Oligarchy is the replacement of representative government by the melding of public and private power with the administrative state. Throughout history, most oligarchies have united around the stakeholders’ primary common interest in orderly rent-seeking. Typically, oligarchies have nothing to do with ideas of right and wrong, never mind with ideology. And if they form out of a political party, that party is all about oligarchy itself.

But ours is not a typical oligarchy. The sense of superiority to the rest of America had been the animating force behind the Progressive movement around the turn of the twentieth century. From their embryo, the disparate parts of the American administrative state/oligarchy shared this sense. Beginning in the 1960s, however, the will to hurt and to demean the rest of the population grew among these stakeholders, to the point that today, this vengeful approach overshadows and endangers their very power.

This happened because the tasks that these public/private institutions were empowered to fulfill always had something hostile, vindictive about them…

America’s oligarchy is made up of diverse elements that have little in common other than an indifference to or loathing of Western civilization in general and of the American republic in particular. Since members of the oligarchy support each other’s claims—over which they have no control—by the iron law of political necessity, there is no logical end to those claims. That is yet another reason why our oligarchy’s modus operandi relies so heavily on cutting off at the source any and all circulation of facts and arguments that would cause any set of stakeholders publicly to argue its case—an argument they might lose and that would surely upset other members of the coalition. This is why Google’s and Facebook’s censorship is essential to the oligarchy’s continued power…

Our ruling oligarchy has made it socially difficult even to think about the difference between what is right and wrong. This itself presents us with an important crossroads. Eliminating the intellectual and moral conversation that made the American republic unique has been the oligarchs’ effect if not also their objective. Their success in this enterprise haunts America’s future. China does not.

Angelo Codevilla, ‘The Specter of Chinese civilization’

https://newcriterion.com/issues/2021/11/the-specter-of-chinese-civilization