In June Great
Britain voted to leave the European Union, what’s become known as ‘the British
Exit’ or Brexit. Many predicted that Brexit would mean the collapse of the
British economy and a whole host of other horrors. None of that has happened -
but the doomsayers remain hopeful.
In parallel,
we’ve seen the rise of Donald Trump as the GOP candidate for president.
Meanwhile, the
‘ruling elite’ is trying to explain just what this all means. In one of the
major business magazines, the CEO of one of the largest US corporations (and a
member of the elite) recently suggested this really isn’t about anything more
than a failure of large bureaucracies and the lack of leaders with clear
vision.
His inference is
that with the right ‘leaders’ and the right ‘management’ the bureaucracies can
all be fixed up and everything will be great. With respect, the CEO is simply
flat-out wrong.
The
bureaucracies that have grown up in the US (and Europe) since World War II
haven’t failed; arguably, they’ve succeeded.
This isn’t the
failure of bureaucracies, this isn’t the failure of the process, and it isn’t
about a Constitution that no longer works. The British essayist GK Chesterton
once noted the problem with Europe ‘…wasn’t that Christianity had been tried
and found wanting, but that Christianity had been tried and found to be
difficult, so it was abandoned.’ The same might be said about how many –
particularly on the left – have viewed the Constitution in the last 60 years,
and the notion of a free and participatory government: the Constitution was
found to be difficult, and so they have abandoned it. It’s much easier to find
the right judge, and better yet the right agency and the right bureaucrat, and
eschew the slow, painful process of a referendum and perhaps some legislation
to affect change. Find a convenient ‘leader’ (dictator) to issue some new court
order, regulation, or executive order and to hell with democracy and the
Constitution.
Simply put, they
didn’t, and don’t, want limited, participatory government. They want an elite
(them) that rules by fiat, because they believe they are better than us. And
that’s how the bureaucracies have grown.
As Peggy Noonan
points out, the ‘leaders’ – the elites who have ever more money and influence –
have grown into a global aristocracy. They believe they’ve the right to decide
everything for us: where we’ll work, where we’ll live, what we’ll eat and how,
in detail, we’ll live. But none of these boundaries placed on you and me will
affect them. They live outside of – above and beyond – the reach of bureaucrats
and local political entities. They live how and where they want. They lecture
us on carbon footprints, demand the ‘end of coal’ and close coal mines and put
thousands out of work, then climb into private jets, fly off to New York to
give a speech - for $250,000 - to Wall Street elites who think just as they do,
then fly to the South of France for a vacation, producing more CO2 in a single
day then some of us will in a lifetime.
The point of
Brexit is that the English recognized the elites of the European Union, to
include England’s elites, don’t really care about them – at all. The same is
happening in the US, with voters recognizing that the elites in Washington and
in the media and the universities, have no loyalty to them, to the US, to our
Constitution or to our culture or our origins. Simply put, they aren’t really
Americans.
As Miss Noonan
noted, there’s now a vast ‘detachment’ between the elites (who globally
associate, thinking of themselves as ‘citizens of the world’) and the average
citizen, the inhabitants of ‘fly-over country,’ as it’s derisively termed by
the establishment.
The elites label
as racist the trucker with a Confederate battle flag on his truck, while they
disdain most Americans, exploit the lexicon of racism for political gain,
expand bureaucratic programs that have created a black unemployment rate twice
the national average for most of the last 40 years, leaving black-on-black
crime at horrific levels (while they maintain they’re own security behind
well-armed private security guards), cynically locking millions of blacks into
tightly controlled voting blocks.
But, for the
global elite, that’s not racism, that’s just what they do. After all, they’re
better than us.
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