Angelo M. Codevilla's essay, "America's Ruling Class — and the Perils of Revolution," published this summer in the American Spectator, and released this week in book form, has already accomplished what few essays do: it has touched a nerve. In his essay, Codevilla contrasts the "Ruling Class," including both Republicans and Democrats but tending leftward in word and deed, with the the “country class," consisting of heterogonous individualists who'd rather be judged on their merits than their beliefs and affiliations. Despite its name, it should be emphasized that you can belong to the "country class" and still live in a tattoo-stained neighborhood in a big, fashionable burg like New York City. In fact, many do, even if they often feel a need to lower their voices.
At the heart of Codevilla's essay lies the charge that today's "ruling class" was trained to think the same way and speak the same left-of-center ideological language. This he sees as a tragedy for intellectual diversity, and as a danger to America's future.
Culturally, who represents the "ruling class"? Look at any movie and TV screen, open any newspaper or magazine, and the A-list names and candidates will come tumbling forth like clothes out of a dryer opened mid-cycle. For it often seems as if every actor, singer, novelist, screen writer, TV producer, hairdresser's assistant, sound engineer, and failed Foley artist aligns his or her beliefs with those of the Democratic Party and will continue to do so until he or she drops dead.
But culturally, who represents the "country class" while also being respected by the "ruling class"? Is there even a Laundromat? Technically, yes, albeit one peopled by strange, threatening, or quarrelsome types like Clint Eastwood, John Malkovich, Ted Nugent, Elizabeth Hasselbeck, Robert Duvall, and Sylvester Stallone, several possibly armed. Would anyone even dare to go in?
The obvious response on the "country class" side, having a paucity of crossover cultural icons to their name, is to put forward a politician who will immediately and inevitably be covered in opprobrium on a thousand Web sites. After all, few people like politicians. As a certain American sang scornfully over four decades ago, "The drunken politician leaps / Upon the street, where mothers weep." And if there's one person who could be said to represent the "country class" it's the very man who penned those words, namely Bob Dylan. The man, moreover, who was the "voice" and inspiration of the liberal "ruling class" in its infancy, and who nonetheless has long stood apart from its obsessions and precepts.
In the mainstream media, Dylan's image is still rigidly defined by the social upheavals of the 1960s, though he rid himself of those shackles when he was only 26. To be precise, he divorced himself from the increasingly leftist, anti-American politics of his own generation when, in 1967, he moved to a house in upstate New York to record the Americana-drenched Basement Tapes with The Band. Soon after that, while free love made love to riots and psychedelic stalks burst from a million brain sockets, he married, started a family, and wrote more good songs, few of which had revolutionary applications, although "Dear Landlord" will surely always have a place in city-dwellers' cramped, rent-obsessed hearts.
So while Dylan may not be conservative in the conventional sense — he's sui generis, if anyone is — he is definitely not a member of the "ruling class" as described by Codevilla, even if many of its members still regard him with a mixture of wonder and awe. That they do so is partly based on merit and partly on generational solidarity. As the late New Yorker writer, George W.S. Trow, pointed out, rock "n' roll is the baby boomers' major contribution to the culture and they will forever circle the wagons to protect its status. And by boomer consensus, the most important rock "n' roller of all is Dylan.
Yet by the standards of his ruling-class peers, Dylan is an old-fashioned patriot who wears cowboy hats, loves Texas as much as Greenwich Village, and spoke warmly to Rolling Stone of George W. Bush, whom he'd met when the latter was governor of Texas, while also wishing President Obama well.
Brendan Bernhard is a contributing editor to the New York Sun, where he was the television critic from 2006-08, and a former staff writer at LA Weekly. He writes about culture, politics, and sports, and is the author of White Muslim (Melville House), a study of converts to Islam in the West.
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Surely you jest, Mr. Bernhard. You gonna offer up Van Jones next?!
Dylan reads the Bible and has guns so I guess that makes him one of us.
Some of us have known these things about Dylan for quite a while. Now you know this as well.
Bernhard’s perceptive analysis firmly identifies the secret of Dylan’s longevity as an artist. Dylan’s persistent ability to cut through the ideological radar and speak directly to what is most human in us puts him head and shoulders above the usual suspects in the rock’n roll hall of fame, not to mention most of the people posting their political opinions on this site. Hey, why can’t we have more pieces like this? Writing that makes you think, that celebrates unique achievement. All the furor over mosque building and koran burning is like junk food in comparison.
Dylan has the ability to see what many others don’t and put it into poetical words. He saw a whole bunch of what we are dealing with in these days and warned us about a “slow train coming around the bend”.
Dylan’s song, Neighborhood Bully, remains the greatest musical defense of Israel—which, of course, makes it verboten among the left.
Recall the last lines of ‘Lonesome Farewell’: “And I make my stand, and remain as I am, and bid farewell and not give a damn.”
LONG LIVE DYLAN!
Interesting you write about Dylan . On my walks this past year I have been listening to one of my favorite Dylan songs and fantasizing about Dylan performing it at a large Tea Party Rally. The song is “Everything is Broken” As I listen I wonder what does Dylan think of this mass movement of people who want Liberty from “the control freaks” I’d say the tea party are the real “counterculturalists” Mr Bernhard I would conclude that Dylan’s songs express Thomas Sowell’s “Constrained Vision”
The world owes us nothing," he told Wenner, "not one single thing." And: "Human nature really hasn't changed in 3,000 years. " It's not meant to change. It cannot change. It's not made to change." Which does rather leave social engineers out in the cold.
I just finished Sowell’s Intellectuals and society. Page 76 has a great summary of the difference between the vision of the annointed and the tragic vision…and I, too, immediately thought of this when I read Dylan’s comments.
Love it! Absolutely!!
This is an insight I had never considered, but am enriched by.
Yes, those of us who are seeking a restoration of our Republic and the Constitution, yet seeking to defend and provide a societal safety net (but not a sugar teat), are, in sum, merely seeking honesty, fidelity, and dignity.
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