The Western ruling class is unraveling: elites panic, institutions crumble, and the gap between rulers and the ruled has never been clearer.
If you take a close look at some of the major news stories that have captured our collective attention over the last few weeks, you may notice a peculiar pattern.
We’ll start in Minneapolis, with the story that has dominated the headlines for weeks. Although Tom Homan, President Trump’s “border czar,” has deftly negotiated a de-escalation of tensions in the nation’s most aggressive, bizarre, and aggressively bizarre sanctuary city, protests there continue. More to the point, state and local politicians continue to behave as if federal laws are irrelevant and as if they have no responsibility whatsoever to abide by rules that they have decided are unpleasant.
From there, we move to the story that has dominated headlines—off and on—for years. The Justice Department recently released a new trove of documents from the “Epstein Files,” and, to no one’s surprise, the most powerful people in Washington state, Washington DC, London, Cambridge (Massachusetts), and all points in between have been revealed—once again—to be among the most loathsome creatures God ever made. As it turns out, we should be grateful that the worst thing Bill Gates ever gave us was “Clippy” or Windows Vista, given what he, apparently, gave his now-ex-wife.
And speaking of Washington, this past week, The Washington Post, once famous for enabling a jilted bureaucrat to take down an American president, laid off one-third of its staff and fully shuttered its sports section. Peggy Noonan, the onetime speechwriter for presidents who were repeatedly and viciously maligned by the Post, nevertheless lamented the paper’s collapse and lectured the rest of us that we too should mourn the loss of this institution that openly and unabashedly loathed us: “The capital of the most powerful nation on earth appears to be without a vital, fully functioning newspaper to cover it. That isn’t the occasion of jokes, it’s a disaster.” Maybe Noonan is right. Maybe the Post’s collapse isn’t the occasion of jokes. If that’s the case, however, maybe someone should tell the paper’s “journalists,” who seem bound and determined to prove her wrong at every possible opportunity.
Meanwhile, in Chicago, the American Medical Association decided, after much soul-searching, that maybe it’s not a great idea for minor children to lop off various parts of their bodies in vain hope of changing their gender. Less than five years ago, the AMA could hardly control its fury at state legislators who took this same position (that subjecting minors to transgender surgery was a grievous mistake) and railed against “the governmental intrusion into the practice of medicine that is detrimental to the health of transgender and gender-diverse children….” Times change, however, and sometimes science turns out not to be as settled as the righteous scolds would have us believe.
Finally, across the pond, in Europe, the censors have been resurgent of late. Last week, for example, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez told the World Government Summit in Dubai that he and his government intend to hold the executives of social media companies liable for the naughty, untrue, or just inconvenient things their users might say on their platforms. Sánchez laid out a five-point plan for fixing the “failed state” of social media and imposing law and order on that lawless ecosystem. Like the rest of Europe’s establishment leaders—from Germany to France to the UK—the Spanish government sees the “unregulated” speech found on social media to be a threat to its ability to govern “effectively.” By week’s end, Sira Rego, the Spanish Minister of Youth and Children, was calling for a flat-out ban on Twitter/X—and not just for kids.
By now, you may be wondering: what, exactly, is peculiar about all these stories? What makes them especially interesting? As I said, you have to look closely. You have to look beyond the superficial, beyond the “who, what, where, when, and why” of journalistic lore. If you do that, if you read them with an eye toward social and cultural forces driving the broader narrative, rather than the specific characters and storylines in each narrow tale, you will notice that they are all, in some very real and relevant ways, the very same story. They all describe, in some form or another, at various stages in the process, the cracking up of the Western ruling class: the self-destruction, the exposure, and the inevitable freakout of the gatekeepers of our society, the men and women who have, for the last century, deigned to rule us and to subject us to their every whim—for our own good, of course.
As I am fond of noting, fifteen years ago, the brilliant and incomparable Angelo Codevilla wrote what came to be seen as the cri de coeur of American neo-populists, those whom he called “the country class.” Since the end of the American Civil War (more or less), the American ruling class has been consolidating its power, setting itself apart from those it rules in taste, manners, and interests, and depriving its “subjects” of the liberty to which they are entitled by their creator. Over the past quarter-century or so, however, the ruling class has overplayed its proverbial hand and has prompted a response, a near-revolution by the country class, which resents the arrogance and insolence of its so-called “betters.” Slowly but surely, both the United States and Western compatriots have been moving toward some sort of revolutionary denouement, as Codevilla noted:
The ruling class wears on its sleeve the view that the rest of Americans are racist, greedy, and above all, stupid. The country class is ever more convinced that our rulers are corrupt, malevolent, and inept. The rulers want the ruled to shut up and obey. The ruled want self-governance. The clash between the two is about which side’s vision of itself and of the other is right and which is wrong. Because each side—especially the ruling class—embodies its views on the issues, concessions by one side to another on any issue tend to discredit that side’s view of itself. One side or the other will prevail. The clash is as sure and momentous as its outcome is unpredictable…
All of the stories above—be they about the recklessness and fecklessness of the neo-Confederates in Minnesota, the neo-totalitarians in Europe, or the pedophile and pedophile-adjacent “elites” in the United States and England—suggest that this denouement is approaching, that the ruling class is, at long last, facing judgment, and is, as a result, panicking. No one “needs” the gatekeepers at The Washington Post any longer to tell us what is and is not “news.” No one believes—as Tim Walz and Pedro Sánchez insist—that demanding national borders is akin to the Holocaust. No one believes that it is sound practice to castrate teenagers or that the doctors who advocated for castration will be forgiven and forgotten. No one believes that Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers were mere innocent bystanders. No one believes any of what the ruling class insists, and no one believes that they should any longer have the power to manipulate institutions and deny reality to maintain their glorified status.
Western elites speak nobly about “public service,” but they possess almost no public spirit. Plato famously envisioned a republican ruling class that loved knowledge and chose to live the simple life. By contrast, members of the Western ruling classes today revel in intellectual fads, the advocacy of moral radicalism, and the gratification of all their material desires. They are, in many ways, the perfect opposite of the ruling class Plato imagined for his Kallipolis.
Of course, as Codevilla noted, our constitutional “republic” is long dead and gone. Our ruling class saw to that. What comes next, however—what comes after the denouement—is still very much in doubt.
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