From Rush’s radio show on Tuesday (he mentioned the now-seminal, Alt-Right Bible Who Are We?: The Challenges to America’s National Identity by the late Samuel Huntington) to the Super Tuesday results (still being digested as I write this), I would have to say the ‘name of the day’ is Angelo Codevilla, whose 2010 book The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It is a contemporary update to ideas proposed by Alt-Right pioneer James Burnham in books such as Suicide of the West: An Essay on the Meaning and Destiny of Liberalism (1964) and The Managerial Class: What is Happening in the World (1972).
Among CNN’s hack pundits — the ‘conservative’ side all being RINOs — is the one exception to the rule: Jeffrey Lord, a Trump supporter whose political knowledge is impressive and who appears to ‘get’ it. Lord astutely referenced some of the figures and historical dynamics below.
From the Tea Party insurrection in ’09, to the midterms in 2010, to Eric Cantor’s primary defeat by a relative unknown, to the GOP Congressional sweep in 2014, there is an anti-Establishment trajectory here, but one that GOP, Inc resists and struggles to deal with.
Flashback to Max Weber, who arguably first delineated the contours of a modern ruling class. The idea of an increasingly ‘apolitical’ elite, itself increasingly detached and alienated from the values of the indigenous masses (the bulwark of their respective bases), was more fully analyzed by Burnham. (I’m not sure of this, but it may have been Burnham who coined the phrase ‘Death of the West’.)
In a 2013 VDARE article, one of the best political writers today, James Kirkpatrick, anticipated this thematic coalescence in “Fuel for the Furnace—Conservatism Inc. and Sam Francis”:
Francis frankly acknowledged his intellectual debt to his conservative predecessors, especially James Burnham of National Review. From Burnham, Francis took the concept of the “New Class”—the apparatchiks who actually run the managerial state. The “New Class” has an institutional hostility to traditional familial and patriotic loyalties, seeming them as a barrier to their totalitarian control of economics, culture, and government. Burnham`s used this analytical framework to study Cold War geopolitics. Francis applied it to something ultimately more important—the Death of the West.
The thought of Sam Francis can be summarized in three words—“who not what.” The New Class is pushing through a cultural, economic and governmental program that dispossesses the historic American nation. In theory, this should lead to a purely rationalistic and materialistic order where Americans become disposable cogs in the global economy. In practice, because race at the least “carries and parallels culture” if it doesn`t actually determine it, America as a meaningful national entity is being displaced and replaced by a distinctly alien order, gradually stripping white Americans of cultural, economic, and governmental power.
Whether the emerging non-white America will be in fact more amendable to technocratic rule, or whether short-sighted corporate elites are selling the rope that will be used to hang them, is a separate (and very interesting) question.
In Francis`s view, Americans who want to keep their country must be
willing to challenge and derail the ruling class that gains money and power from the mass immigration it has permitted. It is doubtful that working through either of the two major political parties today can accomplish that, and Americans who seek to preserve their nation from the destruction that immigration brings will have to start building new parties and constructing new coalitions. And to do so, they will have to think seriously about how to rid their country of the elites that are destroying it.”[America Extinguished: Mass Immigration and the Disintegration of American Culture, 2002]
Francis further developed his thesis to identify the key importance of race as a necessary (but not sufficient) basis for preserving historic American and its nation-state. Anti-white racism is the ideological justification for destroying it. As Francis put it in Race and the American Prospect :
“At a time when anti-white racial and ethnic groups define themselves in explicitly racial terms, only our own unity and identity as a race will be able to meet their challenge. If and when they challenge should triumph and those enemies come to kill us… as Robert Mugabe as threatened to do to whites in Zimbabwe, they will do so not because we are `Westerners` or `Americans` or `Christians` or `conservatives` or `liberals,` but because we are white.”
Burnham had it right when he called liberalism the “ideology of Western suicide.” But the genius of Sam Francis was that he fully developed what Burnham only hinted at.
In regards to all this, the aforementioned Codevilla is no slouch. From Amazon:
Angelo M. Codevilla is professor emeritus of international relations at Boston University. Educated at Rutgers, Notre Dame, and the Claremont graduate university, Codevilla served in the US Navy, the US Foreign Service, and on the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. He taught philosophy at Georgetown, and spent a decade at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He has written 10 previous books.
Rush Limbaugh (who wrote the introduction to Codevilla’s book) spent significant time on Tuesday discussing this book’s thesis, with his discussion intended to provide context to the Trump phenomenon.
Along these lines, J.R. Dunn writes:
This new system was outlined by Dr. Angelo Codevilla in his 2010 book, The Ruling Class. Codevilla saw clear signs of the formation of a ruling elite in the U.S., a convergence of interests among both “liberal” and “conservative” politicians, along with industrialists, academics, and members of the entertainment and media worlds. It has become expedient for these blocs to combine their efforts in order to protect and extend their own interests, even in defiance of the American political system and secular creed as it has always existed. Opposing this effort is the “country class,” the vast mass of Americans, essentially the middle class (to be American is, in a real sense, to be middle class), who have invested their lives in the traditional state of the country and expect to see it remain as it is. These past months present us with clear evidence that the Codevillian ruling class is beginning to take shape.
(A major influence of Codevilla’s thinking is James Burnham, particularly his The Managerial Revolution, which discovered basic similarities in the attitudes and procedures of communism, fascism, and New Deal liberalism. Burnham, a onetime Trotskyite who played a large role in the founding and development of the National Review, predicted a grim postwar world in which these ideologies converged and melded to rule what was left of the Western world. His thinking guided George Orwell in the writing of 1984.)
The stakes really are this high.
Where will all this settle in November?
Has the Alt-Right finally reached the threshold?
Stay tuned.
