This website began in 2005 and continued weekly and sometimes daily until 2018. Its purpose was to comment on and interpret events in the USA (and occasionally the UK) within the context of the rise to power of the Media Class, America’s first genuine and thus revolutionary Ruling Class.
Karl Marx’s great claim was that economic classes had been the source of human division and conflict since the dawn of civilization. His particular categorization of classes – and his attempt to neatly dress them in the science of his day – unfortunately has led to the widespread dismissal of his concepts of “Class Interest,” “Class Conflict,” “Ruling Classes” and “Class Revolution”.
Marx based his research on European events – and particularly the industrial revolution in England – where class conflicts, economic, social and political, were sharply and cruelly exposed.
Two things need to be noted along the way.
- Marx further undermined his theory by seeking to use it, not only to promote radical political action and economic change, but also to clothe Socialism in the armor of historical and scientific inevitability.
- The new Nation State of America was uniquely created on almost-unoccupied land, by people escaping ruling classes, and arriving with nothing. They devised a constitutional framework they thought would be a permanent bulwark against “class rule” emerging.
This website maintains they were wrong.
Marx was right to claim that powerful groups (classes) are formed by the very occasional and accidental combination of advances in technology, favorable economic circumstances and weakened social mores. Such “perfect storms” are rare, and it does not automatically follow that a class thus created has the ingredients and potential power of an aspiring ruling class.
In 1709, when Telford’s Abraham Darby III began smelting iron with coke, he had no idea that he was preparing the way for an Industrial Revolution that would create a new class of industrialists. Very favorable circumstances enabled this new class to grow in power and wealth, acquire an identity, and develop a self-serving agenda that required the overthrow of the ruling aristocratic landowner class. The new class was revolutionary because it sought and won political/legislative power and the destruction of the old traditional culture. It used that legislative power in Parliament to remove and replace everything that stood in the way of its class interest. (Americans please note!)
That it won without a civil war has much to do with the willingness of the landowning class to abandon its dependent agricultural workers to poverty and join the new rulers in sharing the spoils and power. And like all new and numerically small ruling classes, it made alliances with minor classes to increase its reach and numbers.
By around the 1960s, film-making in Hollywood, radio as news and entertainment, and the invention of television, had created new economic classes in America, but they were rivals.
It took the sudden explosion of popular demand for television entertainment to bring together a new class with real power and huge potential. Full employment, a TV set in every American home and the expansion of shift work led to a lucrative market for 24-hour programing. This could only be met by the marriage of TV and Hollywood. TV simply could not produce enough entertainment to satisfy demand. It needed Hollywood’s films, actors and technicians. A marriage took place.
The final development that innocently gifted the emerging new class with awesome power was the abandonment of the distinction between news and entertainment. A camouflaged propaganda weapon was born. It is with us today and more powerful and insidious than anything yet devised by any past totalitarian regime.
When I began writing Radical and Right in 2005, I frequently described how the new Ruling Class had expanded by digesting advertising, fashion, professional sport, theater, and much more. But I had no idea that through internet communication for the masses, the tech giants of Silicon Valley would become dominant members of the new Ruling Media Class and enable it to silence free speech, recruit and intimidate business corporations, and brazenly and ruthlessly persecute all who resisted.
It could be argued that the Industrial Class, which pushed aside the old aristocracy, nevertheless was in many ways a force for progress. Its members were very moderate social revolutionaries and not interested in erasing 2000 years of hard-earned Christian wisdom and its Greek and Roman precursors. Many were craftsmen who invented things, and few were ideologues.
The Media Class, whose roots lie in Hollywood, the artificial world of theater, and the Arts, manufactures make-belief as its prime product. Its workers and practitioners have always been dominated by fugitives from the real world, attracted by its offer of escape from the bonds of normality. It is a dangerous mix of sexual perverts, sexual predators, psychopaths, narcissists, neurotics, drug addicts and permanently dysfunctional children. As a Ruling Class and like all ruling classes in history, its members are driven to remake society in their own collective image. This essential task is revolutionary and the goal requires the forcible erasure of the old society, its history and – most of all – its morality.
Somewhere around the 1970s, the emerging Ruling Class, as befits a movement driven by a revolutionary quest for power, began purging its own house of remnants of the old culture. Harmless, moral and popular family shows were gradually eliminated (e.g. The Honeymooners). The people’s comedy shows, gently poking fun at all aspects of life and all human beings, often expertly acted and scripted (Nat Hiken’s Phil Silvers Show and Car 54) but rarely politically partisan – and never shocking and never profane – were systematically purged and replaced by talentless young pretenders with a nihilistic political agenda, dirty talk and all marching to a radical, anti-family Feminist agenda.
Into the archives went the old crime and Western themes in which good triumphed over evil, men were chivalrous and women were feminine. Militant, emotionally unhappy – usually lesbian, bi-sexual or the sexually insatiable – feminists were welcomed into the Media Class ranks where they had access to the bully pulpit. They created a new language of victimization with which they attacked the traditional family, Christianity, maleness, reproduction, normal humor and normal male/female relationships.
If you have read this far and recognize the Ruling Media Class at work in your life and in America’s politics, you will be truly “woke.”
Having purged its own house of reactionary cultural elements, the Media Class emerged strengthened by inner discipline and in need of a political party to capture legislative power. A revolutionary mission to replace “old-fashioned” morality and traditional culture required a party of the Left and – ideally – one with a mass following. The cultural purging of the Democratic Party (and its ancillary Unions) began.
The MSM (Mainstream Media) created litmus tests for candidates for office, awarding good publicity to those it favored, and bad publicity to those who represented “old” values. Leftist economic policies, though supported by the MSM, took second place to abortion, homosexual normalization and all those behaviors that may be categorized as permissive. “Permissive” stretched to a woman choosing to be a single parent (a Feminist priority) and having a welfare right in place of the income and role that a man would have provided. It soon became impossible for a Democratic Party office-holder at any level, even rank-and file membership, to be pro-life or to point out that African-Americans would suffer by abandoning marriage.
The Democratic Party began to part company with much of the working class at this point. Those industrial workers drifting away were replaced by the growth of the government white-collar workforce and government unions who could afford to promote ‘moral’ issues over economic ones.
In 2008, the MSM chose Barack Obama to be President. For eight years, with the pen, the phone, the connivance of the Courts, the energetic approval of the MSM, and the surrender of the self-serving Republicans in Congress, he quietly took America to the cusp of a completed revolution. By the end of his Presidency, traditional marriage had been devalued; the Courts had been packed with Far Leftists; the highest ranks of the military, the FBI and CIA had been purged of patriots and seeded with perverts; and federal government institutions had been fully politicized with radical activists. None of this could have been achieved without the approval and absolute complicity of America’s journalists – and the gutlessness of most Republican legislators.
It remained only for the Media Class and its Far-Left allies to win Congress and the Presidency in November 2016. Total control of the legislative process would cement the final seamless transformation of the USA into a revolutionary new society, spirited by legal means and without violence, past a somnambulant American people.
The ambitious, totally unscrupulous Hillary Clinton was judged a willing tool in the White House to preside over the transition and going forward to front the new regime. The first Black President was to be followed by the first woman President, two meaningless qualifications but drenched in shallow symbolism for a genuinely Revolutionary era.
Jeb Bush was adjudged by the impatient Ruling Media Class to be the perfect Republican ‘loser,’ though the rest of the pack of Republican office-holding time-servers, vying for the approaching electoral defeat, were little better.
As the Media Class scribblers and wafflers prepared to coronate Hillary Clinton, a jester emerged from the Republican pack.
The next article will assess the character of Donald Trump and the awakening of the people’s nationalism.