The Ruling Class and States’ Rights

Someone pointed me to this article that’s been making the rounds. It’s definitely a move in the right direction, inasmuch as it lays out an operational definition of the Ruling Class. Sun-Tzu taught that you must know your enemy in order to defeat him. Now, we know our enemy.

I do have some issues with the article, though. While doing an excellent job of defining the Ruling Class and laying out just how pernicious they are, it also warns that if the country class isn’t careful, they can and will be just as oppressive and overbearing as the current ruling class. Such is the danger of revolution, I suppose. The author writes,

Suppose that the Country Party (whatever its name might be) were to capture Congress, the presidency, and most statehouses. What then would it do? Especially if its majority were slim, it would be tempted to follow the Democrats’ plan of 2009-2010, namely to write its wish list of reforms into law regardless of the Constitution and enact them by partisan majorities supported by interest groups that gain from them, while continuing to vilify the other side. Whatever effect this might have, it surely would not be to make America safe for self-governance because by carrying out its own “revolution from above” to reverse the ruling class’s previous “revolution from above,” it would have made that ruinous practice standard in America. Moreover, a revolution designed at party headquarters would be antithetical to the country class’s diversity as well as to the American Founders’ legacy.

Of course, this is why the Founders strove so vehemently for a strong Constitution in the first place. We think of American government primarily as a system of checks and balances, and right we are to do so, but the most important checks are not between judcial, legislative, and executive. They are, in fact, the checks between a strong Federal government and the rights of individual states (and citizens) to govern themselves. The Constitution had a number of these checks built right in. Unfortunately, they have been eroded ever so carefully to give the Ruling Class more and more power.

Achieving the country class’s inherently revolutionary objectives in a manner consistent with the Constitution and with its own diversity would require the Country Party to use legislation primarily as a tool to remove obstacles, to instruct, to reintroduce into American life ways and habits that had been cast aside. Passing national legislation is easier than getting people to take up the responsibilities of citizens, fathers, and entrepreneurs.

If nothing else, the most important thing to do to thwart the Ruling Class will be to somehow strengthen the Constitution against encroachments of governmental power and then return to the states the powers they once enjoyed before the elastic clause, commerce clause, and general welfare clause were bent and warped to allow the tyranny which we, as Americans, now willingly bear.

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