America has a ruling class problem

The American elites are one vast social networking scheme that subsidizes each others' projects, arranges regulatory variances for one another's fiddles, places family members at elite universities and the top-tier banks, law and consulting firms, and reinforces each others' opinions. There is a bit more ideological variance tolerated than in the Chinese Communist Party, but only a bit. -- David Goldman

America has a nobility problem, and it means our leaders don't pay for their failures

Our Constitution forbids the creation of “titles of nobility.”  The Framers thought it was important enough that the prohibition appears twice, once forbidding the federal government from doing it, and elsewhere extending the ban to the states. ... 

Charles C.W. Cooke, a Brit who just recently became an American citizen, noted the practice of calling former government officials by their former titles and called it "grotesque.” It’s something he discussed in a recent book. 

"By custom, we allow our politicians to retain their titles for life. Throughout the 2012 election, Mitt Romney was referred to as 'Governor Romney,' though he had not been in public office for six years," Cooke wrote. "One can only ask, 'Why?' America being a nation of laws and not men, political power is not held in perpetuity, and there is supposed to be no permanent political class.   

"Americans do not have rulers, they have employees — men and women who can be hired and fired at will and who remain subordinate both to the highest law in the land and to the popular will that it reifies. It is wholly proper for individuals to adopt titles when they have been hired by the people. But it is utterly preposterous for those individuals to retain those titles when their commission has come to an end." 

In principle, Cooke is absolutely right. But in practice, America absolutely does have a ruling class, and a permanent political class, and they seem to be increasingly one and the same. (As Angelo Codevilla writes:  “Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust.”) And like any ruling class, they claim, and possess, privileges and immunities not available to ordinary citizens.

Read the whole thing. Also:

The next time we hear a lecture about caring from a woke Yale professor, or a sermon on systematic racism from a CEO, or more Hollywood confessional video drivel, we should pause and politely ask, 'But where do your children go to school? And why do you live where you live? And dine with whom you dine?' Then remember class, not race, is what divides America—the truth that the upscale white progressive dares not utter.