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Conservative Mike Cernovich (1.2M followers) Tweeted "Trump needs a VP that will make him assassination proof. Anyone saying otherwise has no understanding of the time we are in. Tim Scott as VP? Trump's survivability will drop to zero. It's incredible to me that more don't understand this."
How seriously should Trump take such a threat, and how seriously does Trump take such a threat? Yes, the powers-that-be truly hate Trump and if he became president and had Scott as VP many would rejoice at Trump's death. But by what mechanism might they kill him? Obviously, it creates horrible incentives if Trump believes the threat and it causes him to consider someone such as Kari Lake, Marjorie Taylor Greene, or Sarah Palin for his VP nominee. In sort-of support of Cernovich, part of the reason that Biden might be sticking with Harris as VP is to reduce the chances he gets removed from office for senility.
There should be a requirement that if you're going to use vague and allusive terms that you define those terms so people can know who you're talking about. Don't just say 'elites' or 'the powers-that-be'. What specific people/organizations/institutions do you mean?
There is a rule about being specific:
It's not followed or enforced. But it is a rule.
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There should be a requirement that people who act as if the ruling class is only a useful category when it is legible explain what they think people ought to do in political regimes where the ruling class is incentivized to be as illegible as possible.
Because I don't really see "not talk about the ruling class" as an acceptable answer to that question. And we happen to live in one such illegible regime.
These demands for specificity displace the object level debate into another debate about the true nature of the ruling class, in which dissidents usually disagree with each other, and thus serves the interests of the ruling class by keeping opponents divided. Since that rhetoric serves an interest, I find it suspect.
In a sense it is in effect completely irrelevant what the nature of the ruling class is, what matters is who is their friend, and who is their enemy. And that can be easily divined without needing to elucidate the specifics of who they are down to a list of names.
You could just be specific. I'm not suggesting you need a comprehensive list of every single person involved, but you should be able to provide some key identifiable institutions or people. It is extremely relevant who they are because you cannot possibly draw useful conclusions about them otherwise. A nebulous "they" has no interests.
All rhetoric serves an interest. Vagueness makes it impossible to interrogate claims or simply obfuscate their absurdity. The motives of the "powers that be" to assassinate Trump are not something anyone can examine because there is no clear reference.
Of course, the real answer to all this is that the "ruling class" is a fiction - the people and organizations that wield power are fragmented and frequently at odds.
This is entirely compatible with the concept of the ruling class and I should say necessary to understand the reasons of formation and collapse of the category. Everyone is indeed always at odds, a ruling class is a group of people that are sufficiently organized that their internal squabbles don't jeopardize domination of their external enemies.
Let us consider a salient and inarguable example of a ruling class, the Soviet nomenklatura.
No sane student of history would deny that these people had vicious internal fights, often to the death. But then nobody would deny either that they were a ruling class. They formed an organized minority of people who ruled over the majority of Soviet population.
Insofar as they were ready to favor their social circle over the population at large, they held power, and it slipped from their fingers at the precise exact time that their inner divisions became more powerful than the pact they held against the population. In the 1991 Yanayev coup, when fellow party members stopped being friends, and became enemies.
In some abstract sense, perhaps. And everything is also political in that sense. But it dissolves the category into uselessness. Rather, as I think you're saying, refusing to front a list of names serves the interest of dissidents. Which is also suspect.
Fair enough, but I then don't think we ought to take sides if we want do do a descriptive inquiry. Talking about the ruling class, whatever it is, and the ruling class, a specific one; are both valid and useful in my view.
I guess we agree in the sense that we then ought to bring up different models of the establishment and its behavior, and compare them against the situation. I think that's productive and we should cultivate a number of such models if we want to understand the world as it is.
I simply want to prevent us from the demand of fronting a perfect prediction model for something that is desperately trying not to be observed.
I'd like some more details too. President Biden is obviously part of the American ruling class. I couldn't name anyone else who inarguably is though. Is Marjorie Taylor Greene part of the ruling class? Are New York Times journalists? Are American generals? Is Peter Thiel? Is Donald Trump himself? Supreme Court justices? State governors? If you're saying Trump is at risk of being assassinated by the powers-that-be, I want some more details on which powers exactly those are, because there are a lot of powers in America. Many of them hate Trump, many of them hate each other, many of them hate Trump and also hate other people who hate Trump.
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That's a hard question, especially without specifying the number of people in the set called "powers-that-be". I like the term because it is clear that I am not pretending to know exactly who is in the set.
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