Allow me to test some ideas by means of a kind of thought experiment.

Image that I was to sit down with a group of Chinese Communist leaders.  And imagine that I was to ask them—off the record—whether it was a good policy or not for the United States to undertake massive social spending in the midst of a deep recession.  Imagine further that I was to ask these socialists whether accumulating debt for “healthcare reform,” and undertaking trillion dollar deficits would harm America productivity. 

What do you imagine a boardroom full of Red Chinese Economic Wonks would answer? 

I believe they would respond by saying something like this:  America’s exorbitant social spending, especially in the midst of a deep recession unquestionably endangers the world economy and especially the Chinese investment in American treasury instruments. This spendthrift policy is so dangerous it threatens to destroy the value of America’s currency.   

Of course, this is not just a fanciful invention of a thought experiment.  In fact, this is the very message of concern that is coming from Communist China.  Apparently, the Chinese Communists have become smarter Capitalists than the new and improved “progressive” America of Barack Obama.

So what does it mean when a nation that has long shown the world the wonders of free-enterprise has moved so far toward economic experimentation that even Chinese Communists doubt the wisdom of America’s “progressive” left? 

I do not mean this as a flippant throwaway rhetorical question.

Allow me to offer a different perspective on this phenomenon, something which I hope will result in a much needed paradigm shift away from the standard model of political discourse which presently prevails in the conservative public square.

We are told that all the forces of “leftism” in America are presently arrayed to seize the golden moment of their political ascendency.  Swiftly are they hog tying the America economy and siphoning off as much wealth as possible in re-distributive payoffs to their various constituents. 

The voices of opposition, which once were called Republican, (but I restrain myself from using such meaningless expressions), voices like Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Michael Savage and Mark Levin declare emphatically that this constitutes a radical swing to the left, a monstrous power grab by the Bolsheviki to seize control of the engines of production and distribute American wealth as a grand socialist scheme of social engineering.

Isn’t this the common perspective of the political right?

The problem is that while these indictments describe what is going on, they do not explain.  Why would Communists and European Socialists view with skepticism the policies of Obama and the American Progressive Left, as they are euphemistically called, if their ideas were truly socialist?  The last socialist experiment in America under FDR, for all its foolish inefficiency and injustice, resulted in the electrification of rural America and the building a network of dams that were the envy of the world.  One of them was the Grand Cooley Dam-one of the great electricity producing machines in the world.  Many of the greatest public works in our history were products of big government.  Despite its wrongheadedness, New Deal socialism could proudly point to accomplishments that indisputably enriched and improved our country.  On the other hand, what policies advocated by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid aim at bettering our lives or signal great economic improvement in any real “progressive” sense?

Allow me to offer another, perhaps more sobering, assessment of what is really going on, one that I believe explains more than the rather pedestrian analysis that is common among talk show hosts and Fox News personalities.  

I really do not think Nancy Pelosi or Barack Obama is a socialist in any meaningful sense.  I do not think they are coherent enough to have a comprehensive if flawed view of man and the state.  I do not think Harry Reid is a socialist either for the same reasons.  What I think America is witnessing is something much more ordinary in the life cycle of declining states than anything as romantically revolutionary as a social or Marxist revolution.  What we are witnessing is the formation of a political cleptocracy.  Cleptocracy is and has always been, since time immemorial, the principle enemy of economic and political society.  International socialism is a relatively new phenomenon in history—and while it shares some striking resemblances, socialism and ruling class cleptocracy are not identical.  Cleptocracy is as old as the world.

This “revolution” is nothing more ideological than that which motivated Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, or Idi Amin, or Hosni Mubarak, or Anastasio Somoza or even Pablo Escobar.  All this is to say, that there is no ideological underpinning to what we are witnessing.  Rather, what we are watching before our very eyes is something vastly simpler and more obvious and it is not a conspiracy of socialist ideologues.  We are watching our nation becoming a banana republic, not a Soviet styled communist state.

Allow me, at the risk of being didactic, to begin with certain assumptions that are presently lost on our culture. 

The conservative mind in this most recent chapter of the culture war has fallen into the pathetic dialectical trap of arguing that the first and greatest enemy of the American experiment is socialism.  I am no friend of socialism.  I despise the notion that man is but a piece of a collective.  Nevertheless, the presumptions of this school of thinking have evolved out of the Cold War necessity of vigilance.  It declares that leftism is the greatest natural enemy of our way of life—that the enemies of our republic are primarily Saul Alinsky leftists or European style socialists or even Trotskyite communists.

Yet if you were to ask candidly those same Chinese Communists, in my thought experiment, whether or not this present course of America economic profligacy were good for us or for them, a committee of high Level Chinese Communists would probably uniformly tell us that we are behaving irrationally and self-destructively.  How can the Obama revolution be communists when the communists themselves think we are behaving with some kind of death wish?

Allow me to offer a different paradigm than the shrill champions of anti-communism.

You see the first and greatest enemy of self-government is, and always will be ARISTOCRACY, which is to say, elitism and rule by a privileged class— not, socialism.

·         The American Revolution was not fought to overcome Russian style communism; it was fought against the prerogatives of a king who felt entitled to rule other men without consent.

·         The War of 1812 was not fought against socialism; it was fought against the imperious high handedness of royal policies that disregarded the rights of men.

·         The Civil War, the greatest conflict in our history, was not fought against European style leftism; it was fought against a ruling class in our own country who presumed to order the lives of men without their consent.

·         The First War World and the Second World War were not fought against Communists; they were fought against rulers who presumed that their countries were personal estates.  So was the War in Panama, the War in Iraq and the War in Afghanistan.  So was the first war we ever fought as an independent country: the war against the Barbary Pirates.

Because we are using the language of the Cold War, we are unable to see what is plainly before our eyes.  What America is witnessing, is the war of the Aristoi on the bourgeoisie, the war of royalty against the power of those who would and can govern themselves without the prerogatives of a ruling class.  

Enlisted into this modern royal army against the middle class is first, the age-old ally of aristocracy—the university trained bureaucrat.  Universities were created and patronized in Medieval Ages primarily as institutions for training up men to work in the administration and counting houses of kings.  That is what the great Universities in America have become, training grounds for the apologists of a new aristocracy, those who take seriously the “rights and privileges” of their special training to manage and order society better than ordinary “untrained” people themselves.

The second natural ally of a ruling class is hard for the America mind to fathom.  Nevertheless, there has always been a natural relationship between the underclass mentality and the ascendency of an aristocracy.

The underclass, notwithstanding popular myth, has been throughout history, the greatest champions of monarchy.  Why?  Because aristocrats profess to protect the poor man from the rich man.  That is what Jefferson Davis professed to do by resisting Northern industrialism.  We laugh now.  But he claimed to be protecting the wretched slave from the oppression of the industrialist and the overwhelming challenges of an overwhelming freedom  That was the claim of all the great monarchs of Europe.  Only men of special talent and class have wisdom and prudence enough to govern men who are too lazy and unwise to govern themselves.  That was the argument of Alexander Stephens and John C. Calhoun against the soulless urbanization of the North.

An aristocrat always claims to protect the poor and lowly from the exploitation of self-sufficient men.  Indeed, the very promise of a king, as we witness in the Book of Samuel is that a king and his men will fight our wars for us.  No longer must free men oblige themselves to fight for their own interests.  Royalty serves the instincts of sloth by providing a class of nobility that will do the business of governing in behalf of those who cede that power to them.  The Southern aristocracy used this argument to assure to the world that slavery was a positive good for those intrinsically unable to govern themselves.

At the risk of over-explaining, the French Revolution was not an uprising of the poor; it was an uprising of the middle class.  The poor loved the monarchy.  They wept at the death of their beloved royalty who had provided them with cakes and circuses.  Indeed, history shows that the poor serfs of France stood beneath the scaffolding in the Place de Concord to bathe their unwashed bodies in the blood of the monarchs they adored.  You see aristocracy, professes its moral right to rule because of a superior sensitivity to things, particularly benevolence for the common person.  And why?  First, because the poor generally work for and are organized by middle class people.  The middle class is the stratum of society that creates wealth and organizes labor.  This makes the middle class the apparent enemy of the poor.  This makes the middle class the common object of hatred of both those who feel they are morally superior and those below who resent their order and self-discipline of success.  Second, the common man believes he cannot protect himself—at least that is the opinion nurtured by the ruling class.  The king and his nobility rule in order to govern for the benefit of the weak and the poor.

The impulse of aristocracy is to operate with contempt for self-sufficiency.  Aristocracy by its nature needs to be needed.  It needs to be justified.  Despite the aphorism of the political right that limousine liberals are motivated by guilt, the better answer is more obvious.  The wealth of the left, accumulated primarily as a result of privilege, and university training, and not work, is justified by the noblesse oblige of being members of a ruling class that “cares” more deeply for the down trodden and the destitute than heartless businessmen. It is not guilt. It is the noble duty and obligation of a ruling class. Even where there are no destitute or downtrodden, the creation of such a class is necessary for the self-justification of a ruling class.  

For those who are naturally independent and self-sufficient, they have no need of kings.  People who earn and make money, design and create things do not need the king’s men to assist them.  The middle class, or what has been contemptuously referred to as Bourgeoisie, do not need the largess of monarchs or the vicarious excitement of royalty to fill up otherwise empty lives.  Free men are free because they distain the instinct to find meaning through the glitter and awe of a ruling class.  Freemen have identity outside and apart from men who claim to rule over them. The despondent, the undisciplined, the depressed, the drug addict, the mindless drone of TV dramas, must live through the energy and vicarious thrill of celebrities, TV stars, basketball heroes, and “Camelot”-like political celebrities, like Louis XIV, John F. Kennedy and now, Barack Obama.  These are men of style, charisma and je ne sais quoi,—or to rephrase it: the ruling class.

Noblesse oblige: it provided the games in the Coliseum of ancient Rome at public expense.  It explains why Obama worked so hard to get the Olympics into Chicago.  It explains the deep psychological need to lead and manager others.  It is the age-old formula of despots.  An aristocracy casts farthings from their royal coaches in return for the adoration of those who have little or no respect for themselves. 

The enemy of our country today is not socialism; rather it is the emergence of a definitive ruling elite.  But more tragically, it is the emergence of an indoctrinated class of men and women who view themselves as objects of charity rather than respect.  It is the slow decaying of the dignity of liberty and self-sufficiency.  Too many of us have been told too many times by elitist advancing their agenda— that we are disenfranchised-- and we believe it, because it caters to the worst qualities of self-pity.  Hard work and self-sufficiency takes character. Then behold! The champion of those wretched underlings arrives on horseback to share not the promise of equality, or the challenges of liberty, but an equal promise that allows men to live through the greatness of those who are above them. In short, we may work so that a better class of men and women can do great things in our behalf.  For this rising class of modern thralls, we are no longer the land of the free, or the home of the brave.  We just want to live through the majesty of those we set over ourselves for great tasks, and for the honor of receiving on occasion a deigning look and brass penny from the passing royal coach.