How America’s governing class became like their like their tyrannical and corrupt predecessors within the imperial bureaucracy.

People are people, no matter where they are.  Give them enough power, enough money and sufficient time to pass after the Revolution, and they fall into a very familiar pattern.  There is a good book review at Belmont Club of Ending ‘Big SIS’ (The Special Interest State) and Renewing the American Republic

The Founders were under no illusions that native-born Americans would be any different from the British bureaucrats against whom they had rebelled. They too in time would become like their like their tyrannical and corrupt predecessors within the imperial bureaucracy, handing out privileges to cronies and selected groups, which they had lately fought to end.


Their key defensive idea was simple. The Constitution would be designed to pit one set of politicians against the other. “If faction could not be prevented, it had to be neutralized. Even better would be to harness faction to provide stability to the republic.” ...


The catastrophe happened, DeLong says, because the Founders forgot that factions could cooperate as well as compete through log-rolling as well as a host of other mechanisms. The interest groups had become despite their differences, what Leo Linbeck has called the Party of Incumbency and more broadly what Angelo de Codevilla termed the “court party” or the New American Ruling Class. They realized it was in their common interest to cooperate in order to put themselves collectively in charge of literally everything.

The media are now part of the Ruling Class, enabling ever greater government power.

A compliant media has convinced the public that to every problem there is an agency and a rule for every purpose under heaven. The media has learned to craft “compassion trap” stories in which heart-rending problems can be fixed by yet another government bureaucracy whose creation only the cruel could refuse to fund.

Is there a way out?  There always is because time flows on.  Whether Americans will recover their country, will go the way of empires or descend like Europe is the question.  Pray that God is not done with America yet.