Month: November 2018

by George Rasley   In 2010, Claremont Institute Senior Fellow Angelo Codevilla reintroduced the notion of “the ruling class” back into American popular discourse. In 2017, he described contemporary American politics as a “cold civil war.” Now in an essay “Our Revolution’s Logic“ that should be a wake-up call to every conservative in America Codevilla applies the “logic of revolution” to the escalating “Resistance” to the results of the 2016 election and says its sentiments’ spiraling volume and intensity have eliminated any possibility of “stepping back.” The 2018 Congressional elections are the Democratic “Resistance” strategy’s first major test. Regardless of these elections’ outcome, however, this “resistance” has strengthened and accelerated the existing revolutionary spiral says Prof. Codevilla. In an erudite review of Thucydides’ account of Corcyra’s revolution in 427 BC, the fifth year of the Peloponnesian War, Codevilla outlines a paradigm of revolutionary logic and elucidates the striking parallels with today’s American political dynamics. Revolutions, says Codevilla, turn upon the logic of mutual hate that drives them, and on their consequences, and the consequences for constitutional liberty are already driving us away from our constitutional republic’s essence: The American republic’s essence had been self-restraint toward fellow citizens deemed equals. The…