We are nearing the climax of a watershed election. The Ruling Class understands that Donald Trump represents a counter-revolution to all they have built up over the last 50 years.  That emphatically includes GOP leaders like Speaker Paul Ryan, who hastened not merely to step on Trump’s bounce back in the second debate by announcing he was suspending support, but is signaling he will continue to damage Trump as much as possible [Inside Ryan's decision to (almost) dump Trump| The speaker might still fully rescind his endorsement before Nov. 8, sources told POLITICO, by Jakee Sherman and John Bresnahan, Politico, October 11, 2016]

This phenomenon has inspired an important essay from  Angelo M. Codevilla, a Senior Fellow of the Claremont Institute and emeritus professor of International Relations at Boston University, : After the Republic. [Claremont Review, September 27, 2016]. Codevilla’s basic idea: the cultural revolution of the last 50 years has destroyed America as a constitutional republic. As many on the Alt Right have noted, there is nothing left to conserve. The question now is where our post-republic period will take us. Codevilla [Email him] writes

Because Republicans largely agree with Democrats that they need not take seriously the founders’ Constitution, today’s American regime is now what Max Weber had called the Tsarist regime on the eve of the Revolution: “fake constitutionalism.” Because such fakery is self-discrediting and removes anyone’s obligation to restrain his passions, it is a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power. [Emphasis added]

This is why we see repeated crazy comparisons of Trump to Hitler—most recently, This New York Times 'Hitler' review sure reads like a thinly disguised Trump comparison. [By Aaron Blake, Washington Post, September 28, 2016] Despite absolutely no statements from Trump suggesting that he would suspend the Constitution and assume dictatorial powers, the concern is lurking that, like Hitler, he would do just that.

The fundamental reason for this fear among the elites: their guilty conscience. They understand that in the last 50 years they have completely upended the old order in America. They have created a revolution that opposes the most fundamental interests of the historic white American nation. They understand that this election could confirm their revolution—but only if Hillary Clinton wins.

Her victory would mean continued Leftist appointments to the Supreme Court (Codevilla has an excellent summary of the vast changes in “Constitutional Law” imposed by the new regime) and it would mean importing around many millions more non-whites, the great majority uneducated, poor, and dependent and the vast majority of whom will be entirely on board with their revolution.

The top-down nature of this revolution cannot be overemphasized. There was never a demand by a majority, or even close to a majority, from any Western country for a complete transformation, to the point that white people will soon be minorities in societies they had dominated for hundreds and, in the case of Europe, thousands of years. This top-down revolution has never been supported by a majority of white Americans. There is anger, resentment, and fear for the future.

Trump represents an inchoate backlash against this revolution. But we have entered an era where it is too late to simply turn back the clock. The changes have been too drastic. One could change the legal situation with one or two judicious Supreme Court picks. But that will not undo the importation of a new people—tens of millions of non-whites with all that that implies for the future.

As Codevilla notes, because we have entered an era of fake constitutionalism and because the most fundamental interests of the traditional American majority have been ruthlessly suppressed, there is no obligation to restrain one's passions. The situation is indeed what Codevilla calls “a harbinger of revolution and of imperial power."

The new Ruling Class realizes that it rules by lawless bureaucratic coercion:

In today’s America, a network of executive, judicial, bureaucratic, and social kinship channels bypasses the sovereignty of citizens. Our imperial regime, already in force, works on a simple principle: the president and the cronies who populate these channels may do whatever they like so long as the bureaucracy obeys and one third plus one of the Senate protects him from impeachment. If you are on the right side of that network, you can make up the rules as you go along, ignore or violate any number of laws, obfuscate or commit perjury about what you are doing (in the unlikely case they put you under oath), and be certain of your peers’ support. These cronies’ shared social and intellectual identity stems from the uniform education they have received in the universities. Because disdain for ordinary Americans is this ruling class's chief feature, its members can be equally certain that all will join in celebrating each, and in demonizing their respective opponents. [My emphasis

While the traditional America aspired to be and substantially attained a society based on individual merit, the new elite is not a meritocracy (the poster child for this is Elena Kagan), and not just in terms of Affirmative Action and ethnic favoritism in university admissions. The Clintons may be seen as representative of the corruption of this new ruling elite, able to flout laws with impunity. At this writing, Hillary Clinton remains ahead in most national polls and has the support of the entire Establishment, left to right, despite:

• highly credible charges of unprecedented corruption involving hundreds of millions of dollars to the Clinton Foundation from donors, many of them foreign entities, while she was Secretary of State, as well as outrageous speaking fees for Bill Clinton from these same donors (importantly, his speaking fees skyrocketed after Hillary became Secretary of State);
• violation of an agreement between Clinton and the Obama Administration not to accept foreign donations during her tenure as Secretary of State;
• the destruction via BleachBit (a program designed to make the information non-retrievable) of likely incriminating emails after a subpoena,
• being cleared of criminal conduct by the FBI that would have sent ordinary people to prison;
• her staff pleading the Fifth Amendment in Congressional hearings;
• many of her staff  receiving immunity deals even there is good reason to think they lied to the FBI;
• an agreement for the FBI to destroy computer owned by Clinton aides, including Cheryl Mills, Clinton’s Chief of Staff, plus looking only at contents between June 1, 2014 and February 1, 2015 and hence ignoring much possibly incriminating evidence.

And in the same vein, Bill Clinton continues to receive adulation in the Main Stream Media and acts as a spokesperson for Hillary, despite a credible history of rape and lying about extramarital relationships which were aggressively covered up by Hillary by lying and intimidating and impugning the reputation of the women involved.

None of this has been enough to derail wall-to-wall Ruling Class support for Hillary Clinton. We have indeed come to the end of America as a constitutional republic governed by the rule of law.

Indeed, Codevilla sees the failed impeachment of Bill Clinton as a harbinger of the end of the republic:

Consider, for example, how republic-killing an event was the ruling class’s support of President Bill Clinton in the wake of his nationally televised perjury. Subsequently, as constituencies of supporters have effectively condoned officials’ abusive, self-serving, and even outright illegal behavior, they have encouraged more and more of it while inuring themselves to it. That is how republics turn into empires from the roots up.

If the Democrats win, Codevilla sees them driving “the transformations that it has already wrought on America to quantitative and qualitative levels that not even its members can imagine.”

They would continue their war on traditional "racist," "sexist" America with literally nothing to stop them. The

disdain for how other Americans live and think has remained fundamental…. The media reacted to Hillary Clinton’s remark that “half of Trump’s supporters could be put into a ‘basket of deplorables’” as if these sentiments were novel and peculiar to her. In fact, these are unremarkable restatements of our ruling class’s perennial creed.

Exactly.

Thus, despite appearances to the contrary, there is a unified oligarchic Establishment that straddles both the Republican and Democrat parties. This has not been so obvious in previous elections, when Republicans and Democrats were apparently quite different on some issues. However, the rise of Donald Trump has shown that the Establishment is entirely united. For example, billionaires are supporting Hillary Clinton 20–1, whereas in previous elections, they were much more split between the two parties. Not one Fortune 100 CEO  is supporting Trump.

The other pillar of the Ruling Class is the media which reflects academic culture and political culture generally. The media, along with academia, and the bureaucracy, have been prime drivers of this top-down revolution, in which the moral and intellectual high ground has been seized by people hostile to the traditional peoples and cultures of the West. This new Ruling Class is completely out of touch with the interests of a majority of its citizens—particularly White Americans. Thus the print media is almost completely in the anti-Trump camp:

The [endorsements] are overwhelmingly against him, and they just keep coming, in language that is notable for its blunt condemnation of the candidate and its “save the Republic’’ tone.

The endorsements are coming not only from the usual mainstream media suspects but also from newspapers that either never before supported a Democrat or had not in many decades—The Dallas Morning News, The Arizona Republic, The Cincinnati Enquirer—or had never endorsed any presidential candidate, like USA Today. The Wall Street Journal has not gone there, at least not yet, but a member of its conservative-leaning editorial board has: Dorothy Rabinowitz, who called Mr. Trump “unfit.”

What’s most striking is the collective sense of alarm they convey—that Mr. Trump is a “dangerous demagogue” (USA Today) whose election would represent a “clear and present danger” (The Washington Post, The Cincinnati Enquirer), or, as The Atlantic editor Scott Stossel said in an interview Tuesday [October 4, 2016 “a potential national emergency or threat to the Republic.”[The Editorialists Have Spoken; Will Voters Listen?, by Jim Rutenberg, NYT, October 5, 2016 ] [Links in original]

It is ironic indeed that these media people see Trump as threatening the republic when, as Codevilla notes, that republic is already gone as a result of the actions of our new Ruling Class.

Because of this perceived “clear and present danger,” Codevilla argues, from the standpoint of the media, “devotion to truth means not reporting on Donald Trump and people like him as if they or anything they say might be of value.” An important example: Lester Holt, moderator of the first Clinton-Trump debate, skewed questions to favor Clinton, emphasizing perceived Trump’s weak points (on his taxes and the so-called birther issue) while completely ignoring Clinton’s blatant financial corruption and other criminal actions.

Similarly, the media in the U.S. and in Europe has been entirely in favor of massive non-white immigration and the never-ending flow of refugees. In both Europe and the U.S., the media has downplayed or ignored crime by immigrants as well as an epidemic of black on white crime. Horrendous crimes by illegal immigrants and recent migrants are treated only as local issues if they are mentioned at all. Unless citizens are reading widely on the internet, they don’t know about these stories.

The MSM environment has been closed off to the message that whites have interests, just like everybody else; that identifying as a white person who wants to advance these interests is normal and natural; that race is real; that there are real racial differences in traits important for success in a modern society and that there is no magic wand to change these traits; and finally and most importantly, that immigration and multiculturalism carry huge costs to the historic American nation in terms of social cohesion, social conflict, trust, and willingness to contribute to public goods, like healthcare, welfare, and public infrastructure.

But as Codevilla notes,

Under our ruling class, “truth” has morphed from the reflection of objective reality to whatever has “normative pull”—i.e., to what furthers the ruling class’s agenda, whatever that might be at any given time. That is the meaning of the term “political correctness,” as opposed to factual correctness.”

Truth is whatever you want to make it, just as the Constitution now means whatever the Ruling Class says it means.

While it's obvious what a Clinton victory would mean, the consequences of a Trump victory are far less certain. Codevilla is pessimistic that there could be real change:

Because it is difficult to imagine a Trump presidency even thinking about something so monumental as replacing an entire ruling elite, much less leading his constituency to accomplishing it, electing Trump is unlikely to result in a forceful turn away from the country’s current direction. Continuing pretty much on the current trajectory under the same class will further fuel revolutionary sentiments in the land all by itself. Inevitable disappointment with Trump is sure to add to them.

But the two great revolutions of the twentieth century—the Bolshevik Revolution and National Socialism—did indeed replace ruling elites. And of course, the fear that a Trump victory would indeed lead to a wholesale replacement of our ruling elite is behind the hysterical opposition that he has received from the entire Establishment.

Codevilla's conclusion is worth pondering:

We have stepped over the threshold of a revolution. It is difficult to imagine how we might step back, and futile to speculate where it will end. Our ruling class’s malfeasance, combined with insult, brought it about. Donald Trump did not cause it and is by no means its ultimate manifestation. Regardless of who wins in 2016, this revolution’s sentiments will grow in volume and intensity, and are sure to empower politicians likely to make Americans nostalgic for Donald Trump’s moderation. [Emphases added]

Finally, given my research interests, II would be remiss if I did not mention the critical role played by Jews and the organized Jewish community in the changes that are now coming to a head.

There is no question that Jews are a prominent component of our new elite and played a determinative role in passing the watershed 1965 immigration law. I have written five VDARE.com articles on Jewish opposition to Trump, often expressed in terms of Jewish identity, interests in multiculturalism, immigration and refugee policy, and fear of a fascist America.

Given the very powerful position Jews enjoy in the American media (summarized briefly here and more extensively here, pp. xlvi-lvi), they necessarily play a major role in the anti-Trump movement.

Jewish opposition to Trump is virtually unanimous, and in the Republican Party, Jewish neoconservatives are leading the #NeverTrump movement. (One of them, Paul Ryan adviser Dan Senor, is rumored to have leaked the Access Hollywood tape, although the MSM seems reluctant to ask him). According to 538, in 2012, around 70% of money given by Jews directly to candidates went to Obama, while in 2016, 95% has gone to Clinton. [The GOP’s Jewish Donors Are Abandoning Trump,By Eitan Hersh and Brian Schaffner, September 21, 2016] Jews are vastly overrepresented among the top donors to pro-Clinton PACs, while the Republican Jewish Coalition has not endorsed Trump, with many donors switching to Clinton. Adelson, after investing $93 million in the 2012 campaign for Republicans, including $30 million to a Romney PAC, now says he will donate only $45 million, of which only $5 million will go to Trump, the rest going to House and Senate candidates. [Donald Trump Gains the Support of a Former 'Never Trump' Billionaire, by  Michal Addady, Fortune.com, September 20, 2016]

Codevilla says frankly that a deep unhappiness with the current political culture is brewing that could ultimately lead to a revolutionary upheaval.

Trump accomplished a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Can he accomplish a hostile takeover of the presidency in the teeth of unanimous opposition from our hostile elites?

Kevin MacDonald [email him] is emeritus professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach. His research has focused on developing evolutionary perspectives in developmental psychology, personality theory, Western culture, and ethnic relations (group evolutionary strategies). He edits and is a frequent contributor to The Occidental Observer and The Occidental Quarterly. For his website, click here.