St. Obama the Narcissist and His Apostles

Posters were being hawked around D.C. yesterday during the inaugural festivities depicting Obama as the Second Coming of Christ. Good luck meeting those expectations! In any event, it does give some insight into the religious-like faith that some people have in Obama and, from some of the things the President himself (Himself?) has said, he too may believe in his God-like powers. For insight into that mindset, a recent interview with Angelo Codevilla, a professor at Claremont and author of The Ruling Class, sheds some light. finance.townhall.com/columnists/jerrybowyer/2013/01/22/is-president-obama-liberalisms-gorbachev-n1494253

The Ruling Class uses an analytical framework that divides the U.S. into the Ruling Class and the Country Class, as if you were studying Roman or European history, and proceeds to study the norms held by each. The closer the norms of the two classes are, the more stable and dynamic the nation. Unfortunately,  Codevilla finds a huge gap between the two which is growing at a rapid clip. 

Some of the observations that Codevilla makes not only help with understanding what is going on in this country, but where we are likely to head in the long term:

•  The Ruling Class of America is not up to the challenge of leading America in the world, partly because it has engaged for several generations now in a process of reverse merit selection.
  

• Our ruling class has practiced negative selection for several generations now. I point you to a very, very interesting piece of research by a man called Ron Unz.

• Ron Unz, a wealthy entrepreneur, has just conducted interesting research on the admissions policies of America’s elite universities and has found that there is an iron quota against Asians in these universities: a limit of roughly 16 percent in these universities, even though the proportion of Asians relative to other ethnic groups among high achievers in the country has risen…they account for something like 40 percent of high achievers in the national merit scholar competition, national math and science competitions, etc.

• What you’ve got here is a ruling class in these universities which has perpetuated itself and has become more like itself, and has excluded alien elements. The element most excluded happens to be also the most numerous, which is to say ‘white non-Jewish Americans,’ and hence the overwhelming majority of high achievers. Yet the percentage of white non-Jewish admittees has continued to drop; there is especially a virtual absence of Christians among these admittees. The point being that this ruling class, which is increasingly styling itself as meritocratic, is anything but meritocratic and has renewed itself by cooption.

• This has nothing to do with fairness; this is not a moral argument I’m making at all…I’m saying that the people running this country are ever less competent to do their job. They are ever less able to do whatever the hell they do.

• They are ever more confident because they live in a bubble. They congratulate themselves. They give prizes to one another; they tell each other how smart they are.

• Having been a college professor for many years I saw students become ever more confident of their own intelligence and their own preparation while they were becoming less able to do the most elementary things.

• They are becoming more insular, less bright and less demanding of themselves.

• That’s what happens so often to ruling classes: they protect themselves against their competitors. Their greatest interest is in perpetuating their own cushy positions.

What Codevilla describes in a nutshell is an unstable nation that is becoming more so. Another way of saying it is that there are pre-revolutionary conditions arising in this country. If you study history, this occurs when a Ruling Class tries to consolidate its power and goes too far, causing a huge reaction by the Country Class that sweeps them out of power. Historically this has not usually been via the ballot box. The genius of America has been that its leaders and the people have always been close enough in their view of how things ought to be done that political transition has been accomplished peacefully. For a variety of reasons, that no longer appears to be true. The needle on the dial for the continuation of our peaceful political process of the last 237 years must be moved to "guarded."