The election of President Trump made it clear that America is not engaged in politics as usual. We are in the midst of a political war.
If this wasn't evident to some observers before, the furor this week over the consulting firm Cambridge Analytica and Attorney General Jeff Sessions' firing of FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe should have driven it home. These are not ordinary political times.
Regardless of their partisan leanings, those earnestly seeking to grasp what is happening understand that President Trump is, as Venkatesh Rao says, “more consequence than cause” of the underlying conflict. Perhaps he is a consequence of the fact that “[t]he fault line in American politics is no longer Republican vs. Democrat nor conservative vs. liberal but establishment vs. anti-establishment,” as William Lind put it at the American Conservative.
What we mean when we say “establishment” versus “anti-establishment” is the question of the hour, but as Jordan Greenhall declared, “while 2016 still formally looked like politics, what is really going on here is a revolutionary war.”
War is confusing. In the fog of battle it is not clear what might be happening or even who and where one's friends and enemies are. While this is especially so in the midst of a revolutionary war, there is agreement among keen observers as to what the revolution is against.
Eight years ago, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla called it the “Ruling Class,” a popular thesis which he turned into a book (The Ruling Class) and used deftly to explain the 2016 election and its aftermath. Michael Anton, in perhaps the most significant essayof the election, called it the “Davoisie oligarchy,” or the “Davos class” and recently coined the word the “oligogues” to describe the majority of elites in their camp that flatter and support them.
