who opposes them, or any of their ideas, is retrograde, racist, and dysfunctional unless appropriately constrained. Hussein Obama sneered that the people of Pennsylvania clung to "God and guns". (Oh, the horror.)

They unabashedly believe that they are socially and intellectually superior to the vulgar herd (you and me) and they no more believe that a Christian might be their intellectual and moral equal than white slave owners could think the same of Negroes. The Ruling Class thinks it exclusively owns modern science's secrets. Its answer to any problem is to increase government power.

The Ruling Class believes it can transcend the Constitution while pretending allegiance to it. Their primary enemy is the Family. Parents are not allowed to object to what their children are taught, but the government may object to how parents raise their children. The Ruling Classes' principal article of faith, its claim to the right to decide for others, is precisely that it knows things scientifically, and operates by standards beyond the comprehension of others. They assume moral authority as priests of what they claim are ultimate truths. Ordinary people pervert reason with ideology, religion, or interest, science is "science" only in the right hands.

The whole problem of the legal system is that our laws are primarily grants of discretion and all you need to know about them is who they empower. By making economic rules dependent upon discretion the Ruling Class teaches us that prosperity is to be bought with the coin of political support.

The power to decide when words mean what they say and when they do not is the power to do so whenever one wants and for whatever purpose. But, if a Constitution is to have any meaning at all it has to be some kind of restraint on the government. When asked what in the Constitution allowed her to force citizens to purchase health insurance Nancy Pelosi answered: "Are you kidding. Are you kidding?"

Discretion kills the importance of the law. They can tell us what the law is today, but they cannot tell us what the law will be tomorrow.

Their minions are the "gimme free stuff from da govment" people like the teacher's unions and all government employee unions and the entities that run professional organizations, like the AMA and the ABA, but not the individual members of those organizations. The Ruling Class believes that its opinions are science and that anyone who opposes their scientific positions is stupid, crude, religious, and a gun-toting racist. the Ruling Class worships itself and its pathological altruism. Enemies of the Ruling Class, to be harassed, bullied, and destroyed, are God, religion, fathers, nuclear families, parental authority,

In between the Ruling Class and their minions is the rest of us - the Country Class - the poor slobs who remit (this year) 3 trillion (and counting) in taxes - and who struggle forward working, feeding our families, and trying to be moral and decent while being harried and harassed by swarms of bureaucrats who infect every square millimeter of our lives - what we eat, what we screw into the lamp, what we put into the gas tank, how we discipline our kids, whether we can build a porch on our house, whether we can be licensed as a dentist, and so on and on and on. Obama Care was the Ruling Classes' ultimate boondoggle as it taxed citizens to pay for medical care and it forced citizens to purchase health insurance.

Angelo M. Codevilla is brilliant. Read this book . (Now, damnit.) show less

More of a popular summary of events than an analysis. Nothing new for anyone who reads non-MSM media or non-academia publications. Good summary of the current disastrous state of national and international affairs.
Would have been nice to read his pre-Obama edition to see how much he had to change, if any. of the theory.

Garbage. If you believe this book, everything that has been done in foreign policy for the last 50 years has been wrong.