Saturday, January 28, 2023

Aurelien (2) Elitist Political Systems

Political systems right across the western world have become fragile and ineffective, while becoming more and more elitist.

Elections have become a party game in which different members of the elite group take turns at governing. The courts and news media that are supposed to keep them accountable and the security services that are supposed to protect the overall system both come from the same professional, fairly prosperous, political class that lives in the capital and attended the same schools and universities. The problem is that this elite group has become more and more detached from the people that they govern.

People tend to vote for parties that represent, or at least acknowledge, their interests, and if a party no longer does that, they will stop voting for the party, or stop voting altogether. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence of the move towards elite Professional and Managerial Class (PMC)-based political parties.

In the past, for as long as there were genuine differences between parties, and parties themselves had mass memberships, the problem was containable. Most people were prepared to go along with the system, believing that their vote could change things, if only at the margins. That’s no longer true, and not only do people increasingly not vote, which is awkward in a democracy, but when they do vote, it might be essentially a vote of protest against the system, out of a desire to demonstrate a lack of faith in it. So other methods have been required as well...

In most western countries there is now a professional political class, with links of family and education to similar classes in the media, professional and intellectual worlds, who mostly think alike, and who believe, and tell each other, that they know what’s best, and so should be allowed to rule. This political class itself is drawn from a far narrower and far more homogeneous group than at any point in modern history.

So this professional political class, narrowly based and insulated from much of real life, but with close and overlapping contacts with other parts of the establishment, naturally thinks that it knows best...

But this class is only part of a larger PMC, which also includes the traditional establishment professions: law, education, banking, the media, the public service and so forth. Structurally, we can look at much of the rhetoric around the functioning of today’s political system as different expressions of the class power of the PMC, and to some extent a reflection of the competition for power and influence within it...

After all, the elites move between the various spheres, and sometimes occupy them simultaneously: a politician may go on to a lucrative media career, a lawyer may also advise and work for NGOs. If one part of the ecosystem seems to be getting a little out of control, other parts can step in to restore order. Above all, the system is multiply redundant in obstructing attempts from any quarter to challenge its power, or to advance the interests of ordinary people.

Liberalism, the dominant political force in modern western societies, has been elitist since its conception: it’s just that we are more conscious of that now, as the gap between the interests and preoccupations of ordinary people and the PMC continues to grow all over the world.

The sociologist Robert Michels developed what he called the Iron Law of Oligarchy, based partly on his experiences in the German Social Democratic Party before the First World War. All organisations, he argued, even the most faultlessly democratic, ultimately wind up being run by a “leadership class” which takes decisions and renews itself. Anyone who has observed, or participated in, organisations large or small, is likely to find this argument persuasive, but it’s clear that, beyond a certain level of complexity, it applies to nations as well. Perhaps the PMC is, in part, a natural consequence of a complex society.

The problem is the rest of us, and especially those whose only relationship to the PMC will be that of a servant class.

More at https://aurelien2022.substack.com/p/lets-all-be-accountable-

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