A Plutocratic Universe

[Joanne98]

Autocrats, plutocrats, authoritarian ideologues and elitists of all stripes speak often of the people’s inability to govern themselves in a complex world that requires expertise – namely, the self-justifying expertise of the elite themselves. With surprising frankness, federal appeals court Judge Richard A. Posner summed up the elite’s paternalistic rationale:

Few citizens have the formidable intellectual and moral capacities (let alone the time) required for the role that assigns to the citizenry…

The anti-democratic sentiment is hard enough to stomach. But what really galls is the blindness to an indisputable fact of history: it’s the autocrats, plutocrats, dictators, duci, fuhrers, imperial presidents and corporate barons who have lacked the necessary “intellectual and moral capacities” to cope.

Even historically exalted leaders are usually only those who’ve succeeded in cleaning up the messes of their predecessors. And they do it by widening their circle of advisers, sometimes all the way to the people they serve. Franklin Roosevelt comes to mind. The years of his administration saw a major spike in broad government/political engagement and voter turnout.

I’ve been reading historian Miranda Carter’s entertaining new book, George, Nicholas and Wilhelm, about the cousin-emperors (Kaiser Wilhelm II, Czar Nicholas II, and King George V) who helped lead the world into the catastrophe called World War I. Yep, they were cousins. In some ways we can thank the 19th Century’s Queen Victoria for the bloody 20th . She spent most of her time intermarrying mentally infirm members of the royal families throughout Europe and Russia. Her grandson, King George V, even created the name “House of Windsor” out of whole cloth, scrapping the true, pan-European royal name – the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha – in a tip of the crown to English nationalist fervor. But blood feuds are thicker than spin

http://firedoglake.com/2010/05/16/a-plutocratic-universe/

[IndianaJoe]

1. Your article called to mind something I read recently:

It was a theory propounded by a German sociologist named Robert Michels called "The Iron Law of Oligarchy". It states "that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. The reasons for this are the technical indispensability of leadership, the tendency of the leaders to organize themselves and to consolidate their interests; the gratitude of the led towards the leaders, and the general immobility and passivity of the masses."

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iron_law_of_oligarchy>

"This is why it’s urgent that we move toward authentic popular democracy. Short of the guillotine, we should enact full public finance of campaigns, universal voter registration and election-day holidays, tough privacy laws and strict limits on surveillance and search, etc. Of course, these kinds of things are often ridiculed as “process” issues that don’t capture the emotions and imaginations of voters. We can keep telling ourselves that until, pretty soon, there won’t be any voters at all.

The greatest danger lies in pretending that we have perfected democracy. Richard Nixon and George W. Bush came to power, and voters played a role, to be sure (less so in the case of the Supreme Court appointed Bush). But we ignore the pernicious, democracy-warping influence of big money and media bias and over-simplification at our own peril. Blame is also misplaced when we point the finger at “the people” – the Right’s ongoing blame of 1960s civil rights, anti-war or poverty protestors, for instance – instead of at the Robert McNamaras, Henry Kissingers and other plutocrats."