https://www.imperiumpress.org/shop/populist-delusion/
Author: Neema Parvini
Really interesting book, although pretty cynical. Here are a few quotes that I think capture its essence. Definitely grab a copy if you’re into this kind of thing.
Since there are always the rulers and the ruled, how can ‘the people’ ever be sovereign? Power does not rest nor will ever rest in ‘the will of the people’, but rather in the organised efforts of the ruling minority.
That’s the main idea, and it rings true. Since the ruling class is always a minority, they stay in power by being highly organized and relying heavily on propaganda.
In elections, as in all other manifestations of social life, those who have the will and, especially, the moral, intellectual and material means to force their will upon others take the lead over the others and command them.
No doubt.
However, feudal states are inefficient at quickly mobilising men for military campaigns and are subject to internal quarrels between rival lords. In contrast, the bureaucratic state, which has succeeded in centralising taxation, has greater specialization of the key functions of government and can maintain a standing army.
This is basically the mainstream take on the evolution of the state.
If people want change even at a time of popular and widespread resentment of the ruling class, they can only hope to achieve that change by becoming a tightly knit and organised minority themselves and, in effect, displacing the old ruling class.
Yep, matches my observations. An unorganized opposition is a total clown show.
Here, Pareto’s analysis bears many similarities with Mosca’s in terms of the fact that the elite are constantly replenished by exceptional individuals from the lower classes, and risk overthrow if they are too exclusive.
That was definitely the main cause of the 1917 revolution in Russia.
‘For the will of the people is not transferrable, nor even the will of the single individual’, argues Michels, drawing on Mosca directly, ‘in actual fact, directly the election is finished, the power of the mass over the delegate comes to an end.’ Hence not only is direct democracy impossible, but also representative democracy is necessarily a fiction.
Yep, broken promises go hand in hand with the electoral process.
The nature of organization is such that it gives power and advantages to the group of leaders who cannot then be checked or held accountable by their followers. Michels himself put it even more succinctly: ‘Who says organization, says oligarchy.
Thus, once a leader has attained power in the first place, they are driven by something like a Nietzschean Will to Power, they are intoxicated by it and want more of it. It is significant that it is power that is the motivation and not merely money.
This is often understated. People tend to portray politicians as just greedy, which is partly true, but there are more important factors at play.
British politicians have a remarkable capacity to ‘fail upwards’. These politicians may have been voted out of their seats, but they remained part of the ruling class and enlarged the scope of their personal power.
This proves the political class is just a private club. It’s impossible to get kicked out, you just get shuffled to a different top spot.
He also notes that the old leaders will style themselves as the sensible people, the ‘adults in the room’ against ‘extremists’ whom they can paint as naïvely idealist or as demagogues, and in this they can rely on the natural conservatism of the masses in the party membership (who distrust newcomers) to enlist support.
This will likely appear absurd to some. How could an absolutist monarch bear any relation to, for example, the US government with its careful system of checks and balances, its separation of the executive from the legislature and judiciary and so on? The answer lies in the fact that Schmitt saw it fit to judge any political system not by its norms but when it was under crisis.
Exactly. Systems reveal their true nature under pressure. The US championed free trade but has turned to protectionism. In Europe, self-proclaimed liberals are now harassing any Russian they can find, regardless of individual guilt. It exposes the elite’s “whatever it takes” mentality when their goals are threatened.
From the realist perspective of Schmitt, there is no structural difference between the liberal state, the communist state, and the fascist state, or indeed any other state. The only difference is the extent to which a regime may obscure the nature of its power or else genuinely buy into myths of neutrality. Viewed in this way, a state wedded to liberal democracy is as ‘totalitarian’ as any other since, by its very nature, it will be unable to tolerate any leaders who are not always already liberal democrats.
We can see it clearly in the way current EU elites are harassing a genuinely popular opposition.
England, too, discovered the ideal of a Free Press, and discovered along with it that the press serves him who owns it. It does not spread ‘free’ opinion, it generates it.
After following the BBC and The Guardian for a while, I have to agree. There’s no such thing as an objective, government-supported, or even just government-tolerated media.
Liberalism, in its degenerate and anarchic form involving periodic crises and unemployment as in the U.S.A., implies even greater subjection of the individual to economic forces than does Communism.
The moment of truth for any regime will come at the moment in which ideological ‘soft power’ is stripped away and it must use repressive force to crush its opposition. Hesitancy on the part of Power at the hour of decision, whether through a failure of nerve in the leadership or a failure in confidence on the part of their generals, will seal their fate if rival aristocrats exploit popular discontent.
The nineteenth-century liberals overlooked, and the twentieth-century liberals decline to face, the fact that teaching everyone to read opens minds to propaganda and indoctrination at least as much as to truths.
Absolutely. Centralization boosts group coherence, and we have more tools for it now than ever before.
The divorce of control, or power, from ownership has been due in large part to the growth of public corporations. So long as a single person, family or comparatively small group held a substantial portion of the common shares of a corporation, the legal ‘owners’ could control its affairs. Even if they no longer actually conducted the business, the operating managers were functioning as their accountable agents.
Now we’re switching to the topic of “managerialism.” But it should be obvious to anyone who wasn’t born yesterday that corporations are just arms of the government, and the state won’t tolerate any dissent.
The same can be said, and doubly so, for the Ford Foundation. Shortly after Henry Ford’s death, Henry Ford II signed a document stating that the Ford family would exercise no more influence over the foundation than any other board member; he regretted the decision for the rest of his life. Since then, the Ford Foundation has supported almost exclusively left-wing progressive causes that would make Henry Ford—a well-known social conservative—turn in his grave.
Brendan Eich was forced to resign after only eleven days as CEO of Mozilla after it was found he had donated to a political campaign against gay marriage and employees launched a social media campaign to oust him.
Luckily for him, he founded a successful company called Brave after that.
As more people come to see them as unmistakably totalitarian in nature, and as the gap between elite and popular values widens, it is only a matter of time until we see a circulation of elites because the managerial regime is failing precisely at the moment of its apparent victory lap.
This is what people call “overtightening the screws” in Russia. I’m not sure it actually works, to be honest, but a man can hope.
He claimed that the regime faces a ‘paradigm crisis’ in which ‘the gap between its democratic and liberal self-descriptions and its imposed social policies’ would become too obvious to escape notice and therefore ‘the efforts to justify these policies with archaic terminology or human rights rhetoric no longer elicit widespread belief.
At Davos a few years ago, the Edelman survey showed us that the good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more, so we can come together and design and do beautiful things together. The bad news is that in every single country they were polling, the majority of people trusted that elite less.
A great read, highly recommend.