By CHRISTOPHER MANION
(The
Wanderer) Ten years ago, Dr. Angelo Codevilla wrote America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of
Revolution. His best-seller analysis of our country’s bipartisan elites
quickly formed the foundation for the fledgling Tea Party and, later, for the
unprecedented coalition that elected Donald Trump in 2016.
The Ruling Class has never accepted Trump’s victory. It was — and is —
illegitimate, they insist. To employ Thomas Sowell’s term, they view themselves
to be “anointed” as our natural betters to tell us how to live our lives. For
them, those millions of us whom Hillary Clinton labeled as “Deplorables” belong
in the class described by Aristotle as “natural slaves.” Our lives will be
better if we are ruled by those naturally superior to us than if we lived
according to our own lights.
Deplorables disagree. We “believe that the system is rigged,” Codevilla wrote.
We want to “drain the swamp.”
Of course, the elites fought back. Their power, wealth, and status were on the
line. The “revolution” Codevilla predicted in the 2010 title was coming to
pass. By 2017, he described the conflict as a “Cold Civil War.”
“Well-nigh the entire ruling class — government bureaucracies, the judiciary,
academia, media, associated client groups, Democratic officials, and
Democrat-controlled jurisdictions — have joined in ‘Resistance’ to the 2016
elections,” he wrote. For a time, they embraced “politics as war,” using every
power, legitimate and otherwise, to resist. By 2019, however, he saw violence
as inevitable. “At a certain point, the other side shoots back,” he wrote — and
that was before the riots that still ravage America’s urban areas.
With the prospect of revolution so close at hand, we turn to Edmund Burke.
Russell Kirk calls Burke’s Reflections on
the Revolution in France “one of the most influential political treatises
in the history of the world.” And there are ominous parallels with our own time
— too many, alas. Consider: Burke visited France three times, Kirk writes,
“returning to London dismayed at the rise of atheism among the French.”
If Burke visited the United States today, would he be dismayed to see our
Ruling Class’ repudiation of The Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God? Is the
rise of atheism nothing short of a pandemic?
The Qualm Before The Storm
Joe Sobran limned that phrase
to depict the precarious uncertainty that precedes the inevitable conflict.
History doesn’t repeat itself, we are told, but it rhymes. The present moment
finds us in the midst of a tsunami of lies, ideology, venom, and hate. Reason,
logic, and history itself lie undefended on the precipice of ruin. The
preambles of Revolution can span a long period of time, Codevilla observes, and
the timeline of our own civilization’s collapse is long indeed. But the moment
the “spark” (to use Lenin’s term) ignites, the “shock of events” takes over.
That stage of the revolution never takes long.
“The presumption of the ‘Age of Reason’ roused Burke’s indignation and
contempt,” Kirk writes.
“Indignation and contempt.” Doesn’t that describe our own response to the
elites’ gaggle of grifters and powermongers of our own time?
Kirk continues: “Endowed with the prophet’s vision, [Burke] marvelously foresaw
the whole course of events which would follow up on the French attempt to
reconstruct society after an abstract pattern.”
Today’s “pattern” is no longer a mere abstraction. It is a cauldron of chaos.
Burke’s vibrant vision belongs as much to our own time as to his. “The
revolution,” writes Kirk, “after careering fiercely through a series of stages
of hysterical violence, would end in a despotism.”
On this point, Codevilla cites Aristotle, who “points out that oligarchies born
of violent revolution tend to succumb to the very violence that births them,
quickly degenerating into some kind of tyranny or one-man rule.”
And it doesn’t take long. “Like Saturn, the Revolution devours its children,”
observed royalist Jacques Mallet du Pan. Dictators are able to consolidate
their power because they first eliminate those who once served as their fawning
enablers.
The hangers-on, the sycophants, the slobbering lapdogs who preened for those
pirouetting pomposities will no longer be required. In fact, they will now be
the competition. Soon they will be sent to the Gulag or to the gallows.
Machiavelli proposed that the Prince deal with them all at once, with all of
them. Many tyrants since have tipped their bloody hat to the master.
The tyrants will also deal with the Deplorables, of course. Including us
Catholics. We all know what happened to the Church and the faithful in
revolutionary France, Germany, Russia, Mexico, Spain, Germany, and China, to
name a few. So it’s especially daunting to discover that that the Vatican isn’t
leading the resistance. Nor is the USCCB. In fact, they both seem to be
cheering the revolution along.
What Is To Be Done?
So we Deplorables are going to
be on our own. Branded by our shepherds as “racists,” “bigots,” even
“Pharisees,” the faithful too will be sent underground or worse, as our
brothers and sisters have been dealt with in Communist China, which seems to be
the working model of “Catholic Joe” Biden, with the glowing imprimatur of the
Vatican’s scandal-tainted insider Bishop Zanchetta.
But wait — what about reform? Isn’t that what the Jacobins, then and now,
promise to deliver? Here Burke delivers a warning that was too late for France
but not for us:
“Is it then true, that the French government was such as to be incapable or
undeserving of reform? So that it was of absolute necessity that the whole
fabric should be at once pulled down, and the area cleared for the erection of
a theoretic, experimental edifice in its place?
“All of France was of a different opinion in the beginning of the year 1789,”
he writes. “The instructions to the representatives to the Estates-General,
from every district in that Kingdom, were filled with projects for the
reformation of that government, without the remotest suggestion of a design to
destroy it.”
No one in early 1789 wanted to destroy the Ancien Régime, he writes. “Had such
a design been then even insinuated, I believe there would have been but one
voice, and that voice for rejecting it with scorn and horror. Men have been
sometimes led by degrees, sometimes hurried, into things of which, if they
could have seen the whole together, they would never have permitted the most
remote approach.”
In this, today’s Jacobins are ahead of the curve. Do they really want only
reform? No way. Revolution is in the air — although admittedly, our radical
Democrats want only to destroy parts of the Constitution, not all of it.
Historian Carl B. Cone writes that, before the French Revolution, Burke’s view
of the French Enlightenment had been theoretical, cautious, and indecisive. But
in short order, “the shock of events transformed it. Events clarified his
thinking, removed his indecisiveness, and enabled him to make up his mind about
the evils and dangers of the revolution.”
Will the “shock of events” transform our own view of today’s Jacobins? Will we
reject them with scorn and horror? Because, in Russell Kirk’s words, they want
to finish the job of “[bringing] down in ruins most of what was fine and noble
in traditional society.”
Chicago’s Cardinal Francis George, OMI, was hopeful, but he wasn’t an
optimist.
“I expect to die in bed,” he wrote, “my successor will die in prison and his
successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up
the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization as the
Church has done so often in human history.”
Holy Martyrs of the Vendée, pray for us!
