I usually get Andrew Sullivan's Substack Weekly Dish emailed to me. And last week, just before the Nov 8 midterms, he was agonizing over the Biden disaster: "Will Biden and the Dems Finally Get It?

In return for centrists’ and moderates’ support, Biden effectively told us to get lost. He championed the entire far-left agenda: the biggest expansion in government since LBJ; a massive stimulus… mass migration…

Of course, if Trump runs again, Sullivan will vote against him. Because Weimar.

But, Andrew Sullivan, there was a reason you "centrists" got shafted. It was the stitch-up of March 2020, when Biden got Clyburn to swing the black vote to him in the North Carolina primary, and then the Dems got Bernie Sanders to withdraw.

What do you think was the price of Sanders' withdrawal? How about "champion[ing] the entire far-left agenda"?

So now we get New York magazine via RealClearPolitics, telling us "Why Democrats are Suddenly Very Nervous." Hey, it's not as bad as the "historic wipeouts" of 1994 and 2014, and "the numbers show a hardening of right-wing support, not a broad-based move toward Republicans among genuine independents," but still…

Of course, nothing is said about the 27 percent move to the GOP among suburban white women that I wrote about on my blog which would suggest that the opposite is true.

So really, the 2020 stitch-up, to foil the dreaded Trump, has blown up in the Dems' faces. Yet they are all just running around in circles obsessing about "the profound threat to democratic legitimacy that the election-denying GOP core now represents."

Now I am a student of Gaetano Mosca and his The Ruling Class, originally published in 1895.  My take is here and here. One of his basic ideas is the "political formula," the narrative the rulers use to justify their rule. Our ruling class's political formula? They are a wise, educated, and evolved elite, and only they have the skills and knowledge to administer the country. Plus, they are the Allies fighting for the Oppressed Peoples against the White Oppressors.

Hey, I tell you what, dear Democrat friends. I'd say that, with the total cock-up on the COVID and the "transitory" inflation fronts, your narrative of a wise, educated elite is a little frayed at the edges. And as for the notion of Allies fighting for the Oppressed Peoples, I'd say that most people in America today experience our ruling class as fighting for their own Anointed selves, and to hell with the Benighted, and even the Oppressed Mascots, because if they don't toe the line "[they] ain't black."

Another of Mosca's ideas is that a healthy ruling class refreshes itself with new talent from the lower classes. I don't know how that squares with President Biden anathematizing the ultra-MAGAs and universities closing themselves to conservative students and scholars. I just have an instinct that a healthy ruling class wouldn't do that.

I'd go further. When you anathematize half of America and accuse it of committing "increasingly grave threats to the nation’s democracy," you are really saying that your rule is falling apart and you can't believe it. You are telling us that you are a failing ruling class and don't have a clue what to do about it.

Okay. I got it wrong, and so did Gaetano Mosca. Your average ruling class doesn't think about the long-term preservation of the ruling class. It just thinks about teaching the serfs a lesson today and handing out loot and plunder to its supporters today, and, in democratic countries, winning the election tomorrow.

Back in the day, the Brit ruling class sent their sons to Oxbridge to learn "Greats," the Greek and Roman classical texts that would teach their young punks how to rule the realm. Then it switched to "Modern Greats," philosophy, politics, and economics, so their young punks would know how to manage a modern country. But our elite sends their youngsters to college to become wokey activists. How's that working out, rulers? Right now, apparently, everyone in Liberalland is mad as hell that CNN and the New York Times are calling President Biden out on his delta-minus-moron stupid lies.

A wise ruling class would have said Houston We Have a Problem when Trump won in 2016 rather than treat him as a fascist freak. A wise ruling class would have kept its administrative class in check during the pandemic. A wise ruling class would not have increased the money supply by 44 percent in two years. A wise ruling class would not have imagined that the subsequent inflation would be "transitory."

But our ruling class didn't do that, experts agree. And now it is reaping the hurricane, whose category will shortly be determined by the scientists at the National Political Hurricane Center.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

Image: Sergey Vasilyevich Gerasimov