The battle of class inside the GOP is a microcosm of what once was the battle between the two parties, but is no more. The lordships seem to have won that fight it seems. It also may be the final battle in a war that began approximately 235 years ago.

      It doesn't matter to me if you'd prefer to notch one up for Darwin, and allow that America is a product of natural selection, or the opposite, that America is from the hand of Providence.
      I go with the latter, but even the former explanation would make modern Darwinists very uncomfortable by its implications. For either approach would have to agree that America is indeed a novel social and political arrangement compared to all the rest of the world's history, and both would agree that this strangeness arises from the fact that America arose from the loins of ordinary men and women...made free. Vassals no more. We like to call them "C-students" here.
     I submit that this is the source of all hatred for America in certain quaters around the world and in teh US...just as it is the source of respect, and admiration from yet other sector of the world's populations.
     Whatever her faults, scars, and scabs, America represents an ideal of freedom and liberty that is universal, and so powerful an impact has this strange new design had on the world that from her benchmarks all the other 'isms have been built, by way of competition and comparison. Even the communists had to call themselves "democracies".
     One can rail against American power, economic and otherwise, her coarse manners, or arrogance (of late) but even the most pious socialist and wannabe aristocrat has to pay lip service to the foundations of human liberty established here. They couldn't draw a single onlooker around their wagon to pitch their patent medicine otherwise. Even Karl Marx had to pretend he was out for the little guy. He even made the common man seem cool on campus, where there has always been a smoldering resentment (in America especially) against the achievements of C-students...but only as an object of pity and exploitation.
     In Man's political history, America has been the game changer. And yes, I think God had a hand in it, for it is clear to me that He does not like the exercise of ruthless power by one man over another, and likes this even less when that one man substitutes himself for Himself.
     The North American continent simply provided a secure petrie dish for this great experiment (making the Providential case even stronger), so that the culture could begin splitting cells for newer generations without any great interruptions. This went on for about three generations, marked by intermittent drowsiness over the true meaning of the experiment's nature, as set out in the original lab manual (the Constitution). So, this period was followed by that one inevitable blood letting (over slavery) the Founders knew would one day come, followed by an infusion of still more new cells from around the world, and an industrial expansion the likes the world had never seen.
     It goes without saying that mutating cells cannot grow and mature and multiple without being attacked from the outside, as well as being vulnerable to genetic weaknesses in their own structure. America's petrie dish had its hands full, especially after the Civil War. Over the next three generations we suffered a new viral threat (industrial oligopoly), alongside the re-awakened dark visage of the natural enemy of the "liberty embryo", the ancient feudal overlord, who had "managed" the lives of these cells elsewhere in the world since the beginning of time, and by this time referred to as "the state".
     This industrial enemy our cells managed quite well, thank you, (after some fits and starts), thanks to free markets and the rise of a small business middle class which ripped Marx's entire vision to shreds. But the other, more ancient Enemy was never fully eradicated by our Revolution and had laid dormant for years, just itching to get back into the game. This Enemy has gone by different names for millenia, but we call it "statism" here, although it has been known as "elitism" in its most narcissistic state, "socialism" in it most academic, "fascism" in its most thuggish, and "progressivism" in it most fashionable. No matter, they can all be identified by one single thesis, which is easily noticed in the most commonplace speech of the day in America, as when one says that someone else ought to be made to do this or that because it is good for still someone else. In the end, that beneficiary is always the speaker, and that poor soul who must do the doing is one the speaker looks down upon with some disdain. That thesis, whether dressed up by the French, who attempted to turn it into a noble birthright (royalty and aristocracy) or the English who tried to gentrify it by acquired merit, or Marx, who tried to paint it with the lipstick of the social engineer, was always "If God had not intended them to be managed he would not have made them a herd."
    How low have we sunk? That sentiment is now shared by the average 19-30 year old, still living in Mom's basement, playing his xBox in his bathrobe, waiting for a phone call for a job interview.
    Oh well. Our maturing culture faced yet another blood letting as the darker side of statism reared its head in the 1940s, but despatched, we once again fell off into our previous state of drowsiness, allowing statism to reemerge from its hole to beckon our herd with its sometimes wagging and nagging, and sometimes seducing, come-hither finger of dependence.
    So pervasive has been this pull from this lethargy the past forty years that it does appear to be the fly in the buttermilk of the Founder's design...so much so that many are beginning to say this is the fatal flaw in our constitutional design. Or, as they say in France, "Whew! Finally."
    Recalling the ups and downs of the refugee children of Israel in their trek from Egypt, alternately begging Yahweh for protection, feasting at the table He set, then erecting new gods to replace Him, like children in need of constant attention and reward...they were eventually denied admission into the Promised Land. Only their children and children's childen could go. We could make an analogy in the way the American people keep turning their backs to the original intent of the Founders, the Constitution, to the gratitude of their forebears and to the honor of Liberty itself. Maybe God is just getting a little fed up, and considering making us wander around in this  wilderness of our own creation for a generation, before allowing our children to once again taste the sweet nectar of Liberty. I'm not sure just yet. Time will tell. Or maybe this Darwinian mutation called America truly has finally run its course.
     What I do know is that the original design was not flawed...just as I also know the failures of our culture has not been due to the natural (genetic) negligence and incompetence of the common man and women; the herd. In that I am heartened.
    The fault, dear Brutus, lies in our betters.
   
    That's a helluva lead-up to a discussion of class warfare inside the GOP, and is certainly not designed to improve my standing with party leaders or for that matter, the conservative movement.
    Interestingly it is the GOP, and not the Democrats or the extreme Left who actually magnify this idea of "class" as being more ancient than all the statist 'isms of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and therefore, more cultural and less political. There is a clear, apolitical, nay, unpolitical line running straight from the feudal nobility of the Merovingians to the modern Me-ists of Middlebury. It is based on nothing more than a self-appointed class awareness.
     We've written about this much on this site. The Founders understood the nature of this natural Enemy to liberty long before Marx, but not only in the royal or aristocratic sense, but in the sense of the inner need of the wealthy, powerful, educated and better bred, people of station, to simply need to be able to lord it over their lessers. They knew there would always be men (and women) who would simply wish to gain power over others...but not just because they could, but because they thought it right that they should. The obverse of the statist thesis, above: "If God had not intended me to manage the herd, he would have placed me outside, and above, it."
In modern college parlance, "What's the benefit of being smarter than Bubba if I can't somehow show it?" (You can fill in the blanks of just what "somehow" translates to be these days."
      The Founders understood this inclination among some men, and designed into law a way for lesser men, who were also far more numerous, to be able to resist the unwanted advances of these men, but not so as to keep them separate, but to bring them together reciprocally. Here, we've often called that the "handshake", so that common men and women would then be able to select/elect among their "betters" who would be entitled to lead them, forsaking the self-appointed.
      It's simple when you stop to think about. And it's simple because it was written for the common people..."Suffer the little children..."

      The Constitution was not conceived and written so as to provide a basis to debate this notion, for this sentiment exists as a matter of nature within people. Always has, always will. The Constitution was designed to give the people, the masses, the C-Students the absolute power to defeat it. Period. To wrap it up and gag it. To send it to its room without supper. To swat it over the nose with a rolled up newspaper.
     We have written much about the failure of the "protectors" of the Constitution, both the elected and un-elected variety. That failure has manifest itself in that handshake between the upper realms of society and those down at the base being withdrawn. Part of that handshake is in education, or as Rush Limbaugh calls it, "teaching", so as to pull those folks up. We agree with his analysis. Good leadership carries with it an element of education, sometimes in the mere watching, since most everyone wants to emulate a good leader in one characteristic or another.
     The Democrats have answered the dilemma of leadership and the handshake in another way, but also quite easily. Having no use for the Constitution anyway, they've just gone around it and bribed everyone. They have their own plantation (actually several) where they keep these constituents, and a large part of their political agenda is to keep them fed...lest they all get angry and someday cross the tracks. This is how Democrats manage their C-students...with crumbs...and a fence.
     No libel ever accused the GOP of harboring "socialist" ideology, so whatever their social disdain for their lessers, it is not inspired by Marx. GOP class orientation being more ancient, in some ways makes their disdain for their lessers even more craven. It is more French than German.
     What I can't understand about class snobbery in the party that sent 600,000 men to die liberating illiterate black people that most had never even seen before, is why are they even here...in this party?
     Yes I know, the party of Curtis and Lincoln turned into the party or Pierpont Morgan and John D in a short forty years, but still...
     ...do the math. Republicans, let alone Republican elitists, can't do what Democrat elitists can do now...even if they wanted to....which begs a whole new line of questions. JP would have figured that out in a heartbeat. For one, the Republican base won't go where the Democrat base has gone. They won't be driven or prodded like cattle, they won't be teased, or fooled (more than once) and they have never developed a taste for crumbs. They haven't been spoon fed and bribed the past forty years. You can cut them loose, but you cannot drag them along, toward a new plantation, er, promised land with a snell hook in their belly.
     So, honestly, I can't figure out the thinking of this wing of the GOP, especially from the East, who believe the party can only grow by first chucking this very, very large base.
     The M'Cain embarrassment of '08 has already proved the simplemindedness of this notion. There's no telling how many Republicans voted for Obama rather than M'Cain, but we know enough stayed home to possibly have swung the election, at least in some key districts and states. And Obama cleaned house with the "moderate" vote in general. What would these urbane Republicans have us do to increase our draw that wasn't done in '08?
      And sadly, for their case, Arlen Specter let the cat out of the bag when he more or less acknowledged that the only reason a moderate candidate becomes a Republican in the first place is because that is the only way he/she can realize a personal political ambition (i, e., the Democrat field was too crowded.). There is nothing, I repeat, nothing, intrinsically wonderful about the Republican Party...its founding roots, its constitutional grounding, its economic platform, its looking out for the little guy...unless maybe as his keeper...that would cause any moderate to choose to become a Republican out of conscience. Even Big Money has gravitated leftward. (There's cultural reasons for that as well.)
      But GOP moderates tip their other hand as well by articulating two reasons why the conservatives, especially social conservatives have to go. One is immigration, about which they may have the better argument...but one for negotiation, not dismissal. I simple haven't seen anyone rolling up his sleeves and extending the hand of reciprocity to acquaint the social conservatives with his side of the argument.
     The other great issue is abortion, or to be more succinct, the pro-life position. The GOP moderate position vis a vis conservatives here is an absolute mystery to me, inasmuch as their position is in the minority, by a wide margin, within the party, but possibly even so in the broader culture. Pro-life was never that far behind in polling, even in its hey-day of killing tens of thousands in the 70s-80s, and has been trending back toward life ever since. Even in the Democrat Party pro-life sentiment is very strong, especially among blacks and Latinos, who alas, are being dragged along politically anyway with that snell hook in their bellies.
     The decline of the number of abortions in the past several years (it may once again grow as the Administration intends to end the Welfare Reform Act and get those mommies back on welfare) has proven that the underlying "rights" issue (which was about the worst legally-reasoned case ever handed down by the Supreme Court, anyway) was based more on class than rights, and affluent class more than  poverty class. With a large number of abortions today, it seems to be more of a convenience and cosmetic issue than economic one.
     We believe there has always been a negotiation basis, inasmuch as the proper venue for establishing abortion "rights" was always the states. That was what was so horribly wrong with Roe. Get rid of Roe and the right to an abortion doesn't end, it just goes back to the states. One could get a legal abortion in the US before Roe. (Then it will be state supreme courts telling legislatures they can't outlaw it. Pyrrhic victory? We think not.)
     In the end, I can't understand how GOP moderates hope to grow, by first cutting off a large part of their party (OK, a small part in Connecticut and Maine, but say, 70% in the South) with no plan as to how to entice them in the party one their key issues have been trumped.
     My only common sense conclusion is that perhaps GOP moderates are in fact Democrats in drag, sleeper Dem's who actually want to reduce the size of the party to a permanent state of dependence on the Democrat majority...but where they could be put in a safe and secure (and hereditary) position in government as the Minority Party in Perpetuity. (Can anyone come up with a fitting name from the acronym MICHEL?)
     Conspiracy? No, class.

     We've already said our piece about the GOP needing a banner....and that banner has to be the Constitution. But the reasons for Constitution were those Vassals-No-More. If the GOP cannot embrace them as the Founders did then that part of the GOP who cannot should go. If there is no party that stands for the Vassals-No-More, and no party that stands against the notion of overlordship, no matter how benign then we vassals-no-more need to find a new home...quickly. The clock is ticking. We are not looking for kinder, gentler drovers.
     What is so remarkable to me is that it would be infinitely more easy to go onto the plantations of the Democrats, places even Rush Limbaugh can't get to, and their vassals over to the Vassals-No-More camp than it ever would be find that one little niche issue in a Democrat moderate that might make them to want to switch sides. With a full 20% of the American population living in abject servitude, but also with the right to vote, it is a no-brainer to as to where the stress of my campaigns the next few season would be. There is Principle, Policy and Process, in that order, and in '10 and '12 we should see a rising menu of Principle and Policy directed at the Democrats' greatest mistake...they still let those folks vote.
     If the GOP is telling us that they cannot find a single selling point from the Constitution, the heroism of the Founders, the spirit of liberty, the bones of the half million who died freeing slaves, and the quarter million who died freeing the rest of the world, that might appeal to a other-side-of -the-track Democrat "client", perhaps in New Orleans, who is still looking for that ladder out of the warm, snug hole the Democrats keep her in...for her childrens' sake...or a Yankee, who started it all 235 years ago, or a wealthy Oregonian who has forgotten the shoulders he stands on, ...then I would say the GOP leadership has the vision that is just about as deep as a warm pool of p**s.
Vassar Bushmills