WHO RULES AMERICA?, redux

And when, exactly did this happen?

G. William Domhof published his master work, WHO RULES AMERICA, in 1967. By my Freshman year of college, it was required reading in Sociology Intro classes, as it took a close look at the historical power center of US society: the White Anglo Saxon Protestant elite, some of whom, literally, descended from the Pilgrims. These folks and their predecessors founded the Ivy League Colleges, created enormous businesses throughout the land, and in every metropolitan area of the nation funded the great cultural, public health and social welfare institutions of our country.

From the early Twentieth Century, this power elite formed the spine of the Republican Party. Domhof would point to substantial numbers of Democratic leaders as well, but the Republicans were represented predominantly among elites. From the writers of the Federalist Papers forward there were ideological outliers, who were careful to not raise their strong views too often or too publicly.

Sometime during the Obama Presidency, these conservative outliers began moving to the center of the GOP party machinery. A new elite had raised its head up from the basement of the Republican establishment. Offering more conservative to reactionary platform ideas and people steeped in their thinking ready to run for and/or hold public office, they found their spear-carrier in 2015/16, and fueled Donald Trump’s Presidential Campaign. Trump knew in his guts that he was speaking to the masses, many of whom hadn’t voted in many elections. He’d had years of self-enrichment marketing lousy products to the masses and endearing himself to working Americans with his rough language, crude and racist humor and the repeated blowing of “dog whistles.” Here he was in all his glory, scion of an elite NY family, Ivy League educated, on the same level as millions of disenchanted Americans, who somehow believed him as near-messianic in his certainty, “that only I can solve these problems.”

These millions did have their own internet sites, their own preferred ideologues, and their own political organizations, e.g., the Federalist Society, that worked to train and inclulcate thousands of promising lawyers to serve as conservative and libertarian leaders on benches: state and federal. Trump’s election in 2016, in process of which, he demolished scions of traditional conservative Republicans like Jeb Bush or John Kasich, created the inflection point. He’d cleared the field, and with strong support from the activists of that “movement” populated an administration dedicated to dismantling the “administrative state.”

Perhaps the most lasting legacy, enabled by then Senate Majority Leader, Mitch McConnell, is populating wide swaths of the Federal bench with Federalist Society judges. With the 3 conservative justices already on the Supreme Court, appointing three more, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Comey Barrett, with a race to the finish line, meant that by the end of Trump’s term, his judicial ideology and activist-caste was ensconced on the Federal bench and able to rapidly become the most consequential in American history.

This new power elite supplanted the traditional ladies and gentlemen of the Republican establishment, and had few qualms about working with today’s Brown Shirts—Proud Boys, et.al.—to spearhead the cementing of the new power elite. If until Tuesday, you had questions about these observations, listening to the moving testimony of conservative Republican Secretaries of State and Election Commissioners before the January 6 House Committee should have answered your last qualms to acknowledge that there’s been a new sheriff policing the new Power Elite. They’ll intimidate local poll workers, threaten their families with bodily harm or prison terms, commit innumerable acts of fraud while lying that the opposite party is doing exactly what they’ve done. Once more, the end justifies the means. The end: control the levers of power, not just this year, but for as long as they can hold and control power.

Yesterday, their judicial backstop, intending to enshrine these reactionary changes and laws in place decided that a 240 year insurance that “freedom of religion”—a fundamental motive to break from Europe and a guarantee of individual rights in America no longer was needed. Justice John Robert, “the moderate” conservative voice on SCOTUS wrote the opinion. So with an ironclad 6 Federalist Society majority on the Supreme Court, red state gerrymandered republican majorities, and a state election infrastructure now deeply committed to Trump’s useful and persuasive (for millions) big lie, all that’s needed is for Democrats to continue doing little to nothing.

The first big test is just around the corner in November. There is always a counterforce in American political life. But we who care so deeply about America’s social evolution had better be active in this November’s bi'-election efforts.