We are in the middle of the year celebrating America’s 250th birthday, a date pegged to the drafting and signing of the Declaration of Independence, but which also encompasses the entire Founding period including the Revolutionary War. The military struggle with the British started in the Massachusetts hamlets of Concord and Lexington in 1775 and for all practical purposes ended in Yorktown, Virginia, in 1781.
But it’s a mistake to think the American Revolution ended in 1781. The struggle for liberty is eternal. And its opponents don’t only live across an ocean or beyond the U.S. borders. As Dr. Benjamin Rush, an essential Founding Father, wrote in 1787, “The American war is over but this is far from being the case with the American Revolution.”
The Revolution, of course, was against the entrenched elites in England who bullied the colonies with excessive taxes and regulations right up until those early American populists – people dismissed as a “rabble” by the crown and in Parliament – could take no more and “fired the shots heard ’round the world.”
Through the many arcs of U.S. history, it has frequently been thus: Elites versus the common-sense citizenry. America has often been divided into two classes.
Some may recognize it as Delta House versus Omega House, the two warring fraternities in John Landis’ 1978 classic comedy “Animal House.”
Yes, John Belushi hilariously mangled his history when his character rallied fellow Delta brothers by bellowing, “Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?” But the key point was the answer to Bluto’s own question – whether they were willing to be pushed around by the suits who ran mythical Faber College: “Hell no!”
No doubt the Delta frat house had its share of screwballs and screw-ups. Yet the important thing was its foundational beliefs: Maximum freedom was the guiding philosophy of Delta House, while exerting control was the abiding philosophy of Omega House.
Donald Trump is the leader of today’s Delta House Republicans. Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and a generation of control-freak Democrats are Omega House Democrats – with an even more authoritarian generation of “democratic socialists” waiting in the wings.
Being a member of the ruling class does not only mean trying to exert economic control over the citizenry (though that’s an element). It’s not strictly geographical or even purely ideological. It’s a cultural mindset and, more than anything else, attitudinal. Elites think they know what’s best for you. First, they encourage, then they coerce, and if that doesn’t work, they order you to do what you’re told. To be in Omega House, you must be a conformist. To be in Delta House, you need to be an individual – and one willing to fight for your rights. Those were the kind of men who stood on the bridge at Concord and braved the winter at Valley Forge. Omega House was full of Tories.
A more recent example of their authoritarian impulses came during the Great Recession of 2007-08, when the elites reached into taxpayers’ pockets and gleefully took out $700 billion to cover their own gross financial mistakes. Nobody on Wall Street ever went to jail for crashing the economy. No, the elites paid themselves handsomely for our troubles.
As the late Rush Limbaugh once proclaimed, “Republicans are the way they are in Washington because Washington is a culture and a place that is run and dominated – not just politically but socially – by Democrats, by the left. They’re the big clique.”
In the 21st century, we’ve been reminded that it’s not that tidy. There are, in fact, Delta House conservatives. Although it’s not always apparent who is Delta House and who is Omega House, in some cases it’s easy. Donald Trump is “Otter Stratton,” the charismatic rush chairman of Delta House who always seems to get what he wants. Ronald Reagan would be President Emeritus. Newt Gingrich would be Delta’s Toga Party planner. Most everybody at Newsmax would be Delta House pledges along with most (but not all) of those at Fox News.
Almost the entirety of the legacy media are the compromised elites of Omega House. As are Democratic Party establishment and the billionaires who fund them. Despite their cartoonish faculty lounge patter about “corporate power” and “oligarchs,” so are the performative “democratic socialists” who attended Ivy League schools – often on other people’s money.
In 1865 after the union was saved, Abraham Lincoln sought to instill national unity by noting that both sides in the great Civil War “read the same Bible and pray to the same God [while invoking] His aid against the other.” As a proud member of Delta House, I cannot help but observe that today’s elites pray to themselves as supposed saviors of the planet and shapers of mankind in their own image.
Another distinction between the two competing philosophies is that Delta House conservatives are patriotic and believe in merit – and understand that America is still the world’s last best hope for those who want to work hard and pursue their dreams. Omega House leftists, by contrast, practiced a strange new hybrid version of a failed old ideology, one centered on blaming America for all their own shortcomings and, really, for all the ills of the world.
Another feature of Omega House defeatists is they somehow think we Delta House conservatives are not smart enough to make our own decisions. That they must have power to run our lives. They use nice little euphemisms such as “for the people” and “tax the rich” and “climate change” to try to placate the citizenry, but is mostly about their own accumulation of naked power.
The elites are the product of the same education system, churning out ignorance, cancel culture, and anti-American hatreds instead of teaching open debate and honest inquiry.
I’ve had fun with the “Animal House” comparison, and yes, that movie was a spoof, but if you’ll recall, Omega House and the Faber administration really were quite corrupt – like the elites of today. (“I’ll have your legs broken,” said the head of Faber.)
Rush Limbaugh, channeling Thomas Jefferson, noted, “There have always been revolutions.” We’re in the midst of another one, and I know whose side I’m on. Or, as John Blurarsky vowed, “Not me! I’m not gonna take this!”
So, down with the elites! Long live the 250th American Revolution!
