November 19th, 2018
Note: Below is an excerpt from my new book, “Making Oregon Great Again,” to be published next month (December). This is the first of ten “blue Oregon” myths that I discuss. If you like it, please consider sharing with your friends. Thanks….
(One other point, unrelated: I am running for Chairman of the Oregon Republican Party, with PCP delegate elections in mid-February. I’d sure appreciate your support. We have an applecart to turn over!).
PART ONE: OREGON IS NOT BLUE: DEBUNKING THE MYTHS
“This is your last chance. After this, there is no turning back. You take the blue pill—the story ends, you wake up in your bed and believe whatever you want to believe. You take the red pill—you stay in Wonderland, and I show you how deep the rabbit hole goes. Remember: all I’m offering is the truth. Nothing more.”
-MORPHEUS (LAURENCE FISHBURNE) FROM THE MOVIE, THE MATRIX (Warner Brothers/Village Roadshow Pictures, 1999)
I’m a fan of the red pill. How about you?
Knowledge is power. Use your own common sense to understand the fallacy of the following myths and you will become confident, like Diana and me, that we can turn Oregon around. Note that in Parts Two and Three, I will go into deeper detail on all of the points I make here in Part One.
Myth #1: The political war in America is Between Democrats and Republicans.
The conflict is not between Democrats and Republicans, or even the Left and the Right. It’s between the political elite class, and you and me – regular Americas who make this country work.
So, on one side is the self-selected elite contingent: the Ruling Class. These are a small minority of Democrats AND Republicans, who endlessly and condescendingly explain to us how-things-should-be-in-America, not how they ARE.
Almost always, these people have a problem with our institutions and traditions.
On the other side, here we are: you and me, the conservative grassroots. Without pretensions, our membership also crosses political boundaries. We can be defined as regular Americans who want safety and prosperity for our families. We are Americans who love our country with little reservation. (Yes, of course there are elements of our society that can be improved.)
Regardless of party affiliation, the great majority of Americans are conservative grassroots.
Ruling Class members, Left and Right, the distinct minority, will never read this book. In fact, many will proclaim this book is trash without reading a single word of it…and will look with disdain upon you for having read this far.
Ruling Class adherents, one way or the other, have their futures and financial well-being dependent on big-government.
And yes, they hate Donald Trump.
They walk among us. The Ruling Class, particularly those on the Left, has its own PC-language and attitudes. In your own life, you know exactly who they are.
How does the descriptor “progressive far-left” fit in? It’s the Ruling Class’s driving force, the front-line propagators of what I call, the Unfairness Doctrine: “Little person: You have been unfairly victimized even though you don’t know it, and unfortunately you are incapable of fixing this for yourself, so we are here to guide and defend you. All we ask is that you vote for us.” Almost always Democrats, the especially loud progressive segment comprises only about 30% of the Democratic Party, and therefore less than 15% of the total Oregon voter population.
It’s true: in Oregon we are being ruled by the leadership of less than 15% of our population, assisted by the never-Trumper/establishment/Ruling Class Right which is 10% of Republicans and therefore a minuscule 3% of the total voting population. (The remaining 90% of Republican voters? You can call us, “forever Trumpers.”)
Needless to say, Donald Trump does not belong to the Ruling Class, and he never will. He’s from Queens, NYC, and he won’t play their game. Why is the Ruling Class – left and right – attacking him with such venom? He’s upset their applecart, and of course they won’t go down without a fight. We watch that fight every time we turn on the news.
Is there a Ruling Class in Salem? Oh yes: an applecart ready to be tipped over.
The Ruling Class is an almost-religion that, in author Angelo Codevilla’s words, “…speaks the language and has tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans who are not oriented to government.” And he goes on to say, “…our Ruling Class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection to ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.”
Here’s more: “The Ruling Class’s first tenet is that its members are the best and brightest, while the rest of Americans are retrograde, racist and dysfunctional unless properly constrained.” And this: “In sum, our Ruling Class does not like the rest of America. Most of all, it dislikes that so many Americans think America is substantially different from the rest of the world – and like it that way. For our Ruling Class, however, America is a work in progress, just like the rest of the world, and they are the engineers.”
How did the Ruling Class develop? It has a government control-orientation that is the result of our public educational system – Public “government” schools – that throw down the unfairness doctrine from grade school all the way up to the blue-blood universities that produce their own leadership, e.g. Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge.
Some say that failed 2018 Republican gubernatorial candidate Knute Buehler – his credentials include Oxford Rhodes Scholar and Johns Hopkins surgeon – precisely fit the Ruling Class profile as he, in both the Republican primary and general election contests, dogmatically avoided contact with the 90% of the Republican constituency that supports our President, and as he unceremoniously rejected the official Oregon Republican Party Platform that was put together by Republicans just like you and me.
Is this Ruling Class vs. regular Americans conflict, a war?
Yes. A civil war.
The take-away? Get Codevilla’s book, The Ruling Class: HOW THEY CORRUPTED AMERICA AND WHAT WE CAN DO ABOUT IT. It spells it out better than anything I’ve seen, as it gives a brief yet cogent history of how progressivism came about and developed. BTW, the book was published way before Donald Trump’s political involvement, back in 2009, giving it historical credibility. Rush Limbaugh wrote the Forward. Find it here: The Ruling Class: How They Corrupted America and What We Can Do About It by Angelo M. Codevilla