CODEVILLA: Biden Has No Foreign Policy. Here’s Why Americans Should Be Worried

 Between 2016 and 2020, their use of national security powers in matters of domestic political consequence made it possible for the ruling class to cast aspersions on its opponents while preventing them from challenging the bases on which the aspersions were made. Thus, federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies were key to the evolution of America’s political system from a republic of equal citizens to an oligarchy by, of and for its bureaucratic and corporate constituents. 

For the oligarchy to endure, to foreclose opposition from the Deplorables, it will need to continue to shut down access to authoritative information about what its components are doing and to further enable un-answerable aspersions against its opponents.

More than ever, it will be necessary to leak damaging opinions about opponents who are being “investigated” while using investigations to bury facts that might discredit its own. To do this, a Biden administration will further the Obama-initiated merger of these agencies’ leadership with the Democratic Party’s constituent groups and push politicization ever deeper into the agencies’ ranks.

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Categorizing domestic opposition as something to be managed by the opaque, unaccountable rules of intelligence requires only further evolution in what, by now, are well-established tendencies in both agencies: for the FBI (and elements of the Department of Homeland Security) officially to regard persons “excessively concerned with their liberties” as the principal source of terrorism, and for the CIA to “assess” (read, opine) that “the Russians” are interfering in our elections on the Deplorables’ behalf.

Equality of citizens before the law is the defining characteristic of republics. Restricting citizenship to constituent groups is oligarchy’s principle. Expelling political opponents from the equal citizenship, effectively treating them as foreign to the ruling groups, is what the modern Woke left is all about. Applying the strictures of classified information to the processes by which the government deals with its political opponents, reserving judgments about them for itself, does this most directly.