America's New Ruling Class

America's New Ruling Class

As promised, we return to America's Ruling Class, Obsolete Nation-States, and Consensus for an exploration into the new ruling class.

America's current ruling class finds itself rightfully discredited. It has failed to generate wealth for the masses, has failed to improve our security, has failed to articulate a vision for the future, and instead of doing anything about it, spends its time in endless incestual recriminations, accusations, and empty promises to “fix Washington.”

Well, it's about time we give up on the traditional power-elite. The American Spectator suggests a rise of the Country Class, rooted in good old-fashioned Judeo-Christian morality and frontier individualism. This is bullshit. Christianity is too riven by culture-war anti-gay discrimination and hypocrisy to present itself as a moral basis for society. The frontier is a lie, and as oil prices rise, the great exurbs will become endless howling wastelands of people too poor to move.

Instead, energy is going to flow inwards, into the city centers. Power is associated with knowledge, the ability to manipulate technical systems, and the ability to motivate people, not linkages to the old and wealthy. With networks, everybody knows somebody who knows somebody, and if you are unique, your skills will be found.

This does not mean that the old power structure is going away; it's far too entrenched for that. But it'll be a joke, something to be manipulated with smart media, and blitzkrieg dadaist marketing campaigns. Money isn't going away, but it's something to be spent, not horded. Cashless economies of favors and goods-in-kind mediated through semi-AI agents and craigslist will help the new America dodge the taxman, the rulers will be the ones who make the system work, enforcing trust, and making proper connections between interested parties.

The future leaders of the world are urban, urbane, and not worried about the battle of the past. The decrepit towers of power, the Federal government, the mainstream media, multinational corporations, are the raw material of their ambitions, inert mass ready to be sculpted into the monuments of the future.