The elites’ loss of faith in democracy is directly proportional to their heightened loathing of the public. According to Cohen, the public is susceptible to “greed, prejudice, ignorance, domination, subservience and fear.” It worships political thugs like Donald Trump in the US and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK. It erupts into Tea Parties and Occupations that upset the steady progress of history. The elites, in brief, have come to doubt that their pet projects can be implemented democratically. They are shopping for alternatives.
Gurri ends up suggesting that Estonia and Iceland’s Pirate Party might offer workable models for the future. I think that it is fair to say that you won’t find that view widely expressed.
Elites are never in favor of democracy, except rhetorically when they lead a faction of non-elites while fighting some intra-elite battle. Except for an occasional highborn fool or selfless philosopher, all the supposed counter-examples which come to your mind (Jefferson, Franklin for the USA) are actually upstarts from the middle (or sometimes even lower) segments of their society trying to supplant the elites of their day (George III, Lord North). Such upstarts may retain their early orientation even after they rise to power, but their posterity willl naturally manifest elite disdain for democracy. Democracy as a working system rather than as a propaganda claim can only persist where members of society are relatively equal, and– I suspect– in fairly small polities (e.g., Swiss cantons). Most of the time democracy simply means that squabbling elites find it more convenient to decide their contests by measuring how many bumpkins each can hoodwink than by self-endangering violence.
Elites do like to distract the masses with spectacles of campaigns, elections, and other democratic rituals. So long as the foolish masses think that they control society through “democracy” they are less likely to revolt against elite rule. Elites are always fearful of upstarts, though, and recognize that so long as the masses believe in democracy there is a danger those masses can be galvanized to use (misuse, from the elite perspective) the machinery of democracy to seize actual power (to the elite mind that would be like an actor using a stage-prop sword to stab the producer of the play). That is why elites are always in favor of mass immigration to multiply the number of culturally- and linguistically-isolated blocs of people in the society and thereby reduce the chance that any voting bloc strong enough to overthrow the elite “democratically” can be assembled. That is also why elites favor the imposition of non-democratic supra-national governments like the European Union, which allow the masses to goggle at the spectacle of “democracy” in their various satrapies, but let elites rule from some imperial capital (Brussels) without little fear of democratic revolution.
The astute observer will notice, that from the elite point of view mass immigration to an national polity such as the USA, and expansion of an anti-democratic empire such as the EU by accession of nearby national polities, have the same goal: multiplying the number of nations under the rule of a single elite, thus minimizing the chance that democracy will be a working system of government rather than an ultimately pointless distraction for the masses like American team sports with draft picks awarded inversely to tournament performance.
Well, given the pet project of the elites for the last century or so has been socialism through democracy, I can see how they might be frustrated with the Tea Party and even Trump. Their patient, one person, one vote, as many times necessary until they vote the right group in, has been slow going as so far the zeitgeist hasn’t been right to do away with further voting at least in the US. Through decades of work, they got to the point that Republican or Democrat didn’t matter and up pops Trump, who is outside their brief and proving popular now that people have a real choice.
Trump is a “real choice.”
Or so think the buyers of his baseball caps.
“Read the whole thing.”
What Martin Gurri appears to be observing in “Western” societies are the effects of the conversions of the functions of governments in the recession (and suppressions) of individuality, to provide the more broadly ‘anti-individual’ “Public” with a ‘social protectorate’ detached from the obligations of choices.
There is the contemporaneous change in the composition of, or the characteristics of, those referred to as “elites;” who are actually the “salesmen” who have been selling that same ‘anti-individual’ “public” programs, policies, practices and administrations as their “mandates,” with increasing extensions, over the past century. Those “elites,” of today have run out of anything new to sell to replace what has not “worked.”
That same “public” is becoming aware that where societies are now fragmenting along lines where individuality retains some material and cultural effectiveness, there are marked differences in conditions and outlooks.
One immediate reaction seems to be a search elsewhere for what the “elite” (as salesmen seeking mandates of their own devising) were expected to deliver; shifting to a quest (so far) for different demagogues. This “our” form of democratic process, which provided the salesmen their “market,” is available for the quest. The salesmen have lost their monopoly of the bazaar.
Still, too much confusion is sown by the constant uses of Democracy, democratic, etc.; all of which infer the process (not a condition) by which the members of a society express or exercise their power. In the case of “our” process(es), that power has evolved into one of numbers, in which the characteristics of the ‘anti-individual” outweigh individuality (and the advancements individuality, with its innovations, produced over the past 500 years).
A democratic process can install tyrants, demagogues or salesmen,; much depends on who gets to use the process, to what ends – such as the constraints of individuality, usually an objective of tyrants, salesmen and demagogues..
Gurri: ” to win at the electoral game, a politician must promise the impossible, thus ensuring failure in office. ” <<
This is a huge and important truth and one of the worst features of democracy. And education doesn't seem to help, rather, the more highly educated are more convinced that their guy's promise is actually possible and fails because the opposition, or those with different ideas, such a person is evil.
I'm thinking the Trump supporters are more honest than Clinton supporters: they know his promises are mostly hot air, and don't believe most of them.
The elites are failing because their policies are failing. Perhaps what’s most infuriating if its not even the most difficult policy choices that are what has the public riled up. Things like mass immigration are purely the product of elite ideology. It has no upside and is easily refuted. If elites would compromise on their ideology to face reality things wouldn’t be so bad. Rather then viewing public opinion as a problem, it should be viewed as a signal to elites that they are screwing up and need to change. Repressing these signals will not improve the situation.