Clarity in Trump’s Wake

Article subtitle: 
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.
Article author: 
Angelo Codevilla
Article publisher: 
American Greatness
Article date: 
23 January 2021
Article category: 
Our American Future
Medium
Article Body: 

Angelo Codevilla's essay is worth reading in its entirety. A few excerpts are included below.

"Either the Constitution matters and must be followed . . . or it is simply a piece of parchment on display at the National Archives."
— Texas v. Pennsylvania et al.
 
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....
 
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....
 
Oligarchy had long been growing within America’s republican forms. The 2016 election posed the choice of whether its rise should consolidate, or not....
 
In the 21st century, the American people’s trust in government plummeted as they—on the political Left as well as on the Right—realized that those in power care little for them. As they watched corporate and non-profit officials trade places with public officials and politicians while getting much richer, they felt impoverished and disempowered. Since the ruling class embraced Republicans and Democrats, elections seemed irrelevant....
 
Americans on the Right were especially aggrieved because the oligarchy had become culturally united in disdain for Western civilization in general and for themselves in particular....
 
Trump’s candidacy drew the ferocious opposition it did primarily because the entire ruling class recognized that, unlike McCain in 2008 and Romney in 2012, he really was mobilizing millions of Americans against the arrangements by which the ruling class live, move, and have their being....
 
The oligarchy’s disparate members had already set aside laws, truth, etc. in opposition to Trump. The realization that the presidency’s awesome powers now rested in his hands fostered a full-court-press #Resistance. Trump’s peculiarities helped make it far more successful than anyone could have imagined....
 
The Democratic Party had promised a return to some kind of “normalcy.” Instead, its victory enabled the oligarchy’s several parts to redefine the people who do not show them due deference as “white supremacists,” “insurrectionists,” and Nazis—in short, as some kind of criminals—to exclude them from common platforms of communication, from the banking system, and perhaps even from air travel; and to set law enforcement to surveil them in order to find bases for prosecuting them...
 
Perhaps most important, they do so without thought of how a war against at least some 74 million fellow citizens might end....