Politics is the battle between these two views of the elites: the view that external forces are harmful, and the view that internal forces are harmful. The left will tend to blame institutions (which are external creations to help people realize certain goals); the right will tend to blame culture (which is generated internally and affects people internally). Both believe regulations and restrictions will solve the world’s problems. What they do not realize is that the non-elites (bourgeois and proletarians) tend to consider the elites the cause of the world’s problems.
. . .Elites tend to treat everyone else like pawns in their political games, and political games are exclusively the realm of the elites. Voting is an opiate for the masses, as evidenced by the fact that most elected officials are re-elected, while the institutions they are a part of are among the most unpopular (at least, in the U.S.). All governments, though, exist by and for the elites, with the elites throwing a few bones to the thugs in order to ensure their continued rule (the thugs follow whoever is throwing them the most bones, and the elites know it). The rest of the population produce the wealth the elites need so they can play their political games and otherwise participate in the gift economy. The wisest elites are those who understand this and try to ensure the economy continues to produce more and more wealth for them to be able to seize (through taxes) and use. The unwise get tired of waiting for the goose to lay those golden eggs, and instead seize the bird and cut it open to get all the gold at once.
I recommend the entire essay
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Heh, tell that to all those recently un-elected GOP candidates from Northern Virginia. Or to Joe Crowley.
One sees this trope repeated all the time, but it makes no sense at all. Try this: “It’s an irrational contradiction to like one’s own nation, but to dislike the United Nations.” Uh, no, it’s obviously not.
It’s like not liking the terrible legal system (and who does?), but liking one’s own competent lawyer who is a kind of mini-elite representative / champion of his client’s interests in the forum designated to fight it out with rivals. You can absolutely hate the forum and its rules and procedures and expense and incomprehensibility and frequent impositions of injustice, and still like your agent who shepherds your case through the system, with no contradiction. The same can be said for, say, the real estate system vs your own real estate agent, or any system of using authorized representatives to negotiate opposing interests on your behalf.
One might dislike war, but root for your side’s hero when it’s a spectator sport, like when Titus Manlius killed the giant Gaul, effectively deciding the battle when the whole Gaulish army retreated in response. “War is bad, but hooray for our Titus Manlius!”
Interesting. Do you disagree only with his linking of re-election prospects and institutional popularity, or with his conclusion that voting is an opiate for the masses? I agree with your point about the former but nonetheless feel, for other reasons, that voting is an opiate.
Thing is, we need opiates. They are essential medicine, both literally on the individual level, and metaphorically on the social and cultural level as “satisfying, calming, soothing, pacifying, and consoling delusions”. Seems to me there are lots of mass opiates out there these days – to include actual opiates – and if voting is one of them, that’s not necessarily a bad thing.
As with actual opiates, it’s all a matter of the dose. Too little votium, and people don’t believe in the legitimacy of the system and feel distressed and agitated. Too much and they give the system too much credit, and don’t demand necessary changes or want to throw the bums out. One way to rephrase Gurri’s thesis is that the Social Media new normal has quickly taken us from an overdose to underdose.
The Mark Twain joke is: “If voting made any difference they wouldn’t let us do it.” It’s apocryphal, but then again: (“Half the quotes attributed to Mark Twain are not Mark Twain” – Mark Twain.)
When a vote result threatens to make a difference (that is, go against the elite consensus), then the fake judges just overturn it officially, or otherwise allow it to be circumvented unofficially.
As always, humbled by the excellence of your comments, nevertheless, will attempt to push back on voting in the USA as an opiate.
Sure there are consequences to elections. No arguing that. But in the USA voters are only represented if their candidate wins. And if you don’t like either of the two major parties’ candidates, you are SOL. And as you aptly note, if your party wants to do something that disagrees with a court, the legal system will shut it down regardless of the actual law. The courts face no checks or balances.
On top of that, the USA system is designed with fear of the democratic mob in mind. Elites always like to believe that it is the common people, normies, who get the USA into all of its wars, and who are responsible for everything bad in the world. Thus we are stuck with the decennial gerrymandering process (euphemistically referred to as “redistricting” as if it is not a pure political powerplay to determine which party will hold the seat in the district) which means you have to move to another district if you want your vote to count.
Then we have unchecked and rampant election fraud. Perhaps a majority of jurisdictions now have more registered voters on their voter rolls than they have actual residents. And “absentee” ballots can be requested and signed off on and delivered without the purported voter ever touching it. Two weeks after the next federal election, secretaries of state will be announcing they have found “lost” bales of absentee ballots in car trunks, just as they have in previous federal elections. Illegals have been voting in increasing numbers and they will again next election.
The great scandal of the last presidential election was how the Democratic primary was rigged for Hillary. The press has treated the revelation of this corruption as the scandal rather than the corruption itself and has used it to pursue Trump ever since with first the Russian collusion hoax and now the Ukraine folly as direct Democrat primary corruption coverup follow-ons. Ironically, though impeachment will establish the precedent and norm that the president will now sit at the pleasure of congress, so this will be one improvement and a step towards replacing the antiquated USA system with a modern parliamentary system of government.
Then we have the career bureaucracy which is perfectly capable of blocking and democratically initiated reform. They have such numbers and so much power that they can thwart any reform.
Then there is the endless bureaucratic redtape and campaign finance regulations the penalties for violations of which are but a cost of doing business for the two major parties but a significant barrier to entry to competing parties. And then there is the relative disadvantage of media ownership. Bezos has the Washington Post, Bloomberg has his networks, and Carlos Slim and the Sulzburgers the NYT to work their political messaging, but you want to buy a political ad on Twitter? Forget it. In modern systems of government in free countries with integrity, all these barriers have been eliminated and political speech is unregulated.
Then there is the enormous hurdles to actually attempting constitutional reform. In a free country of non-slaves like Switzerland, constitutional amendments are on every ballot, four times a year. People in the USA like the taste of boot though and licking the boot by participating in the charade of democracy in this country by voting is indeed an opiate for them.
True, however, the flipside of that coin is that the representation works tolerably well if members of one party dominate the voting population of a particular district, which is often the case. Indeed, without gerrymandering, it would be the case in the vast majority of districts.
Consider: in the most recent congressional elections, out of 435 contests, only 89 (that is, 20%) of them were “close races” where the margin of victory was under 10%, and only 43 (10%) had a margin below 5%. That means 90% of races had a decent margin for the victor, and 80% of races weren’t even “close”.
I did the percentages on probability in the senate.
In California I have the probability of 100% that I will get 1/6 of a senator.
In Vermont, the voters have a 100% probability of getting 1.33 representatives, and 12 full senators.
I get voting is opiate for society but often Democracy is thought of as the ‘best form of government because nothing else works either.’
1) Most voting fraud is fairly small scale and has little consequence on the election. And they tend to caught more often than not.
2) The news has always dominated by specific elite. Nothing new here and I do believe the internet allows more alternative voices. Probably the big today than yesterday the news and politics more dominated by elite locally not nationally. (People like Huey Long were common.)
3) I am not sure how the 2016 D Primary was so rigged and the most obvious point here was Obama put his thumb on the scale and HRC the obvious favorite. Oddly enough this kept Biden out more than anything! And Sanders was not going to win….He lost by 12% of the vote and the voters that overwhelmingly supported HRC in the primary were Southern African-Americans. (Note about Obama…If he was able to run third term, he would have won the Primary easily.)
And if the people vote for something different, insanity among those who presume they rule:
H.L. Mencken, A Mencken Chrestomathy (New York: Knopf, 1949), p. 145:
“All [government] can see in an original idea is potential change, and hence an invasion of its prerogatives. The most dangerous man, to any government, is the man who is able to think things out for himself, without regard to the prevailing superstitions and taboos. Almost inevitably he comes to the conclusion that the government he lives under is dishonest, insane and intolerable, and so, if he is romantic, he tries to change it. And even if he is not romantic personally he is very apt to spread discontent among those who are.”
–Rothbard, Murray N.. The Anatomy of the State (LvMI) footnote
I am trying to think in my head when last saw a credible elite…
Whew that hurt.
Ike?
Or how about Lee Kwan Yew? Does the monarchy in Jordan count?
It seems to me that essential characteristic of an elite would be competence at managing large organizations （bureaucracies), and competence at making decisions. So maybe Warren Buffet could count? Would Bill Gates count? It seems much harder to think of deserved elites in government than in other influential spheres of endeavor.
The essay seems like warmed over Aristotle and Machiavelli. Not sure what to take away from it, as Aristotle and Machiavelli both recommended “Republics”/“Polities” as the best tradeoff in terms of quality of governance and stability.
It is weird however, to label this as libertarian, as the emphasis of both Machiavelli and Aristotle on the permanent existence of power hungry individuals tends to discomfit libertarians. They also believed that there will always be “thugs” and “revolutionaries” which is why you need coercive governments. But of course once you have coercive government, you need “thugs” and “revolutionaries” to keep the government honest. This is a line of reasoning that leads you in the direction of Will Wilkinson and Brink Lindsey as seeming Nordic Social democracy as the best that libertarians can hope for given human propensities towards violence.
Voting is not quite an opiate, but like an opiate is a release valve of the pressure normal folk feel — that pressure to hang the elite by lampposts.
To hang them or disposes them, as many of them deserve – but not ALL, and possibly not even most.
Society and voting as part of the struggle between elites & thugs on one side, and entrepreneurs & workers on the other side.
This captures a true aspect of the culture wars quite differently than any of the Three Languages of Politics. In all 3 of the TLP groups, there is the elite vs worker divide, with elites among Liberals, Conservatives, and even Libertarians (like Koch) more in tune with other elites, than in sync with the normal workers. Leaders are elites, or wanna-be elites.
The world is controlled by elites. It always has been, and it always will be. Our governments are run by elites, our educational system is run by elites, our philanthropies are run by elites, science is done by elites, and art is made by elites.
Where are the gov’t dependents? As “proletarians”, the same as workers? Troy doesn’t mention them, and they’re less than Romney’s 48%, but they’re maybe 10-20% of the voters – working age voters who get more in gov’t benefits than in private, voluntary income. And their interests are not the same as workers, but nor are they mostly thugs. More like passively elite-supporting slugs, who expect to be given things for nothing, even less than thugs or elites — but a lot less stuff.
UBI, in practice, would increase by far the number slugs, without much helping the workers or entrepreneurs.
I don’t think the crooked timber view of human nature is even required to make this point true. If one of the core functions of democracy is Orderly Succession then widespread voter participation builds trust in the fairness of the democratic process. Extreme distrust coupled with true corruption ends in trees bearing strange fruit.