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Profound Political Disunity Is Now Pitting Rising Elites Against Fading Elites

November 24, 2015

Profound Political Disunity Is Now Pitting Rising Elites Against Fading Elites

The American Power Elite may yet discover that throw the bums out applies to all existing Establishment parties and Elites.

As I have often noted, historian Michael Grant identified profound political disunity in the ruling class as a key cause of the dissolution of the Roman Empire. Grant described this dynamic in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a book I have been recommending since 2009.

The chapter titles of the book provide a precis of the other causes Grant identifies:

The Gulfs Between the Classes

The Credibility Gap

The Partnerships That Failed

The Groups That Opted Out

The Undermining of Effort

Today we focus on the rising profound political disunity of the Power Elites of the U.S. As a general observation, the largely theatrical polarization of the two political parties is being replaced by fault lines within each party and American society that no longer respect the ideological lines of Republican and Democrat.

While conventional media pundits have observed the disorder in Republican ranks with more than a little schadenfreude (pleasure derived by someone from another person’s misfortune), relatively little attention has been paid to the equivalent fractures in the Democratic Party.

Longtime correspondent Mark G. forwarded an insightful article by Joel Kotkin that explains one of the key fractures: Tech titans want to be masters of all media we survey.

In effect, the Old Left (currently represented by Bernie Sanders) is splintering from the mainstream Imperial Democrats (my term) of Hillary Clinton, while Kotkin’s Tech Titansare pursuing a Libertarian-flavored dominance.

Mark G. provides the analytic structure needed to understand why both parties are coming apart at the seams:

What Kotkin describes here is best characterized as a civil war among Democratic Party Elites. This parallels a similar struggle taking place inside the GOP between the ‘GOP Establishment’ and probably 70% of the GOP’s electoral base.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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