America is caught in a “revolutionary spiral”. An oligarchy composed of a small number of corporate and government rulers may be in control, but they face opposition from Rednecks clutching at guns and God, working-class peasants of colour resistant to polygender empowerment doctrines and vaccine mandates, and the fact that roughly half of the US population has so far refused to submit to their rule.
These groups can’t influence policies at Amazon and the Pentagon, or other undemocratic bodies at America’s commanding heights. But locally they still have the power to refuse orders from the managerial janissaries who carry out the oligarchy’s bidding.
Pretensions of democracy aside, this is the real political landscape in the US, argued the American scholar of statecraft Angelo Codevilla. The oligarchy demands complete submission, the locals refuse, each party grants itself greater licence in what is permitted to defeat the other and the country spirals toward revolutionary violence. Codevilla, who last month died aged 78 near his vineyards in California, termed it a “cold civil war”.
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For Codevilla, America’s founding tradition of republican self-government has been replaced by a ruling class of both Democrats and Republicans that is steeped in progressive ideology and hides its power in the operations of a vast administrative Leviathan. These views, as well as Codevilla’s affiliation with the Claremont Institute, considered the intellectual home of Trumpism, earned him a place in what one critic recently called “The Anti-American Right”.
According to America’s liberal intelligentsia, the open collaboration between corporations and state organs monopolised by the Democratic Party is unimportant compared to the fascist threat coming from “anti-American” conservatives. They believe that fear of demographic and cultural change has marginalised these anti-American jingoists, and led to their embrace of strongmen like Donald Trump who promise to restore their honour.
[su_unherd_related author="Jacob Siegel"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/09/9-11-and-the-death-of-democracy/[/su_unherd_related]
But that critique, when applied to Codevilla, reduces an historical and structural analysis of power to mere reactionary resentment. It also misinterprets and seriously underplays the radicalism of his ideas. Far from being radicalised by the election of a black president in Barack Obama, or a white restorer in Trump, Codevilla was radicalised by seeing the inner workings of the US government in the 1970s.
It is Codevilla’s background as a classicist, not a culture warrior, that best explains his harsh criticisms of the “War on Terror” policies of a Republican president, George W. Bush. His counsel to Americans who fear the rise of an oligarchic ruling class was not to storm the Capitol or elect a Caesar, but to get out and start something new. He saw an answer to the revolutionary spiral not in violence but federalism achieved through exodus. “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst,” he wrote in March this year. “That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.”
Codevilla was born in 1943 in Voghera, a Northern Italian town near Milan. His father died before his birth. In 1955, he moved to America with his mother, arriving in New Jersey. After a stint in the Foreign Service he made his formal introduction to the American power elite in 1977, when he joined the staff of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. In 1978, he helped draft the original foreign intelligence surveillance court law that, after 9/11, provided the pretence of legal authority — in the notorious FISA warrants — for carte blanche spying by the U.S. intelligence agencies. Finished with government work by the mid-1980s, he went on to take a number of university teaching positions and pursued a prolific writing career, over which he published 14 books and countless articles and essays, mostly for conservative publications.
When I had the chance to interview Codevilla in 2017, his generosity left an impression, as did his voice. For someone who came to America as an early adolescent, he had no discernible accent save a highly articulated diction and crisp, mid-Atlantic consonants. It was the voice of someone obviously learned, slightly mischievous, direct and lacking pretension.
It was the same voice in which he wrote, and reflected something of Codevilla’s character and unique background. He was a government insider who internalised the vision of America’s founders and an unsparing critic of the intelligence agencies who failed to make the country safer while hijacking its politics. You could disagree with his conclusions, as many did when he defended first the Tea Party and later the political movement around Donald Trump. But it was clear he was a man who lived partly outside his own time, translating Machiavelli into English and consulting Thucydides to diagnose the causes and effects of a growing administrative state.
Codevilla was best known for his writing on the American ruling class. Indeed, the idea that America is no longer ruled by a collection of individuals selected on their merits — and its popularity on the American Right — is largely Codevilla’s legacy. His 2010 essay on the subject for The American Spectator became a sensation after the conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh was moved to read aloud from it to his more than 15 million listeners. The essay became a book and elevated Codevilla’s reputation from respected authority on military and intelligence matters to a general Right-wing eminence of the American political scene.
[su_unherd_related author="Tomiwa Owolade"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/08/anti-racism-is-an-american-dream/[/su_unherd_related]
Codevilla interpreted what has often been described as “polarisation” as a conflict between two distinct classes, each with competing visions of America. There is a “court” or “ruling” class, made up of highly educated urbanites whose group identity was forged in the American Progressive movement founded over a century ago, and a “country class” of those excluded from the court, who preserve the older assumptions of America’s founders.
The US has always had an upper class. But for most of American history, it was regional and varied. Because these people came from different places with their own local customs and made money in different ways, they were “not predictably of one mind on any given matter”. The internal tensions and disputes that naturally arose among them served as a check on their consolidation of power.
But now those regional elites have been replaced by a monolith. “Today’s ruling class,” Codevilla wrote, “was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits”. From Washington to Silicon Valley, progressive elites share a “social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints”. While the test for entry into this class is moral and aesthetic, it exercises power through offices of the administrative state, whose authority rests on secrecy.
Codevilla’s most original and striking contribution was to argue that secrecy, rather than expertise, is the foundation of ruling class power. As a strategy of rule, it provides the connective tissue between the ruling class’s domestic social engineering projects and the foreign wars it fights without clear goals or prospect of victory. As Codevilla wrote in his 2014 book, To Make and Keep Peace Among Ourselves and with All Nations:
"The bipartisan ruling class that grew in the Cold War, who imagined themselves and who managed to be regarded as entitled by expertise to conduct America’s business of war and peace, protected its status against a public from which it continued to diverge by translating the commonsense business of war and peace into a private, pseudo-technical language impenetrable to the uninitiated."As used by American spy agencies, “secrecy” can mean hiding information or obtaining it surreptitiously. But it might equally refer to the deployment of academic and scientific obscurantism to justify unpopular policies such as the forced masking of school children or the imposition of racial mysticism in school curricula and corporate boardrooms. The logic of such policies is never straightforwardly presented to the public, where it can be refuted on its own terms, because the logic of this or that policy is beside the point. In the end, the secular utopianism of early twentieth century progressive ideology combined with a secrecy-powered security state built to win the cold war and produced a strange offspring: our new America. Socialised into the belief that they alone have the skill and moral sensitivity required to govern, America’s elites regard their countrymen not as fellow citizens to be reasoned with but as subjects to be ruled, no different in principle from the Afghans and Iraqis designated for liberation. For Codevilla, such an outcome was always implicit in the premises of the War on Terror. Shortly after the attacks on September 11, at a time when many of his fellow conservatives regarded deference to the national security state as synonymous with patriotism, he offered this counsel in an essay for the Claremont Review of Books:
"Common sense says that victory means living without worry that some foreigners might kill us on behalf of their causes, but also without having to bow to domestic bureaucrats and cops, especially useless ones. It means not changing the tradition by which the government of the United States treats citizens as its masters rather than as potential enemies."No one in power took his advice, of course. Arguing that “some foreigners” might want to kill us, and that victory meant stopping this from happening rather than converting them to our way of life, could be easily written off as xenophobic and antiquated. For the next 15 years, the Bush and Obama administrations appealed to the nobility of Islam and dignity of Muslims as US wars killed hundreds of thousands of actual Muslims while achieving no lasting peace for Americans. [su_unherd_related author="Park MacDougald"]https://staging.unherd.com/2021/09/why-we-need-to-be-repressed/[/su_unherd_related] Codevilla was not always right in his five decades of writing about America’s wars and political struggles at home, but he was often uncommonly wise and never lacking in common sense. He understood that while some people live above their means, the members of the American ruling class live above their mistakes. No senior US military official faced any serious consequences over the war in Vietnam. Five decades later, the same is true of Afghanistan. The generals who oversaw the US defeat and lied to the public about the progress of the war have moved on to jobs in the White House and defence industry. President Biden, to his credit, manoeuvred around the machinations of the security establishment to finally end the war. But he did so in a shambolic way that was careless with allies and pushed America’s strategic adversaries into closer cooperation. What’s more, Biden shows no interest at all in dismantling the massive and immensely powerful war on terror security apparatus that, left intact, will always find new enemies to justify its existence. In fact, part of Biden’s motivation to get out of Afghanistan was to rely more on “over-the-horizon” capabilities — meaning jets, missiles and drone attacks — to fight our enemies abroad so that he could refocus the surveillance and policing power of the national security state on political enemies at home. The plan, outlined in June, deems white supremacist and anti-government militia groups the “most persistent and lethal threat” to the US out of all “domestic terrorist” ideologies. To combat this, the National Security Council strategy calls for increased government spying powers combined with efforts at reeducation. It is “the first document,” writes the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “to directly tie US counterterrorism efforts to broader social issues such as systemic racism, police reform and gun control”. All of this is as Codevilla predicted. Many have criticised US military policy in Afghanistan and the opaque and divisive racial theories being imposed in American schools. Codevilla recognised that they are structurally indivisible, two sides of an American ruling-class ideology that defines itself in opposition to the values and preferences of most American citizens. This ideology generates endless cycles of failure because it reflects not particular policies but the gross inadequacies of those who have a monopoly on institutional power. It “guarantees,” as Codevilla wrote in 2014, “unending conflict with all nations and strife among ourselves”.
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SubscribeThis is by far the most interesting piece I’ve read on the roots of the culture wars. I’ve seen comments suggesting collaboration between the security agencies, large corporations and government (particularly Democrats) to impose what amounts to a totalitarian regime on America but I always dismissed them as conspiracy theories. Perhaps I was wrong.
I can certainly believe that the bloated military and security agencies are highly motivated to identify a new ‘enemy’ to justify their existence and maybe this time the ‘enemy’ is Americans who’re viewed as supremacists or simply not sufficiently progressive. If true, that’s a very scary scenario.
For me, the most significant statement in this article, which, sadly, was not discussed further, was:
“His counsel to Americans who fear the rise of an oligarchic ruling class was not to storm the Capitol or elect a Caesar, but to get out and start something new. He saw an answer to the revolutionary spiral not in violence but federalism achieved through exodus. “Were the deplorables to struggle for the partisan power to oppress the others, they would guarantee dysfunction at best, war at worst,” he wrote in March this year. “That is why it makes most sense for them to assert their own freedom.””
When I first posted this comment, I wrote, “I wish the author had explained Codevilla’s meaning behind the phrase ‘federalism achieved through exodus.’ To me, it sounds remarkably like secession of some states from the union.” Then I noticed the author had supplied a link to Codevilla’s original essay. And what an essay it is.
Codevilla advocates a return to true federalism with states enacting their own laws to contain the policies of the ruling progressive oligarchy, as well as local associations to deal with such issues as school boards forcing a progressive curriculum on students. He also mentions legal challenges to hold corporations and non-profits accountable to reputational and other damage inflicted on people who disagree with woke ideology. If you’re interested in how to resist the progressive agenda I certainly recommend this essay.
I’ve now found another author I have to research at the library.
I could be wrong but it seems that your last paragraph could be talking about Europe. If you see Europe as a loose federation of states today, there is now a battle between Poland and the EU – this battle is clearly about Poland wanting the economic benefits without taking the progressive ideas.
Particularly important is the problem of the legal battles. The European Court is at the pinnacle of the legal mountain and it is always going to support the progressives in Brussels. Is this not the same in the USA? You (Codevilla, I mean) talk about legal challenges to stop the progressives but doesn’t the Supreme Court always win the battles? And this is clearly a political animal.
Brexit was the ultimate escape from the ‘federation’. But the progressives here are dying to get back to the old ways. The Labour Party, home of all the woke ideas, would rejoin Europe so that their members could have long wokeful exchanges with their counterparts in the other states. A kind of woke utopia.
The Supreme Court is malleable and will bend under pressure and the Democrats are only too well aware of this. All they need to do is feed their allies in the media and the Supreme Court will quickly be diminished and, under threat of reform will quickly fall into line. Roosevelt pulled this trick in the 1930s to push through some very unconstitutional polices.
The Court does seem to bend. But the public is becoming upset over the bending. Whether public opinion can get the Court to adjust remains to be seen.
And the Republicans weren’t aware of this?
“battle is clearly about Poland wanting the economic benefits without taking the progressive ideas”..
What the hell are you talking about buddy ? After 1980-89 CIA led “transformation”, Poland went through complete de-industrialization and destruction of traditional family farming, which cause several millions of Poles to leave their country in the order to survive and thousands commit suicide. Do you f*****g think that’s not enough “concession” for “your progressive thought”, of the fu*king European Union, which is a fraud-instrument controlled by United States of global disease called “free market” capitalism ?
Good analysis as always but I think there’s at once more reason to be concerned – but also more reason to be optimistic. For example:
9/11 – the politicians said no to the warnings provided by the security industries – and paid the price. It then swung the other way with no politician wanting to be caught out like that again, and by and large the public championed this. See also: covid.
More specifically:
They indeed are highly motivated to find the new enemy and go at great lengths to do so. And yes, to a certain degree it justifies their existence. But that is their job to do that and they should not stop. It’s instead up to those we elect to say yes or no to them. And here is the failing.
I don’t believe there is the coherence or competence at all levels of government to have the control and drive to restrict freedoms. Arguably worse, we sleep walk towards it as incremental decisions are made to reduce freedom in the relentless pursuit of safety and in the case of politicians, popularity.
And the optimism? These are not monolithic organisations, but huge entities largely made up of normal people who have families and live in the same society as us. Many do not agree with the overall trajectory but are powerless to do much to halt it individually.
What we lack is the leadership and the belief to shake us out of this nonsense in both government and private enterprise. Poor leadership leads to weak decisions designed to satisfy the nearest and most simple issues rather than the coherence and strength to address long term problems.
From that I take comfort that we are misguidedly rather than deliberately heading towards chaos. And therefore it should be easier to turn around.
“They indeed are highly motivated to find the new enemy and go at great lengths to do so. And yes, to a certain degree it justifies their existence. But that is their job to do that and they should not stop. It’s instead up to those we elect to say yes or no to them. And here is the failing.”
HaHaaa, sure – even Trump could not reign them in one inch. They are so powerful the security agencies are a force to themselves. They are as powerful as a 4 th member of government now – 1) Supreme Court, 2) Legislature, 3) Executive, and 4) Covert security. AND they have the goods on the other 3, and they are untouchable.
They are the snarling German Shepherd dogs on the chain held by the Global Elites, although I think even the Elites may be a bit wary of them too…
Fantastic article, more will be very welcome as this Global and Domestic Elite is the ISSUE of the age as Hitler and Tojo were in 1930s, and every bit as important to understand.
“identify a new ‘enemy’ to justify their existence and maybe this time the ‘enemy’ is Americans who’re viewed as supremacists or simply not sufficiently progressive. If true, that’s a very scary scenario.”
I used to be a lot more outspoken on China and the Global elites, and all manner of incorrect things, and have had my warning when Homeland showed up to talk to me, showing me what could happen if they did wish to push it, instead they just let it go that time as I had my scare, all on some evidence planted by some one…. It vary much can happen, the security state is running into rogue terrority more and more. Biden is loosing them onto the dissidents in ways history has always led to tyranny, but I have longer experience of them, back to the Obama years. They are to be feared, they are gone feral.
“According to America’s liberal intelligentsia, the open collaboration between corporations and state organs monopolised by the Democratic Party is unimportant compared to the fascist threat coming from “anti-American” conservatives.”
Oh boy the irony and the shamelessness! Check out Mussolini’s definition of fascism. Open collaboration between corporations and state organs was his definition of fascism in a nutshell. Hmm… could this so called anti-fascism crusade just be a smokescreen for our betters to secure more power?
In the US, selective enforcement of the law makes it hard to fight back. For example, Scott Smith was arrested at a June 22, 2021, school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, for disorderly conduct. The arrest kept him from asking about the May rape of his daughter by a boy in a dress in a high school girls room.
In the meeting, the school board said there had been no incidents connected to their transgender bathroom policy. The arrest was used in a letter to Attorney General Garland to ask for FBI protection for school board members from angry parents. Garland sent out a letter asking the FBI to investigate the parents as domestic terrorists.
The rape kit from Smith’s daughter tested positive. However, the school board just quietly transferred the alleged rapist to another school. In early October, he raped another girl. The two cases against the boy are still pending. The school board claims it can’t expel him.
Democrat Terry McAuliffe is running for Governor of Virginia. He says parents should have no input into what their kids study at school, or how the schools are run. Hopefully angry parents will defeat him November 3rd. However, it ain’t who votes, but who counts the votes. The parents will have to overcome a margin of fraud to win.
Excellent point. I touched on this above, but you provide essential details and context. Well done, you!
The elites are inevitably drawn to the institutions where power and money preside. Whilst previously this might have meant gravitating to the dominate local industry, whose various differing and competing interests prevented a united front, today it increasingly means working for the state.
With the modern state consuming an ever larger proportion of a nations wealth it’s no longer clear where the interests of the state end and the those of the elite begin. The function of the state now seems to be endless perpetuation of the state, for the benefit of the state. As long as certain industries are willing to participate in this, in return for political favours, there is really no alternative opposition in Americas upper class, save Mavericks like Trump and those industries in decline. Most movements require at least some support from the elite to succeed. Starved of the financial, technical and legal support that the upper classes can provide, grass roots movements will struggle even when they triumph in elections. Those who run the state do not take kindly to the wrong candidate being elected.
The hope must be that eventually the modern state begins to collapse under its own bloated weight. Unfortunately, it may already be in the position where it is too big to fail, and as before, it will not be the elites who pay when it needs to be bailed out.
I entirely agree but when you say “As long as certain industries are willing to participate in this, in return for political favours” I would go a stage further and say state protection from competition and a large slice of the tax take.
When you look at how much Big Tech gained from Covid-19 lockdowns, in terms of increased web traffic and online sales, it’s easy to see some of the motivation for online censorship disguised as “community standards.” Further motivation comes from the protection government gives to Big Tech from smaller competitors. Government allows Big Tech to buy out competitors with no concern for anti-trust. In some cases, like the termination of Parler, government looks the other way on obvious conspiracies in restraint of trade.
I would like Jacob Siegel to write more often for Unherd.
A wise person once said “It doesn’t matter who you vote for, the Government always gets in.”
Yes, the best analogy of politics is that it’s a multi-headed beast. No matter what you feed it, it all goes to the same stomach.
I’ve often wondered why people go in for politics when there seems so much abuse and lack of job satisfaction. But it seems that politics can be a route to affluence. Johnson is only worth £2m now but I imagine that will change. Blair is worth tens of millions. Nancy Pelosi and husband are worth $300m. That’s alluring.
Also, there is the promotion of failed politicians into other jobs. The EU is packed with such people. Matt Hancock who resigned in disgrace has got a UN voluntary role. Maybe the ruling class is suspicious of newcomers in case they are disruptors. In their minds, a politician may have failed but they won’t rock the boat and their self-supporting hegemony continues.
Bliar. The man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. I don’t know how he sleeps at night. My only consolation is that he can’t take it with him, and it will be awfully hot where he’s going.
Sadly, the managerial janissaries have many weapons in their armory. The PMC allying with trade unions to enforce groupthink, for example.
https://staging.unherd.com/2021/10/how-my-union-betrayed-me/
The universal franchise is literally all we have to now save us, which is why the oligarchy is now trying to denude democracy of it’s potency.
Orwell was right; ““If there was hope, it must lie in the proles”.
Some thoughts:
Like J Bryant, I did not know this guy but will dig deeper. Thank you, UnHerd.
The USA has been in continuous decline for the last 60 or so years, largely because of empire building and bad leadership. The former is completely unnecessary, the later is perhaps inevitable. Start learning Mandarin.
Since Mr. Codevilla’s passing, the USA has gone from a Cold Civl War to at least a war one, and I predict that there will be an actual–neighbor shooting neighbor Civl War soon. I do not welcome a Civil War, but I do completely favor the disillusion of the United States–not united, but divided–and I don’t want to be a citizen of a country where half of my fellow citizens share none of my values. So let’s break up, though I don’t see this happening. What I do see is shooting….
With respect, I disagree with that author’s tip of the hat to Biden for leaving Afghanistan (not deserved), and strongly disagree with the premise that Biden is in charge (of anything). As someone who spent 15 minutes in American politics (still suffering PTSD, though it has given me insight into the sausage factory), I can assure you that it is 20 somethings with no life experience who are telling Biden what to do (OK, maybe 30 somethings with no life experience at the presidential level). How quickly “they” (professional politicians and would be professional politicians give in….)
I see the EU also splitting, along logical lines. Scandinavia can pull out, and have a Scandi group. Same with the Baltic states. Poland, and Hungary really do not like the EU dictating to them (BRAVO!), and I see a Central European federation emerging. Let Germany and France surrender to the hybrid war of Belarus and Russia, though even Germany, the end station of many of these phony refugees–isn’t “economic terrorists” a better and more honest term, 4K and counting–does not seem to want to repeat 2015. “Wir Schaffen das int zu Ende!” Perhaps the Central European Countries–Poland, Hungary, Czech, Slovakia can join in a federation, with a common currency. Makes more sense, no?
Oddly, the EU has arrows in its quiver (apologies to Norway) that it hasn’t used and seems to have no intention of using. If the EU and perhaps the US said “absolutely no visas for Russians (and Belarussians, though I don’t know how many there are) until it stops supporting Belarus’s hybrid warfare” I suspect that these “economic terrorist” flights would stop rather quickly. It’s certainly worth a try.
At some point, an entity becomes too big to govern; the USA has clearly reached that point and the EU seems to have as well. Look at the UK, and even that may be too big–Scotland. The smaller unions I propose–with a common currency–make more sense, and surely I don’t need to point out that the EU still does not have a common currency adopted by all of its members. Should profligate Greece with a long history of bankruptcies (See, Al Murray for a wonderful take on this) really have the same currency as fiscally conservative Sweden? What’s the point? Why reward bad behavior?
Finally, one important point the author omitted is that parents who are against what some call “critical race theory” and I call “woke re-education camps,” are now considered to be “domestic terrorists” as per the current Attorney General, who has directed the federal government to target parents as domestic terrorists because they object to their children being involuntarily baptized into the woke religion. And this clown was Obama’s Supreme Court nominee….
It is actions like this that will inevitably lead to Civil War. Lock and load!
Wow, both eye opening and clarifying on many levels. We really are screwed. I had surmised that our politics is mostly a conflict between two elite factions, and we are just the fodder (Lancasters vs York situation). But I had not factored in how modern education and university had created a monolith that made this inevitable.
This is all to change on a dime though.
The Post Modernist Neo-Marxist Liberal/Lefties who how hold such power, in the government and education, Social Media, MSM and Democrat parties
They are winning as life in the West is fat and easy. Stopping traffic over insulating homes, getting teachers fired for wrong pronouns, BLM, and on and on – this is is OK when life is full of luxury…….
But very hard times are coming FAST. The Stock market is doomed, the Central Bank currencies to be greatly devalued by inflation and Printing excess money to pay the underclasses to be quiet – this will end soon. Poverty is looming, Middle Class wrecked, working class going broke, poor getting their free money cut drastically…..Housing to be too expensive to own and rent and it to crash, services to stop and cities to become a mess…
Then the silliness of Transgender bathroom choice, and all that sort of silliness being paramount will END. The people will demand Reality return – and possibly the French Revolution sentiment will return…or the Stalinist Revolution – but when it all goes really bad, and will soon, then it will ALL change, and possibility the people will get power back.
The issue will be if the Police will beat the people down for the elites – will the soldiers shoot the civilians, or join with them???.
Secrecy is not the route to power. Money is. The turning point was Obama’s 2008 campaign when Wall Street needed to have the next president in their pocket, so they financed his campaign. Little is hid in US politics. Just follow the money and you can see who is buying which politician. It’s only if you reject this hypothesis that US politics seems a mystery.
Greatly appreciate the citation for Codevilla: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/american-exodus-angelo-codevilla-oligarchy. What an expression that captures quite well my thoughts about the direction the US has been taking. While the progressive/traditional citizens have been somewhat at war for some time, it seems the progressives imagine they can now implement their dreams. Their overreach is now more than obvious to normally tolerant traditionalists who have become more aware of the dangers ahead for them. We are seeing the kickback in many places but efforts to stop the complaints are failing. Who knows whether the American experiment survives.
“… the radicalism of his ideas.”; “Far from being radicalised …, Codevilla was radicalised …”.
Is there simply not another word that can be used? Three times it pops up in just two successive sentences. I don’t even think this word has been uttered from a church pulpit. The wealth of language in the Bible? “Codevilla was radicalised” sounds like the trendy name of a techno music band, or, seen out of context, up there with other poor or feckless souls pulled in by the glamour of Islamism.
Are they “ideas”, though, of Codevilla’s? It would be, in terms of ideas, more pertinent to ask of Big Government, What’s the big idea? Make that, Eh, what’s the big idea? (Dare you ask the President what his favourite movies and music were from back when he was very young?). Yes, a never-ending supply of radical ideas from government. We have devices in our hand. They haf veys of making you voke! That’s woke, by the way.
Perhaps, as noted in this interesting article, because Codevilla had arrived in America as a young adolescent, he retained his ability to see a bigger picture. An outsider looking down into the tank. It’s difficult to be candid about one’s fellow men. You don’t want to make them look petty. But pettiness is rife among the powerful in America. Underlying all its getting worked up by this or that is pettiness. There’s nothing radical about seeing that. But dare you let your showy, po-faced grimace twist into a sardonic smile! It’s the brave candour of Codevilla’s gaze and his ability to focus his gaze on woolly aspects of politics rather than radicalism of any ideas of his that’s what it is, and what’s surprisingly refreshing. That’s my take. So did Codevilla see the writing on the wall as far back as the Seventies?