If you weren’t convinced after my last post that we are headed to a return to feudalism (a three class system)–If you didn’t realize that Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon is now Three Degrees for industry insiders, then maybe this article will convince you.
There is far less mobility in the political class than in the Entertainment Industry. While the Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon has been reduced to Two in Hollywood, the Degrees you need for Introduction into the Political class are even tighter.
Take a look at the list of professions of your Congress and you will see a plethora of lawyers, but according to information from senate.gov the dominant professions of Members are public service/politics, business, and law. No mention that a majority of those public servants are also lawyers (public service being former legislators).
! 13 medical doctors (including a psychiatrist), two dentists, three nurses, two veterinarians, one psychologist, an optometrist, and one pharmacist;
! six ministers;
! 37 mayors, nine state governors, nine lieutenant governors (including two Delegates), two state first ladies (one of whom was also the first lady of
the United States), and one territorial first lady;
! three former Cabinet secretaries, two former Secretaries of the Navy, a vice admiral in the navy, a former Deputy Administrator in the Department of Veterans’ Affairs, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of State, a former Defense Department counter terrorism consultant, a
former ambassador, three state supreme court justices, and a federal judge;
! 272 (233 in the House and 39 in the Senate) former state legislators;9 ! at least 109 former congressional staffers (including 10 congressional pages),10 16 White House former staffers or fellows, several former executive branch employees, and a former parliamentary aide in the
British House of Commons;
! four sheriffs, a deputy sheriff, four police officers (including a Capitol policeman), two state troopers, two probation officers, a volunteer fireman, an FBI agent, and a former border patrol chief;
! three chemists, three physicists, a biomedical engineer, and a microbiologist;
! six Peace Corps volunteers;
! two radio talk show hosts, a radio broadcaster, a radio newscaster, a television talk show host, and a television commentator;
! five accountants;
! a corporate pilot, and an astronaut;
! three professional musicians, a semi-professional musician, a screenwriter, a documentary film maker, a major league baseball player, a major league football player; and
! three carpenters, two vintners, two bank tellers, a furniture salesman, an organic farmer, a ski instructor, an ironworker, an auto worker, a clothing factory worker, a mortician, a waitress, a teamster member/dairy worker,
a paper mill worker, a cement plant worker, a meat cutter, a cannery worker, a shellfish specialist, a river boat captain, a taxicab driver, an auctioneer, a toll booth collector, a hotel clerk, a hotel bellhop, and a fruit
orchard worker.
The survey does state that many of the self reporting allows for the congress to list more than one occupation.
Like the English had during its feudal period, there are a pair of Universities in the United States that churns out the political elite in a matter of decades where Oxford and Cambridge took hundreds of years. The entire Supreme Court is an Alumni list of Harvard and Yale Law school (as is most of their staff). Congress is hardly different. The list of our Presidents without a degree from either Harvard or Yale is pretty sparse and sends your search back at least a hundred years if you don’t count outliers like Ronald Reagan who emerged from one of the other prominent and influential arms of American Feudalism: The Entertainment Industry.
Can you imagine our founders listing “Public Service” as an occupation? It would have been an affront to their sensibilities. Yet now, our Congress and our President wears it as a badge of honor. But that badge has become more like a cloak: A Cloak of Insulation. With all the ‘jobs’ in public service in Washington, DC, is it any wonder that politicians who spend most of their time there think the jobs situation is improving?
My representative, Sheila Jackson-Lee (D), spends more time on the television than she does in her Houston, TX district. She spends so much time in DC, New York, and LA that she has forgotten much of the proud Texas history and traditions, except for the Texas hair, obviously.
Other representatives are so clearly out of touch with reality (“Guam might tip over and capsize” Rep. Johnson (D) ) that it is hard to believe they were educated in America at all. Harvard and Yale can take a pass on Rep. Johnson at least, but the Thurgood Marshall Law School must be really hanging it’s head in shame. But where else can such foreign and misinformed opinions, understandings and misrepresentation of facts arise from but in the city so completely alienated from the rest of America?
Insulated and not wholly dependent on Harvard and Yale, DC breeds its own elite. The Reagans, the Clintons, the Bushs, the Obamas, they are only the top of this breeding system. Other families that have benefited from the nepotism are Kennedy, Gore, and even some you wouldn’t expect, like Rand Paul. Family connections are a sure fire win in the political realm.
The success of this political class is, in a large part, the fault of the last and least influential of the classes in our modern day Feudal system: the commoners, because they have allowed, and even supported the other two classes. This support has included financial, spiritual and emotional sustenance, indulging both the Entertainment Industry and the Political Class (including it’s lapdog, bureaucracy) like a father spoils his children upon his return from absence. The only way to change the system, to take back the power from the other two classes and return to a Republic, is for the commoners to stop indulging the other two classes and create leaders from within their own class. We’ll explore that idea more in the next and final part of my discussion of a Return to Feudalism.
Noelle Campbell 