I think interpreting this post is kind of difficult because the word "elite" is left without a definition, and generally it felt vague, aimless and hard to pay attention to, as I wondered: how does this matter? In a dictatorship, monarchy or oligarchy a small number of elites rule; in a democracy a bigger number of different elites, some of whose bums can be voted out by non-elites, have varying types and amounts of power. So clearly I'd rather have democracy for reasons other than "elites lack power". If elites are people who are "on top" in some sense, there will always be elites. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's certainly a thing that is.
> old forms of liberalism are dying, but new forms have yet to be born.
I don't think it's hard to see how things can be improved. It is said that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others", but I disagree. I say democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, and we haven't tried very many. Mostly people call for what has already been tried before―"monarchy", "socialism", "democracy", so that's all we ever get.
I do think it is super important to have *some* democracy. If things are going wrong and they're going wrong because the government screwed up, we the people should always be able to get a new government. But people do, in fact, have poor judgment. They choose which candidate "sounds good" from a few 30-second clips on TV or TokTok, according to their biases from watching their favorite shows that misunderstand or misrepresent how the world works.
It struck me that in in the last election in my country, when I looked at the two leading candidates' web sites, they had almost nothing to say! Both of them offered a very short and very underwhelming case for why I should vote for them. You know those economic difficulties that affected the whole first world after the pandemic? It caused democracies around the world to flip governments: right-wing governments became left-wing and left-wing governments became right-wing. Because the common man couldn't actually tell who was at fault, they blamed the government automatically and voted them out. That's part of how we got Trump by the way. that's part of how we got Hitler (as Matt Yglesias says: "The real story of Hitler’s rise is mostly a history of contingency — bad choices by specific influential politicians first wrecked the German economy and then handed power to Hitler... In the 1928 German federal election, the Nazi Party got 2.63 percent of the vote, putting them in ninth place" ... and this rose to 37.3% in July 1932 after some elites messed up, and the rest is history, a history of messing up even more)
Something that bothers me about standard democracies, though, is that elected representatives typically have poor judgment too, because the skills they need to get elected are not the same skills they need to govern. If you want to get elected you have to say the right things in your caucuses or primaries full of ideologues, and sound "authentic" to your social media followers and on the podcasts you visit. Not honest, not skilled, not competent, "authentic". Well, Trump *sounds authentic*.
The most plausible improvement to democracy that I see off the top of my head are jury systems, where educated people are chosen at random to either directly act as leaders and technocrats, or to directly judge legislators and potential legislators (to swap out bad ones for good ones), or at minimum to study and put out nonpartisan reports and proposals about topics of interest to the people, while the main electoral system is left alone.
But also, I've always said that if we're going to do democracy, we should do it right. First-past-the-post is the worst system. Instant-runoff voting, also known as alternative vote or RCV, is clearly better, but remains the second-worst. Proportional representation, direct representation and simple direct representation are all much better IMO.
But actually talking about what systems work better is moot. What matters in the end is how to accomplish change, given that whoever is elected under the current system is usually more skilled at winning *in the current system* than they would be at winning in a better system. This is a general problem across all systems of government: whoever is in charge *always* has some incentive to keep the system as it is. And even if they feel a change is needed, again, what reason is there to expect that those people in charge are competent to choose a new system? They could delegate, of course; they could recognize that social-system engineering isn't their wheelhouse and try to look for credible people to engineer a better system. But even then, it's hard to tell who the best engineers are when you aren't an engineer. And politics is not an environment where engineers or scientists tend to perform well and win the necessary popularity contests. What can I say, it's a tough problem.
I was about to answer NO to your headline, then decided PERHAPS in the Madisonian sense. Still only successful with an educated, virtuous electorate and elites.
The framing treats elite as a category of person. In practice it is a position: whoever drafts the rule that everyone else is later measured against. That seat does not disappear under any arrangement on the list. It only becomes harder to locate. Democracy does not remove the drafting seat. It moves it somewhere the voter cannot see, usually a committee with a technical name.
Is there a circulation/replacement of elite rule, though? How would we observe that? Is it even desirable to a certain degree?
The main challenge posed by right-wing elite theorists is not that there is a governing elite or that democracy should facilitate a circulation of elites. Their claim is that this supposed circulation is "kayfabe", a theater staged for the citizens to legitimise elite rule in a democracy. In reality, the "new" elite theorists claim, there is no circulation of elites through elections. New elites are integrated or "eliminated" through various undemocratic means by the oligarchic elites (liberals, left-wing radicals, feminists, jews, globalists, insert your favourite boogeyman, etc.) and their technocratic regents (the managerial class). The system is stabilised, "nothing ever happens". Right-wing populist movements and parties are kept and groomed for containment reasons.
My main counterargument would be that this view is ignorant of incremental changes in elite rule, sets standards for elite circulation unrealistically high (nothing short of a revolution will do), ignores disastrous "rightwing" revolutions or rather frames them in a no true scotsman way (Russia, Poland, Hungary and recently USA) and constantly shifts the goalpost. Also it is way too negative about the technocratic and post-democratic rule of managerial elites almost to the point of hysteria. While technocratic rule is disenfranchising and disillusioning citizens it is probably a necessary consequence of our modern societies. It's hard to envision a different solution. With the advent of AI the technocratic rule will become even more unhuman and detached.
In think expectation management (uh oh) and a positive vision is necessary to counter the nihilistic rights view on democracy and elite rule.
My book budget isn't big enough for this one so I do appreciate the summary.
One aspect of the "genius" of the American constitutional system was the intentional design to give the elites a dominant but not absolute position within the system. Reading the Federalist Papers description of the electors who would compose the Electoral College and their expectations of the qualities and character expected in the President are definitely elitist. The Senate was to be appointed by the legislatures that they assumed would be equally weighted toward the elites of those states. The House of Representatives was seen to be the fullest expression of democracy and an isolation chamber for the insanity that democracy can allow to be tempered by the Senate and President. In the end nothing the democrats in the House could pass without the permission of the elites.
Although universal suffrage (for white men) was debated at the Constitutional Convention essentially on the same grounds we argue about today (---ie some are too ignorant/unworthy to vote) they decided to let states decide the requirements and eligibility for voters. Nevertheless I think they assumed that the elite guardrails would hold at the state levels as well. They certainly didn't anticipate the Electoral College turning into what it is today nor did they anticipate the need for a 17th Amendment.
The economic transformation of America in the 19th century saw the death of nature's aristocracy and its replacement by money's oligarchy. Merit was judged by its utility to capital. The problems and corruption of a legislatively appointed Senate transformed into the problems and corruption of a financially purchased Senate.
The next Constitutional Amendment will have to redefine and regulate the relationship between money and politics. Then the merit based aristocracy of nature as understood by some of the Founders might have a chance of being found again.
A long, tedious, and pretentious argument for a technocracy - as bad an idea as it was over a century ago when Woodrow Wilson had it. Progressives doing what they always do - arguing for more centralized power over the people they think are too stupid to vote for them.
Well, the empirical evidence clearly indicates that the majority of the population consists of political illiterates. It does not have to be this way, but something must be done about it. Political literacy does not simply fall from the sky; it must be learned, just like reading and writing.
I read about half your article, thank you for sharing your point of view. I’m somewhat surprised that an engineer would have the point of view that the consensus should have more influence, competition harms not helps, wealthy people negatively influence democracy. Correct me if I’m wrong with the summary.
I would think as an engineer that wealth, competition, and elite gatekeeping (not majority consensus) helped you thrive in your position. A firm attracts investors (wealthy) so it can raise capital to better facilitate goods/services to the customers. The firm as a result hires engineers to maintain the product/service. These products and services are sold competitively to the public, to ensure quality and costs. The engineer does not resort to citizens outside the firm (democracy) to help fix problems with products or the firm, since the average citizen wouldn’t be informed enough to make the best decisions.
Instead, an engineer relies on a certain type of elite gatepkeeping to determine how to fix problems, as do executives within the firm.
I’m guessing that wasn’t your experience as an engineer? If that was your positive experience, perhaps political governance should also follow suit in a similar manner? (let the elites deal with elite issues, let democracy deal with local/self-interested issues)?
Or maybe that was your experience, you just think your path or more democracy and controls on the wealthy is a better way to return back to that form?
I am not all convinced that human society needs competition to thrive and I certainly can't imagine the wheel being invented because a couple of cavemen were competing with each other. In my view, it would be a much more peaceful world if we focused on innovation rather than competition and I sure don't want wealthy elites bribing criminals like Donald Trump to do their bidding.
It was the increasing influence of democracy that put Trump in office. He won the popular vote for the primary and then won the popular vote in the general. If it was pre-1976 (pre McGovern Commission) when political party elites chose their party’s candidates, Trump would never have been the candidate to begin with.
The wealthy (among other self-interested groups) are going to bribe or influence wherever the power structure is growing, and that happens to be Washington DC. Taking centralized power and further democratizing it will just create more dysfunction, as far as I can see. Maybe you see something different?
Without cooperation/competition, it was 400,000 years between the time man started to control fire to the time he invented the wheel. We can do better than that.
I appreciate your concern for the poor and the middle classes (from the Medium article). They indeed are more vulnerable to economic downturns. That always has been the case, and it will always be the case as long as human beings are diverse and have natural tendencies to create hierarchies. Humans have yet to solve for keeping everybody 100% safe and secure 100% of the time. But as long as we keep improving standards of living, create opportunities for mobility (I know you think these opportunities are dwindling), and reduce nasty economic downturns, we will continue to see progress. Don’t you agree?
The country I live in (New Zealand) was the first country in fairly recent times to award voting rights to women. We have a tiny population of ~5 million and I see little harm in trying a further experiment in democracy here. I suspect that there are lot of intelligent brains in the poor and middle classes and I think it would be good to give this large group an opportunity to govern. I really can't see them doing a worse job than the clearly selfish elites.
I think interpreting this post is kind of difficult because the word "elite" is left without a definition, and generally it felt vague, aimless and hard to pay attention to, as I wondered: how does this matter? In a dictatorship, monarchy or oligarchy a small number of elites rule; in a democracy a bigger number of different elites, some of whose bums can be voted out by non-elites, have varying types and amounts of power. So clearly I'd rather have democracy for reasons other than "elites lack power". If elites are people who are "on top" in some sense, there will always be elites. I'm not saying it's a good thing, but it's certainly a thing that is.
> old forms of liberalism are dying, but new forms have yet to be born.
I don't think it's hard to see how things can be improved. It is said that "democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others", but I disagree. I say democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried, and we haven't tried very many. Mostly people call for what has already been tried before―"monarchy", "socialism", "democracy", so that's all we ever get.
I do think it is super important to have *some* democracy. If things are going wrong and they're going wrong because the government screwed up, we the people should always be able to get a new government. But people do, in fact, have poor judgment. They choose which candidate "sounds good" from a few 30-second clips on TV or TokTok, according to their biases from watching their favorite shows that misunderstand or misrepresent how the world works.
It struck me that in in the last election in my country, when I looked at the two leading candidates' web sites, they had almost nothing to say! Both of them offered a very short and very underwhelming case for why I should vote for them. You know those economic difficulties that affected the whole first world after the pandemic? It caused democracies around the world to flip governments: right-wing governments became left-wing and left-wing governments became right-wing. Because the common man couldn't actually tell who was at fault, they blamed the government automatically and voted them out. That's part of how we got Trump by the way. that's part of how we got Hitler (as Matt Yglesias says: "The real story of Hitler’s rise is mostly a history of contingency — bad choices by specific influential politicians first wrecked the German economy and then handed power to Hitler... In the 1928 German federal election, the Nazi Party got 2.63 percent of the vote, putting them in ninth place" ... and this rose to 37.3% in July 1932 after some elites messed up, and the rest is history, a history of messing up even more)
Something that bothers me about standard democracies, though, is that elected representatives typically have poor judgment too, because the skills they need to get elected are not the same skills they need to govern. If you want to get elected you have to say the right things in your caucuses or primaries full of ideologues, and sound "authentic" to your social media followers and on the podcasts you visit. Not honest, not skilled, not competent, "authentic". Well, Trump *sounds authentic*.
The most plausible improvement to democracy that I see off the top of my head are jury systems, where educated people are chosen at random to either directly act as leaders and technocrats, or to directly judge legislators and potential legislators (to swap out bad ones for good ones), or at minimum to study and put out nonpartisan reports and proposals about topics of interest to the people, while the main electoral system is left alone.
But also, I've always said that if we're going to do democracy, we should do it right. First-past-the-post is the worst system. Instant-runoff voting, also known as alternative vote or RCV, is clearly better, but remains the second-worst. Proportional representation, direct representation and simple direct representation are all much better IMO.
But actually talking about what systems work better is moot. What matters in the end is how to accomplish change, given that whoever is elected under the current system is usually more skilled at winning *in the current system* than they would be at winning in a better system. This is a general problem across all systems of government: whoever is in charge *always* has some incentive to keep the system as it is. And even if they feel a change is needed, again, what reason is there to expect that those people in charge are competent to choose a new system? They could delegate, of course; they could recognize that social-system engineering isn't their wheelhouse and try to look for credible people to engineer a better system. But even then, it's hard to tell who the best engineers are when you aren't an engineer. And politics is not an environment where engineers or scientists tend to perform well and win the necessary popularity contests. What can I say, it's a tough problem.
I was about to answer NO to your headline, then decided PERHAPS in the Madisonian sense. Still only successful with an educated, virtuous electorate and elites.
So. Not in our lifetimes.
The framing treats elite as a category of person. In practice it is a position: whoever drafts the rule that everyone else is later measured against. That seat does not disappear under any arrangement on the list. It only becomes harder to locate. Democracy does not remove the drafting seat. It moves it somewhere the voter cannot see, usually a committee with a technical name.
Is there a circulation/replacement of elite rule, though? How would we observe that? Is it even desirable to a certain degree?
The main challenge posed by right-wing elite theorists is not that there is a governing elite or that democracy should facilitate a circulation of elites. Their claim is that this supposed circulation is "kayfabe", a theater staged for the citizens to legitimise elite rule in a democracy. In reality, the "new" elite theorists claim, there is no circulation of elites through elections. New elites are integrated or "eliminated" through various undemocratic means by the oligarchic elites (liberals, left-wing radicals, feminists, jews, globalists, insert your favourite boogeyman, etc.) and their technocratic regents (the managerial class). The system is stabilised, "nothing ever happens". Right-wing populist movements and parties are kept and groomed for containment reasons.
My main counterargument would be that this view is ignorant of incremental changes in elite rule, sets standards for elite circulation unrealistically high (nothing short of a revolution will do), ignores disastrous "rightwing" revolutions or rather frames them in a no true scotsman way (Russia, Poland, Hungary and recently USA) and constantly shifts the goalpost. Also it is way too negative about the technocratic and post-democratic rule of managerial elites almost to the point of hysteria. While technocratic rule is disenfranchising and disillusioning citizens it is probably a necessary consequence of our modern societies. It's hard to envision a different solution. With the advent of AI the technocratic rule will become even more unhuman and detached.
In think expectation management (uh oh) and a positive vision is necessary to counter the nihilistic rights view on democracy and elite rule.
My book budget isn't big enough for this one so I do appreciate the summary.
One aspect of the "genius" of the American constitutional system was the intentional design to give the elites a dominant but not absolute position within the system. Reading the Federalist Papers description of the electors who would compose the Electoral College and their expectations of the qualities and character expected in the President are definitely elitist. The Senate was to be appointed by the legislatures that they assumed would be equally weighted toward the elites of those states. The House of Representatives was seen to be the fullest expression of democracy and an isolation chamber for the insanity that democracy can allow to be tempered by the Senate and President. In the end nothing the democrats in the House could pass without the permission of the elites.
Although universal suffrage (for white men) was debated at the Constitutional Convention essentially on the same grounds we argue about today (---ie some are too ignorant/unworthy to vote) they decided to let states decide the requirements and eligibility for voters. Nevertheless I think they assumed that the elite guardrails would hold at the state levels as well. They certainly didn't anticipate the Electoral College turning into what it is today nor did they anticipate the need for a 17th Amendment.
The economic transformation of America in the 19th century saw the death of nature's aristocracy and its replacement by money's oligarchy. Merit was judged by its utility to capital. The problems and corruption of a legislatively appointed Senate transformed into the problems and corruption of a financially purchased Senate.
The next Constitutional Amendment will have to redefine and regulate the relationship between money and politics. Then the merit based aristocracy of nature as understood by some of the Founders might have a chance of being found again.
A long, tedious, and pretentious argument for a technocracy - as bad an idea as it was over a century ago when Woodrow Wilson had it. Progressives doing what they always do - arguing for more centralized power over the people they think are too stupid to vote for them.
Well, the empirical evidence clearly indicates that the majority of the population consists of political illiterates. It does not have to be this way, but something must be done about it. Political literacy does not simply fall from the sky; it must be learned, just like reading and writing.
I am only a dumb old mechanical engineer who was taught to fix things that are broken. Here's this old engineer's thoughts as to how we might repair our broken democracies: https://medium.com/@cliffwainui1/our-democracies-are-breeding-grounds-for-inequity-and-discontent-this-is-because-5bfa5810a96e
I read about half your article, thank you for sharing your point of view. I’m somewhat surprised that an engineer would have the point of view that the consensus should have more influence, competition harms not helps, wealthy people negatively influence democracy. Correct me if I’m wrong with the summary.
I would think as an engineer that wealth, competition, and elite gatekeeping (not majority consensus) helped you thrive in your position. A firm attracts investors (wealthy) so it can raise capital to better facilitate goods/services to the customers. The firm as a result hires engineers to maintain the product/service. These products and services are sold competitively to the public, to ensure quality and costs. The engineer does not resort to citizens outside the firm (democracy) to help fix problems with products or the firm, since the average citizen wouldn’t be informed enough to make the best decisions.
Instead, an engineer relies on a certain type of elite gatepkeeping to determine how to fix problems, as do executives within the firm.
I’m guessing that wasn’t your experience as an engineer? If that was your positive experience, perhaps political governance should also follow suit in a similar manner? (let the elites deal with elite issues, let democracy deal with local/self-interested issues)?
Or maybe that was your experience, you just think your path or more democracy and controls on the wealthy is a better way to return back to that form?
I am not all convinced that human society needs competition to thrive and I certainly can't imagine the wheel being invented because a couple of cavemen were competing with each other. In my view, it would be a much more peaceful world if we focused on innovation rather than competition and I sure don't want wealthy elites bribing criminals like Donald Trump to do their bidding.
It was the increasing influence of democracy that put Trump in office. He won the popular vote for the primary and then won the popular vote in the general. If it was pre-1976 (pre McGovern Commission) when political party elites chose their party’s candidates, Trump would never have been the candidate to begin with.
The wealthy (among other self-interested groups) are going to bribe or influence wherever the power structure is growing, and that happens to be Washington DC. Taking centralized power and further democratizing it will just create more dysfunction, as far as I can see. Maybe you see something different?
Without cooperation/competition, it was 400,000 years between the time man started to control fire to the time he invented the wheel. We can do better than that.
I appreciate your concern for the poor and the middle classes (from the Medium article). They indeed are more vulnerable to economic downturns. That always has been the case, and it will always be the case as long as human beings are diverse and have natural tendencies to create hierarchies. Humans have yet to solve for keeping everybody 100% safe and secure 100% of the time. But as long as we keep improving standards of living, create opportunities for mobility (I know you think these opportunities are dwindling), and reduce nasty economic downturns, we will continue to see progress. Don’t you agree?
The country I live in (New Zealand) was the first country in fairly recent times to award voting rights to women. We have a tiny population of ~5 million and I see little harm in trying a further experiment in democracy here. I suspect that there are lot of intelligent brains in the poor and middle classes and I think it would be good to give this large group an opportunity to govern. I really can't see them doing a worse job than the clearly selfish elites.