For the most part, the American ruling class no longer has even the slightest sense of national pride or patriotic attachment to the United States: the average plutocrat is now so far removed from the trials and tribulations of the rest of us that they see us no differently than they see the inhabitants of Rio’s slums or Haitian cholera wards — faraway, unsanitary, shithouse-dwelling failures. Public bus/Public school/Free clinic losers useful as interchangeable meat-cog labor, but otherwise wholly disposable.
Every now and then as they raze the American Dream further into oblivion, the ruling class hits a vein of unusually persistent liberty-nostalgia or a particularly intransigent outcropping of constitutionalism that requires them to kick the wingnut killdozer into a higher gear and the grinding sounds of their momentarily-overt, teeth-bared racism or outright contempt for democracy temporarily freaks out the Moderates and Conservative expatriates.
These freak-outs never last: they splutter along for a day or two and then are aggressively paved over with thick, David Brooks-flavored Centrist sludge. Alleged Liberal elitism is widely and angrily mocked, nonexistent “traditional” Conservative virtues are sermonized, and Moderates and Conservative expatriates all dutifully slide back into their “both sides do it” comas.
A.