Deep Divide
"The disconnect, the divide is even bigger than I thought it was, and I thought I had a handle on it." In just over seven years since Rush delivered those lines, the situation has only worsened.
As America has watched the battle for Speaker of the House go on to an unprecedented fifteen rounds, and watched one globalist Republican call the holdouts who refused to vote for globalist Kevin McCarthy terrorists, one thing should have become abundantly clear. America is divided as never before. However, people who have been paying attention; people who listened to the late Rush Limbaugh, have known just how bad the division was for years. In early December 2015, Rush said the following on his radio show:
“The disconnect, the divide is even bigger than I thought it was, and I thought I had a handle on it. But I’m telling you folks, the distance between those, for lack of a better term, that govern us in Washington and the majority of us out here, they don’t have the slightest idea who we are anymore. I mean—I—they really, really don’t have any idea who we are. It’s striking. It’s genuinely striking, and they like to tell us that it’s us that is out of touch.”
In just over seven years since Rush delivered those lines, the situation has only worsened. Fox News, once seen as a bastion for conservatives, was running articles criticizing those refusing to vote for McCarthy as speaker during the mammoth vote. Yet unlike Fox and the elites of the Republican party, the Republican party base did not want McCarthy as speaker. In fact, the holdouts were viewed as heroes in large swaths of the base. From reading the comments sections of many articles about the vote, it is obvious that most conservatives did not want McCarthy. Yet somehow 200 Republicans, elected by these same conservatives, voted for him as a block.
The division goes even deeper than party leadership, however. Conservative grassroots overwhelmingly reject things like drag queen story hour, gender reassignment surgery, and men in women’s sports. Yet the self-proclaimed “most conservative governor in the US” Kristi Noem, refuses to cut ties with advisors and groups that push these evil ideologies on children. What is going on here? Why is it that Republicans cannot seem to relate to their base with rare exceptions?
The answer, one Rush hinted at in the above quote, comes from the way society is now structured. While America has always viewed itself as a classless society, where merit rose to the top, the reality is America has stratified into a class-full society. At the top are the untouchable oligarchs on the left, who can commit any crime, perform any action, even treasonous actions, and never be touched (see the Biden and Clinton crime families for examples). Slightly beneath that are average politicians on the left. They can commit most crimes and get away with them, even incest. Around the same tier are members of the swamp. This includes high-level members of most government agencies, elite academics, lobbyists, and other “experts”. Almost all of these individuals share the same ideology and thus protect each other, making it almost impossible to prosecute them successfully when they inevitably break the law.
The rise of this self-ordained “expert” class has stratified American society. These credentialed experts are often trained in the same universities and institutions and thus exhibit groupthink that defies common sense. The experts are immune from prosecution, consequences like losing a job or an endorsement, or even criticism. If an ordinary American who is not part of the expert class dares to suggest that the expert is doing something wrong or criminal, social media companies censor the speech and the unfortunate “deplorable” may even receive a visit from the FBI on a trumped-up charge.
Why then do Republican lawmakers and leaders say nothing and do nothing to help ordinary Americans? There could be several reasons. One is because they know if they speak, they will be targeted too. Self-preservation is a powerful motivation for many people. Alternatively, they could naively be expecting to be accepted into the ruling elite and want to make sure not to offend them. A third possible explanation is more malicious. They could be either bought or blackmailed into compliance. In an age where cell phones are everywhere and many teenagers make foolish choices and record them, it is completely possible that blackmail material could be obtained by a section of the swamp and used to control Republican lawmakers.
Madison Cawthorn, former Republican rep from North Carolina, may furnish an example of how this works. Cawthorn in early 2022 claimed that he was invited to an orgy in DC by fellow congressmen, and he had witnessed congressmen snorting cocaine. Under intense pressure, Cawthorn tried to walk the claim back but it was too late. Someone released a video that showed Cawthorn in a compromising position. Cawthorn lost his primary. Was Cawthorn being blackmailed to keep silent? He certainly claimed it was blackmail but like in most potential blackmail schemes, we cannot be sure. Regardless, Cawthorn was not part of the political elite class and had made it clear he had no interest in bowing to them. So he was destroyed. Whether there was blackmail involved or not and whether Cawthorn’s claims were true or not, the result was the same. Cawthorn would not kneel, so his political life was snuffed out.
The political elites of both parties believe they are above the law. And in many cases, they functionally are. Neither Joe Biden nor his son will ever be prosecuted. The ruling elites all operate out of the same Hegelian paradigm that is fundamentally at odds with how the ordinary American views life. Most of the elites never interact with any ordinary Americans outside of cursory interactions at a restaurant or short interactions with their constituency. The higher up they get on the political ladder, the more they begin to disdain the people who put them there, and the less contact they have with those people. Until the American voter begins to value common sense above the credentialed expert class, this problem is unlikely to change.