Class Warfare

That's the reality of America, as Glenn Harlan Reynolds describes it today:

America’s elites are waging class war on workers and small bizAmerica’s elites are waging class war on workers and small biz

The question, of course, is: What's behind this class war?

Reynolds starts with the economic rationale--and there's little doubt that this is a very real and conscious motive at the level of corporations and their enablers:

In America, class warfare is often disguised as culture war, and culture war is often cloaked by talk of race. But underneath it all, the class warfare is still there. Whether accidentally or intentionally, America’s upper classes seem to wind up harming the working class and small businesses, always in the name of some high-minded cause.

On immigration, for example, the go-to move is to call people who object to open borders racists and nativists. But what’s behind it? As Biden economic adviser Jared Bernstein commented: “A tight job market pressures employers to boost wage offers . . . One equally surefire way to short-circuit this useful dynamic is to turn on the immigrant spigot every time some group’s wages go up.” Immigration as a way of keeping working-class wages down.

Strangely, Reynolds fails to mention the role of outsourcing in this. The outsourcing of American manufacturing and jobs is all about boosting profits by suppressing the biggest portion of the cost of goods sold--wages and related expenses. The gradual forcing of the working class onto the government dole in various forms (guaranteed income?) is supposed to make up for that and insure a docile populace. But it won't substitute for the meaningful life that all normal humans seek. It will fail.

Reynolds then goes on to discuss the cultural rationale, which is the religious rationale. The point is that the woke adherents of Prog religious enthusiasm need to keep the racist and unwoke underclass in their places--which is under the woke class. The example he offers is one that has been getting a fair amount of publicity on conservative sites lately. At Smith College an African student made blatantly false accusations of racism against white janitorial and cafeteria staff. Despite the blatant falsity, these working class stiffs were forced out after being smeared and, after being totally cleared, were basically smeared again by the college as belonging to, well, the wrong class. Reynolds observes:

Privilege is the ability to get an employee of many years punished simply by making a complaint, even a false one. 

Who is this woke upperclass that so ruthlessly seeks to suppress the unwoke? It's the "gentry", as defined by ideology:

And yet class war rages, even if people don’t want to talk about it. It’s not the Soviet-style class war, with “capitalists” on one side and “workers and peasants” on the other, but rather the educated “gentry class” (as demographer Joel Kotkin calls it) making life tough for the working class.

The gentry class is in firm control of most of the institutions in America, from big corporations, to media organizations, to, most especially, colleges and universities. The Democrats are the gentry class’ party, as the GOP increasingly becomes a diverse coalition of working-class and small-business people. And the gentry class is letting the working class have it.

Barack Obama boasted about driving coal mines into bankruptcy; Joe Biden tells miners they need to learn how to code. There’s talk of forgiving student-loan debt, which would effectively transfer wealth from high-school educated truck drivers to social workers with graduate degrees. Biden’s open-borders immigration policy will once again open the “immigrant spigot” to push working-class wages down. Piling ruin upon ruin.

The "learn to code" refrain reminds me of an article at The Federalist today: Don’t Get Scammed By So-Called STEM Education. The author warns gullible parents about the reality of many of these programs, which parents think will prepare their children for well paying, fulfilling jobs in the tech sector. As if--even assuming the worth of such programs--American kids would somehow be able to compete for those jobs against cheaper foreign labor imports. The reality of many of these programs, of course is different. I liked this passage about coding:

It sounds amazing, at first. “My child will be able to code a robot? Wow! That will prepare him for an amazing career.” What no one is telling that parent or student is that less than 2 percent of all jobs in STEM involve coding or robotics. What good is knowing how to code if 98 percent of STEM jobs don’t use it? If you only speak Icelandic, it’s unlikely there is going to be a massive market for your skillset in Cambodia.

Of course preparation for a job that's more than just a temporary gig is complicated beyond most parents' comprehension--although they have a very real sense of the insecurity of the modern economy for all below the top levels and the support staff for the top levels. But Reynold's point is that the ruling class isn't helping and isn't even interested in helping. In fact, he suggests in conclusion, the intentions of the ruling class--the people, for example, who want you and your family vaxxed in perpetuity--may actually be malign:

And just as at Smith, they don’t care who’s hurt, so long as they can strike a pose. Is all this accidental? Or is it the product of hostility toward what Hillary Clinton called the “deplorables?” On the receiving end, does it really matter?

Archbishop Viganò's latest letter, which is concerned with the analogous political situation in Italy, expresses this malign intent within the Italian context--but the essential similarity is clear:

In the name of tolerance, we Italians were asked to grant legitimacy to evil, reassuring ourselves that in any case the good would not be hindered: today the State guarantees and protects evil and even outlaws the good. ...

On the other hand, the essence of liberalism – ... – lies precisely in progressively disarming the majority of the good, and at the same time in supporting and reinforcing the minority of the corrupt, under the pretext of an alleged and absurd equality of rights. And yet it should not be terribly difficult to understand that the very idea of equality is absurd, because it presupposes a flattening of all differences, a homologation of all diversity, which in fact ends with cancelling out that which vice-versa ought to make the social body – and thus logically the ecclesial body as well – efficient in all its members, diverse but harmoniously connected.

Yes, the Progressive Movement always has been a bait and switch ploy. The problem is, with Progs now in control of education for going on two generations at least, most Americans reflexively think in basically Prog terms--the bastard offspring of Classical Liberalism.

Viganò then makes an interesting comment, which I see often reflected in the comments here of those who support a "third party":

In this way democracy reveals its weakness, since it lays down as a postulate a belief in the innate goodness of the multitude, which instead is inclined to evil and sin and which needs to be guided by an authority that has transcendent values as its model.

What I see reflected in so many of these comments is this touching but misguided belief in the innate goodness of common people--along the lines of Bill Buckley's jest that he'd prefer to be ruled by people picked at random out of a phone book (remember phone books?). What follows from this faith in common people is typically American: We will solve the systemic corruption of our society and its government by "reform", by restructuring the rules--term limits, and so forth. As if tinkering with the mechanics of "the system" will somehow overcome the inclination of men to game whatever system is current. What I've been arguing, however, is that moral and philosophical conversion is the only way to at least mitigate the harm caused by human imperfection. Third parties, with their pipe dream of a virtuous new political movement immune to the innate foibles of human beings, will only serve as yet another vehicle for gaming the system, a rearranging of the deck chairs on the Titanic of liberal democracy. A third party may be necessary at some point, but one built on unrealistic assumptions will inevitably fail.

Viganò concludes on a somewhat optimistic note. There is, in fact, a way to get past the cultural--and thus societal and governing--impasse:

If we are able to understand that what is happening in Italy is part of a single script under a single direction, then we will succeed in grasping the coherence between facts that are apparently heterogeneous, and above all we will understand that the motivations that are adopted in order to legitimize measures in violation of the natural freedoms of individuals are nothing other than pretexts, as false as they are rationally incongruent. And since everything is based on a colossal lie, it will be enough for only one of the deceptions to collapse to make the entire globalist Tower of Babel collapse, its hierarchs, its priests, its courtiers, its servants.

However, the necessary condition for overcoming this organized Evil of the New World Order is our own reeducation in the philosophy of the real world of the God created order of human nature. Tolerance cannot extend to Anthony Kennedy's so called right of all to define for themselves "the sweet mystery of life". That way lies social collapse and chaos.