Class Traitor

Question: Does the Constitution impose any limits on the federal government? 

In 2009, the Progressives' answer to this question was, and I quote House Speaker Nancy Pelosi: "Are you serious?" But, beginning approximately January 20, 2017, we began learning of a seemingly endless list of limitations on the federal government. And specifically, limitations on one branch of the federal government. And even more specifically, limitations on one person at the head of one branch of government. That person, of course, is the President. The President, we are now told – at least any President who was sworn into office on January 20, 2017 – must be totally transparent about how he and his family earned their personal wealth. The President also, we are now told, must not repeal the Executive Orders of any past President named Obama. The President, further, if his skin is not the correct hue, must not nominate a candidate to fill an empty Supreme Court seat in an election year. Further examples abound.

Perhaps you will notice that none of these limitations on the presidency derive from the Constitution. No, our progressives still are not much interested in constitutional limits. The problem with constitutional limits, or any kind of legal limits, really, is that they have to be written down somewhere. In public. Where people might read them, and bother our rulers about them. Limits can be a useful thing. But, once the progressives restore themselves to the ruling saddle, they become so many stinging flies. 

Surely, progressives believe that any president would operate within certain norms. But whatever these norms are, they are not legal norms. Constitutional limits are no good. Legal limits are no good. The needful thing is to have limits that are not written down anywhere. While progressives belong to a political party that trades power every election with a different political party, there are some people, in both parties, who are members of a different club – an invisible club – who gets to set those norms. Members of the invisible club can accuse each other of violating the norms. But not the American public. 

Before Trump, the country was run by the unwritten rules of a secret club. Legal rules are for rubes. And the more legal rules there are, the more effective the distraction.

When that invisible club lost to Trump in 2016, it was a much more devastating loss than merely losing to the other side: there were not supposed to be any contenders for the power of setting the norms of governance.

 

Hillary Clinton did not say so until 2016, but many Americans had known it for a long time: the ruling class of globalists in this country thinks the rest of us are deplorable. How could they not? When the globalists set their sights on their prize, they regarded the natives – we, the Americans – as an insolent band to be swept aside. As Thomas Becket, in the 1964 film named for him, said to Henry II of the Norman conquest of his own Saxon kinfolk, "One always hates what one wrongs": 

When you Normans invaded England,
you seized our Saxon land,
burned our Saxon homes,
raped our Saxon sisters.
Naturally, you hate Saxons.

The lower third of the American population has been brutalized in other ways, arguably more lasting and devastating. Illiteracy, illegitimacy and single parenthood, hooliganism, violence, lawlessness, drug taking, welfare dependency, general hopelessness, and the atomization of the family, are problems that have been, in equal measures, well-documented, serious – and neglected by policymakers. The same policymakers who have enriched and empowered the globalists over the same period.

 

So of course the globalists and their political enablers hate us regular Americans. One always hates whom one wrongs.

What has changed in the Trump era is simply that progressives are finally admitting it to themselves: Yes, once Trumpism is over, we shall rule you. Yes, we shall rule you because we, obviously, know what is best for you. But more to the point: We shall rule you because we hate you. 

 

Donald Trump: Class Traitor

 

Donald Trump was no barbarian. He was a New Yorker. Successful. Wealthy. Well-connected. An elite. 

 

True, Trump was uncouth. He pushed the legal limits in his business dealings. He engaged in infidelity. The WASP culture was lost on Trump. 

But the way of the WASP had been lost or forgotten long before Trump. The media had covered up infidelities and indiscretions of other post-World War Two presidents, with the notable exception of Nixon, by which time the worm had turned. Had journalists held back because of high-mindedness – a reverence for norms, an antipathy toward the gauche?

 

Yes, but not because journalists were high-minded, but because the American public was. The American bourgeoisie was never either high-class or high-brow, but they were middle-class and middle-brow, or nearly enough. Journalists and politicians were the ones who lowered the brow. It was these, our supposed high-brow elites, who took taxes from the middle-brow bourgeois to epater them with Mapplethorpe's piss. It is the middle-brow who chokes on the gauche, and pays for the discourtesy. Elite globalists want a world with other elite globalists, and below them only a mute hand-to-mouth serf class. They do not need a middle-brow middle-class nipping at their heels. Recall how unwelcome was Tom Wolf's cluing in the middle-brow to the Bernsteins' radical chic munching Roquefort cheese morsels with vinyl-clad Black Panthers? 

 

Long before Trump, Flavius Rufinus, born in Gaul, became minister of the Eastern Roman emperor in the fourth century. A Goth, Rufinus was derided by enemies for transgressing ruling norms. Giving voice to the hatred of Rufinus's enemies, the poet Claudian wrote:

Have you seen his yellow-stained pelts?
How he slings barbarous fur round
his shoulders, sporting harnesses,
quivers, and arrows--the kind that
make an inhuman screech? Clothes make
the man, but this man's make a beast. 

It's disgraceful that he signs our 

laws while sitting in the curule chair, 

ruining our Roman way of life

with his poor taste in Gothic "style."

 

Our ruling norms had sunk well before Trump. When Matt Drudge put copies of the Monica Lewinsky story in the hands of every middle-brow American, they were aghast to learn how low their rulers' brow had sunk. While the Kardashians are the butt of every joke about modern American low-brow revelry, even elites today share in their culture. Fashion in clothes and music, even among the elite, is set by the class inhabited by the Kardashians. Theodore Dalrymple observed that when a member of the British royal family had her navel pierced, no one was in the least surprised. "Never before," Dalrymple noted, "has there been so much downward cultural aspiration." 

Ever since Drudge, Americans realized that all these people were fakers. That they were merely climbing from their low morals to spit on us from great heights. 

Trump flips the profile of the modern virtucrat: he may have no political convictions but he does have political courage. The old WASP presidents like FDR were a little above us. The modern globalist virtucrat lets us know we're a good sight beneath him. Trump is something new. We impugn his moral character, but he doesn't impugn ours. Amidst the disappointments of our ruling class, this, at least, is a welcome change. 

 

While it lasts.