A Rotten Elite

Guest Post by The Zman

Long before Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon, the Roman Republic stopped being a serious political entity. The system was still a well thought out and conceived system of governance, but the people operating could no longer be trusted to operate it. The Roman political class could no longer trust itself, because the political class was no longer dominated by serious men. The proof of that was not just its collapse, but the fact that men like Marius and Sulla existed and needed to exist in order for the system to stagger on.

The old line about people getting a government they deserve always comes up whenever someone points out the defects of democracy. It’s circular reasoning but an effective way of not addressing the real issue. That is, a people with a capable ruling elite can get along and be happy with just about any form of political system. A people who need the restraint of democracy or a strong constitution to tame their ruling classes is a people with a ruling class incapable of operation a constitutional government and abiding by its limits.

What this means is the people don’t get the government they deserve, so much as they get the government their ruling class deserves. Even that does not explain why it is that the ruling elites of a society can go rotten within a generation or two. The human capital of America in the 18th century was certainly different than that of today. The ruling elite it produced was very different from today. But, the population of America a century ago was not that much different than today. We’re a little browner, but materially much better off.

As the circus of the Kavanaugh confirmation unfolds, it is important to note that the people creating the circus are not the brown ones. Sure, they were the opening acts, but the main stage is populated with geezers produced by the ruling class of a half century ago. Diane Feinstein is the representative of a the generations that produced the cultural revolution of the 1960’s, not someone from the current age. In other words, the American ruling class started going sour a long time ago. We’re just getting to smell the rotting corpse of it.

You have to wonder if if events like this are what gives the remaining serious men the idea of toppling over the system. In the Roman Republic, the one place where merit counted was in the military. There were plenty of politics, of course, but ultimately a man was what he showed on the field of battle. Read accounts of Caesar in Gaul and the man was not just a great general. He was a lion on the field. While there were plenty of old men in the Roman senate who served their time in the legions, none were the equal of Cesar.

No matter how sophisticated a society, men judge other men by the simple calculation of whether they can take them in a fight. You have to think that the men running the military look over at their civilian leadership and wonder why they are taking orders from clowns like they see in the Senate. This must be especially true of the junior officers, most of whom by this point have done tours in Afghanistan and the Middle East. As patriots, they have to be looking at the civilian leadership with nothing but contempt.

That’s not to say we are about to have a military coup. It’s always possible, but the one place where civic nationalism is strongest is within the military. The one place where multicultural lunacy is strongest is within the senior leadership ranks of the services. The civilian leadership remains cautious enough to make sure the top brass of the military are just as feckless and craven as the civilian side. Even there though, the ingredients are in place for a young and ambitious officer to start thinking about a short cut to the top.

Putting the military coup aside, watching the Kavanaugh circus should be a reminder that America is one serious crisis away from collapse. The financial crisis of 2008 was so terrifying to the elites, because they sense the fragility of their position. The central bankers were able to contain it and limit the damage to the public, by pushing the costs off into the future. The US debt now stands at $21.4 trillion for a reason, but you can only charge off the costs of a crisis so many times. At some point, the elites must act.

It’s clear that the political elite of America is incapable of handling a genuine crisis. They struggle to do the basics of government now. They still have not written and passed a budget for next fiscal year. This is ground floor stuff. If they cannot handle the simplest of tasks, how will the “world’s greatest deliberative body” manage to debate a response to a genuine crisis? The answer, of course, is they won’t because they can’t. Instead, they will look around for the strong man to arrive and take over the task from them.

That’s what we are seeing with the Kavanaugh hearings. Serious men would never have allowed a handful of deranged matrons, suffering from the typical middle aged female hysteria, to disrupt this process. Generation after generation since Gettysburg, the political elite has grown weaker as the quality of the ruling elite has declined. Maybe the system is to blame. Maybe the breeding patterns of the elites are to blame. Maybe it is just an example of reversion to the mean. Either way, our elites are no longer elite.