Dakota Beacon

The January 19, 2016 issue of The Week carried a story titled “How an Obscure Adviser to Pat Buchanan Predicted the Wild Trump Campaign in 1996” written by Michael Brendan Doughtery. Doughtery opened with a citation (not an actual quote) credited to Samuel Francis (Buchanan’s adviser) in the 1996 issue of Chronicles.

“[S]ooner or later, as the globalist elites seek to drag the country into conflicts and global commitments, preside over the economic pastoralization of the United States, manage the delegitimization of our own culture, and the dispossession of our own people and disregard or diminish our national interests and national sovereignty a nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes, the better….”

That was the gist of the advice Francis gave Buchanan in his essay “From Household to Nation.” The issue here is not Donald Trump. The issue is the transformation of Middle America and its discontent with its political and bureaucratic overseers, the Ruling Class.

The Ruling Class lives inside the beltway. The Ruling Class lives in its own world centered inside the Interstate “beltway” which circles Washington, DC. They look out upon, and down upon, everyone else outside the beltway.

As early as 1996 Francis points out that political players should not be described as conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat, because the Ruling Class is made up of politicians and bureaucrats from all parties and all ideologies. This is crucial to understanding the November 2016 elections.

The Ruling Class is its own club and a person cannot merely aspire to join. You cannot enter on merit. You cannot perform and do the best you can to qualify. In good measure it has to do with lineage, how and where you were educated, family ties. It is very exclusive and exists mainly to preserve itself by making certain it is not infiltrated or modified. This is a new way of explaining those elected and those governed.

It is possible to be a major figure like Justice Clarence Thomas or President Ronald Reagan and not be taken seriously by the Ruling Class. It is very much like a fraternity and requires social harmony, i.e., being with the right people and giving the required signs that one is on the right side. Once a person shows that he shares the manners, the tastes, the interests of the class and gives lip service to its ideals and accommodates the interests of its senior members, a person can move around the institution.

The Ruling Class is profoundly out of touch with Middle America. They do not grasp the anger throughout the American people. Consequently, they do not understand a person like Donald Trump. The Ruling Class is fundamentally disengaged from the nation and the culture it dominates. The ruling elite are the real enemy of Middle America.

To quote Francis, “Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elite. That exploitation works on several fronts – economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”

Francis continues, “The significant polarization within American society is between the elites, increasingly unified as a ruling class that relies on the national state as its principle instrument of power, and Middle America itself, which lacks the technocratic and managerial skills that yield control of the machinery of power. Other polarities and conflicts within American society – between religious and secular, white and black, national and global, worker and management – are beginning to fit into this larger polarity of Middle American and Ruling Class.”

In conclusion, Francis states, “The economic interests as well as the cultural habits and ideologies of the Ruling Class drive it toward globalization – the managed destruction of the nation, its sovereignty, its culture, and its people – while those of Middle Americans drive them toward support for and reinforcement of the nation and its organic way of life.”

Interestingly, this view proposed by Francis goes hand-in-glove with Angelo M. Codevilla’s view expressed in his book The Ruling Class. Codevilla concludes thusly, “In sum, our ruling class does not like the rest of America. Most of all does it dislike that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world and like it that way. For our ruling class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.”

Well said by both writers. They give voice to many people.

Dennis M. Patrick can be contacted at P. O. Box 337, Stanley, ND 58784 or (JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address).