The Elite Class And Shirking Responsibility
It Started With Vietnam
Democrats are saying last night was a huge wave. I don’t think so. Blue states got bluer. There were some things to pay attention to, though. Georgia Republicans lost two state elections again. Both Georgia Senators are far-left Democrats, with the Reverend being a closeted communist. In Mississippi, Republicans lost a supermajority in their state Senate.
If you thought Democrats had empathy and compassion or morals, you were wrong. Electing the “Dreaming of Murdering My Opponent and His Children” candidate as Attorney General in Virginia should disabuse you of that. They are about power, not people.
Some say, “Well, if they had a better candidate”…Oh. You mean someone who might say they’d murder everyone on the other side? Or did you mean something else? Any candidate was better than the VA AG candidate. He got a pass because he was Black.
Hugh Hewitt had a long rant on X this morning, encouraging red states to severely gerrymander their states. I welcome him to the party. We are going to see MORE extreme candidates from both sides. That won’t go well.
One thing you have to say about communists is that they never change. They aren’t open to change despite saying so. They also show up. Capitalists are tolerant, and because of the way we think, we are open to changing our minds. Our internal variance is far greater.
Last night, America’s largest city elected a communist. Communists run LA, Chicago, and NYC. They are in city councils all over the country, mostly in blue states. They are in state legislatures. Many aren’t out of the closet yet, but they will be soon. In NYC, communism will become fashionable.
Olivia Reingold has followed NYC’s mayor-elect and wrote about it here.
NYC is screwed because his appointees will be there longer than he will.
How did this happen in formerly capitalistic America?
In the days of the American Revolution, Civil War, and both World Wars, the wealthy of our country sent their sons into battle. They fought and died for their country. Vietnam changed that. Heck, the signers of the Declaration were all wealthy, and many lost their fortunes because of it. Having skin in the game is a big deal.
During Vietnam, if you were connected, you could figure a way out of going to war if you wanted to. Even President Trump figured a way out. Bone spurs or something. President Clinton dodged the draft, and President Bush was in the Texas Air National Guard. Sure, I know Vietnam became an unpopular war, but the truth is the establishment elite from the WW2 generation didn’t want to see their sons fight in one after what they went through. You can’t blame them for their feelings, but it had adverse consequences. Additionally, there was the draft. You went even if you didn’t want to go if you had a low draft number. That is, unless you had strings to pull.
Today, Da Nang Dick lies about his service but gets to be a Senator. Tim Walz lies about his service, but gets to govern the state of Minnesota. They make a mockery of military service.
Contrast that with Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and Carter. All served. Their benches and backbenches served.
This is somewhat changing with our last conflict, which shouldn’t have happened. It’s a volunteer military, and that is a good thing.
That ethos of “I don’t want my boy to serve and potentially die” led to the ethos of “I am entitled. I am special”. Our athletic programs went from “you are the champion” to everyone gets a trophy. Dating went from boys asking girls and being told “no” to “Let’s all go as a group and everyone asks everyone, so there isn’t rejection”.
I saw the crazy “equity creep” in entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship ought to be the last bastion of dog-eat-dog merit-based capitalism. It is in the marketplace, but it isn’t in the incubators, collegiate entrepreneurship programs, and a lot of the dialogue online and in publications.
I had a professor tell us to “give it to the girls” once when two presentations were ultra close in quality, since “girls have been discriminated against”. B Corporations, DEI, “we have to fund X group,” “this group is underserved”, and all the BS that comes with that line of thinking were in vogue. I saw VCs virtue signal on their blogs about it, but when you looked at their portfolio, it never seemed to be the case. This is the everyone gets a trophy ethos.
Of course, educational systems in the US are rotten to the core. Instead of reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, they are reading the 1619 Project and the Port Huron Statement.
I saw organizations that used to be serious, like the Economic Club of Chicago, go woke and soft. Again, institutional rot is wiping out the capitalistic foundation our country was built on.
The elite Republicans who went out east to prep school didn’t go to work and run the family business. They didn’t start businesses of their own. They joined the NGO class. It was free money, and they knew the people who could get it to them.
Elites used to earn it. They used to take risks and work for it. They were the ones who could take risks because they had a family safety net that would bail them out if they failed. They haven’t earned it for a long time.
Republicans are going to have to learn how to combat the politics of envy, and in a hurry. Envy won in blue states last night. Envy brings socialism/communism. Everyone isn’t rich enough to be a Democrat. Only capitalism can give someone the opportunity to be rich enough to become a Democrat.
Unfortunately, crony capitalism has given opportunities to people like Mamdani to be rich enough to be a communist.
We are in a dangerous place in America. The Civil War has started. Shots have been fired. Charlie Kirk was murdered in cold blood. The communists and the anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes are ready to pounce. Bluebloods like Tucker Carlson are only happy enough to open the door for them as long as they wet their beaks.
If Republicans do not get aggressive, advocate for themselves, and do the same thing to Democrats that they are doing to them, you might find yourself marching to the gulag.
Straight to the point, Thanks Jeffery!
Well said! Historically, members of America’s elites were strongly tied to civic responsibility, which included acting as officers in the militia in peacetime and active service during America’s declared wars.
Considering how rare college education was in the 19th and pre-WWII 20th centuries, I think it’s fair to say all college students could be considered elite, or at least potentially elite by dint of obtaining a college education.
While we had West Point Annapolis to train professional officers (many of whom did not remain in service beyond their required terms), there also emerged the idea of the citizen-soldier in both north (Norwich University) and south (Virginia Military Institute, Citadel, and several other schools which have not survived) in which young men who planned civilian careers received military training so that the would be able to effectively serve as officers in the militia and during wartime. Many graduates and even non-graduates of these institutions provided substantial numbers of officers to both South and North during the Civil War.
After the Civil War, mandatory military training was instituted at the land grant colleges under the Morrell Act of 1862, which again acknowledge and encouraged the connection between elite membership and training which would enable one to serve effectively as an officer in time of war. After the First World War, the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) was created to serve a similar function for the increasing number of colleges, and to provide the training not only at land grant (public) colleges but at the nation’s elite universities and colleges.
Most elite families had members serving as officers in one service or another during WWII, many of whom had been commissioned through ROTC. Many of the most elite families on the East and West coasts, where yachting was an important elite sport, served in the Navy.
It was only after WWII, and during the Cold War, that this connection was severed. The unpopularity of the draft (which had never previously continued into peacetime) and the even greater unpopularity of the Vietnam War led to elite colleges eliminating ROTC, draft resistance, and the almost complete abandonment of any sense of responsibility for national defense in our elite.
One should think of the Vietnam debacle as an early failure of the ‘experts’ and elite class - which should have (and did for some of us) presaged the elite class’ abandonment of its sense of civic responsibility and the massive failures of capability of the experts demonstrated through the policies of the War on Poverty, Affirmative Action, the creation of the Welfare State, and all that has flowed from it since the end of the Cold War.
Our military was, until the past 30 years beginning with the Clinton administration, largely insulated because the officers who led the military in the ‘80s and ‘90s were those who fought in Korea and Vietnam, and were largely those who were from middle class rather than upper class backgrounds. The current deterioration of the military is the result of the Clinton and Obama changes, DEI, and such like, which have driven the competent warriors out and encouraged the politically correct and wok.