Angelo Codevilla, who died recently, was an eloquent essayist. A favorite of many people is his 2010 essay on America’s Ruling Class.

while most of the voters who call themselves Democrats say that Democratic officials represent them well, only a fourth of the voters who identify themselves as Republicans tell pollsters that Republican officeholders represent them well. Hence officeholders, Democrats and Republicans, gladden the hearts of some one-third of the electorate — most Democratic voters, plus a few Republicans. This means that Democratic politicians are the ruling class’s prime legitimate representatives and that because Republican politicians are supported by only a fourth of their voters while the rest vote for them reluctantly, most are aspirants for a junior role in the ruling class. In short, the ruling class has a party, the Democrats. But some two-thirds of Americans — a few Democratic voters, most Republican voters, and all independents — lack a vehicle in electoral politics.

Later,

Supposedly, modern society became so complex and productive, the technical skills to run it so rare, that it called forth a new class of highly educated officials and cooperators in an ever less private sector. . .In fact, our ruling class grew and set itself apart from the rest of us by its connection with ever bigger government, and above all by a certain attitude.

I think that this is actually true. Our lives have become way more complex. In the past, people understood how their tools worked and they could fix things that were broken. A farmer in 1800 probably could fix almost anything on the farm that broke. As recently as the 1950s, many people with no formal training in auto mechanics could fix cars.

Today, I think we are reliant on experts to a much greater extent than ever before. But the relationship between knowledge and power is out of kilter: people with too little knowledge have too much power.

My latest essay.

It strikes me that successful politicians, at least nowadays, are very high in “dark triad” traits. It seems obviously true of Clinton (both of them), Obama, Trump, and Biden (does Biden feel an ounce of remorse over Hunter Biden’s graft, the misguided drone strike in Afghanistan, or anything else?).

This is in reaction to an interview on Quillette with evolutionary psychologist David Buss. The essay also highlights recent output from various FITs stars, including Robert Wright, Glenn Loury, Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Wesley Yang.

In a roundtable organized for Tablet by David Samuels, Angelo Codevilla said,

The current American elites hold every lever of power. But their power is brittle. They no longer try to persuade. They command and find ways of hurting and mocking the reticent. No organization that lives by pulling rank can be considered strong.

I think of this in terms of the distinction between a prestige hierarchy and a dominance hierarchy. When the elite uses dominance moves, that shows that it has lost prestige.

You probably want to read the whole discussion. It concludes with Codevilla saying “If we end up looking like Brazil, we should count ourselves lucky.”

In other words, have a nice day.

Jason D. Hill argues that blacks should lose their blackness.

This will not mean that they will cease referring to themselves as black. The world at large, as I have said, has picked out morphological markers and racialized them. In a very real way, people of color are stuck with those designators. But they can cease identifying psychologically and morally with the burdensome evil of racial ascription and all the ways in which it circumscribes life. Black Americans may learn the process of decoupling their robust or even surface self-images and depth-identities from racial-inflicted, denigrating identities designed for them for myriad reasons.

His piece goes 180 degrees against current trends. It aligns with my thinking.

Zaid Jilani writes,

Because we’re taking pleasure in the pain of complete strangers—all we know is that they belong to the opposite faction, so they must be awful people—it’s much harder for us to slam the brakes and recognize that we’re starting to bask in sadism.

. . .There is a reason our greatest traditions, both religious and secular, tell us to love our enemies. That imperative is particularly important in the face of rising social and political polarization. The people opposite us in our big debates are our fellow citizens, and they deserve respect. Only by affirming that truth can we successfully tackle something as daunting as a global pandemic and build the social and civic bonds we need to maintain our grand experiment in pluralistic democracy.

You are unlikely to be a moral exemplar when you define yourself by the groups you hate.

Joshua Mitchell writes,

when Christianity reigned, transgression and innocence could not be decoupled from repentance, atonement, and forgiveness. Without these, life withers. For the moment—perhaps forever?—the reign of Christianity is behind us. What walks about is a ghoulish and deadly creature that lives by killing the living creatures that remain. It does this by scapegoating them, by attributing to them transgressions that must be purged—and giving them no means to repent, atone, or be forgiven. Identity politics is the macabre confirmation of the permanence of the Christian language of transgression and innocence; and it is the chilling confirmation that the age of Christianity has passed.

In a much longer piece, Anne Applebaum writes,

In the 19th century, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel argued for the replacement of exactly that kind of rigidity with a worldview that valued ambiguity, nuance, tolerance of difference—the liberal worldview—and that would forgive Hester Prynne for her mistakes. The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.” Alexis de Tocqueville wrote about this problem, too. It was a serious challenge in 19th-century America, and is again in the 21st century.