Professional Documents
Culture Documents
by Tyler Durden
Friday, Feb 05, 2021 - 23:40
Authored by Angelo Codevilla via AMGreatness.com,
The United States of America is now a classic oligarchy. The clarity that it has brought to our
situation by recognizing this fact is its only virtue...
Texas v. Pennsylvania et al. did not deny setting rules for the 2020 election contrary to the
Constitution. On December 10, 2020, the Supreme Court discounted that. By refusing to
interfere as America’s ruling oligarchy serves itself, the court archived what remained of the
American republic’s system of equal justice. That much is clear.
In 2021, the laws, customs, and habits of the heart that had defined the American republic
since the 18th century are things of the past. Americans’ movements and interactions are under
strictures for which no one ever voted. Government disarticulated society by penalizing ordinary
social intercourse and precluding the rise of spontaneous opinion therefrom. Together with
corporate America, it smothers minds through the mass and social media with relentless, pervasive,
identical, and ever-evolving directives. In that way, these oligarchs have proclaimed themselves the
arbiters of truth, entitled and obliged to censor whoever disagrees with them as systemically racist,
adepts of conspiracy theories.
Corporations, and the government itself, require employees to attend meetings personally to
acknowledge their guilt. They solicit mutual accusations. While violent felons are released from
prison, anyone may be fired or otherwise have his life wrecked for questioning
government/corporate sentiment. Today’s rulers don’t try to convince. They demand obedience, and
they punish.
Russians and East Germans under Communists Leonid Brezhnev and Erich Honecker in the 1970s
lived under less ruling class pressure than do today’s Americans. And their rulers were smart
enough not to insult them, their country, or their race.
In 2015, Americans could still believe they lived in a republic, in which life’s rules flow from
the people through their representatives.
In 2021, a class of rulers draws their right to rule from self-declared experts’ claims of infallibility
that dwarf baroque kings’ pretensions. In that self-referential sense, the United States of
America is now a classic oligarchy.
The following explains how this change happened. The clarity that it has brought to our
predicament is its only virtue.
Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the
choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not. Consolidation was very much “in the cards.”
But how that election and its aftermath led to the fast, thorough, revolution of American life
depended on how Donald Trump acted as the catalyst who clarified, energized, and empowered our
burgeoning oligarchy’s peculiarities. These, along with the manner in which the oligarchy seized
power between November 2016 and November 2020, ensure that its reign will be ruinous and likely
short. The prospect that the republic’s way of life may thrive among those who wish it to depends
on the manner in which they manage the civil conflict that is now inevitable.