Elites Don't Rule (II)

Understanding the paradox of democratic oligarchy

In the first part of this post, we shone a sharp light on the concept of ‘Elite Human Capital’ propounded by Richard Hanania and Anatoly Karlin. We noted that the term elite, which ought strictly to mean ‘cream of the crop’, is being debased into a descriptor for a mass of credentialed midwits better described as ‘Mediocre Human Capital’. At the same time, we admitted that this mass might be described as an elite in the informal sense of ruling class, on the grounds that the expansion of the state has allowed it to usurp power from those above and below it.

As Eugyppius writes at his plague chronicle:

With industrialisation and the emergence of mass society…the bureaucratic apparatus has expanded to the point that a quantitative difference has become a qualitative one. In their scale, complexity, and their power, modern bureaucracies are like nothing the world has ever seen before, and they cause states to behave in new and incomprehensible ways. Above all, power has been steadily diffused downwards, through the ranks of countless even mid-level functionaries, and government policies are subject to enormous inertia.

And:

This is the diffusion of power downwards, from the upper reaches of the political system, into the bureaucratic institutions, academia and even the press. This diffusion, which has happened in varying degrees throughout all of our countries, and which is still ongoing, means that all major government initiatives arise from a broad consensus of the new political elites. Major media organisations, learned societies, and all branches of the bureaucracy collaborate to realise the same consensus vision everywhere. … Only those policies which can inspire broad factions of the ever-expanding petty elite will ever find their way onto the agenda.

Is an “ever-expanding petty elite” not an oxymoron? Or at least a paradox? Our purpose here is not to be pedantic about words, but to highlight a broader problem in the way that the online dissident right handles this concept. (Whether they like it or not, Elite Human Capitalists like Hanania are still just one more subspecies of online rightist, and their confusion on the subject of elitism is proof of that.)

The more typical online rightist is an elitist in theory – i.e. enamoured of premodern aristocracies and monarchies that truly represented the ‘cream of the crop’ – but at heart a populist, inclined to seek salvation in the masses while blaming all our ills on elites. He tends to believe that democracy is an illusion, by which the masses are fooled into thinking that they are in control, while a bad elite manipulates all outcomes behind the scenes. Yet no two online rightists can come up with fewer than five theories as to the identity of this ruling class (the bankers? the politicians? the Jews?), nor explain how their interests are being served by the carefully-crafted appearance of ever-more chaotic and incompetent governance. Hence the tendency for conspiracy theories to proliferate on the online right (and certainly among Eugyppius’s commenters, many of whom cannot believe that their host actually thinks the chaos and incompetence are real).

Although neoreactionary theory is a reputed sanctuary of sanity, there is much in it that feeds into the fever-swamp of populist conspiracism. The work of Curtis Yarvin, formerly known as Mencius Moldbug, is riven by a fundamental contradiction: between his accurate perception of fragmented power on the one hand, and his dogmatic insistence on the other hand that there must be some seat of undivided sovereignty¹ with ultimate power over the state (“sovereignty is conserved”). This search for a true sovereign is no different in essence from the conspiracist quest for a hidden ruling elite. Yarvin’s descriptive constitution of the modern regime, which is well worth a read, even contains a variant of the typical rightist argument that democracy is a fig-leaf for oligarchy:

There are three forms of regime: monarchy (rule of one), oligarchy (rule of a minority), and democracy (rule of a majority). The System is an oligarchy.

There are four forms of oligarchy: hereditary oligarchy (rule of nobles), military oligarchy (rule of soldiers), commercial oligarchy (rule of the wealthy), and clerical oligarchy (rule of thinkers). The System is a clerical oligarchy…

We divide the System into four great organs: in ascending order of power, the Castle [military and police], the Factory [corporations], the Bureau [bureaucracy, presumably also including NGOs and quangos] and the Cathedral [academy-media complex]. (Later, we will add a fifth: the Show [electoral politics].)

According to Yarvin, this Cathedral or academy-media complex is “the most powerful organ in the System”, hence would seem to be the true locus of sovereignty. Yet as soon as he tries to get a firmer grip on it, it begins to dissolve back into mush:

The Cathedral is information: truth, philosophy, ethics, narrative, art and intelligence.

Its inner circle, the Brain [academia] and the Voice [mass media], includes all professors, journalists, serious artists, published authors, etc. Its outer ring, the Conversation, is the whole upper social class. Its funding division, the Foundation, is the whole upper economic class. Its teaching division, the School, gets to indoctrinate almost everyone for over a decade. And its doctrine, the Dream, defines good and evil for all decent people.

…

The Cathedral has five divisions: the Brain, which produces truth; the Voice, which produces true stories; the School, which produces real education; the Conversation, which produces informed opinion; and the Foundation, which gives truth power.

The Cathedral operates on the principle of prestige. Prestige is informal reputation. Informal reputation is the best and most powerful kind of reputation, because no formal process can affect it.

Neither the Cathedral nor any of its divisions is in any administrative sense one organization. Each division is a constellation of independent offices... In the rest of the Cathedral, all institutional and personal prestige is generally informal—though no less real.

If this priestly oligarchy is decentralized, governed by informal prestige, and separated from the levers of state power, then it would seem to be more of an inchoate blob than the apex of a hierarchy or a locus of sovereignty. One might even make the claim that it has no power at all, since not only is it funded by “the whole upper economic class”, but its prestige is also apparently conferred by “the whole upper social class”. Might the Cathedral not be telling its congregation only what it wants to hear? And might that not equally account for the observation that those in high places tend to believe and do what they are told by Harvard and the New York Times?² But would this not reduce Yarvin’s theory to a banal statement to the effect that “the whole upper socio-economic class” holds power?

Admittedly, this would at least be consistent with Yarvin’s definition of an oligarchy, since he defines this term as ‘rule by a minority’ and democracy as ‘rule by a majority’. Yet there are two problems with these definitions. The first is that oligarchy (from Greek oligoi) means ‘rule of the few’, not ‘rule of a minority’ – and this is by no means a pedantic point. ‘Rule of the few’ implies a small group, which could be narrowed down to a rough numerical range by comparative study of different regimes; ‘rule of a minority’ is a useless term that might describe a small group composed of 0.0001% of the US population (around 350 people), or a teeming mass composed of 49%, and yet exclude a teeming mass composed of 51%.

The second problem is that there is no such thing as ‘rule by the majority’, unless it be in a state of anarchy or a primitive egalitarian tribe. This is one of the basic principles of elite theory, a strong influence on Yarvin and neoreaction. The argument is laid out by Gaetano Mosca in his book The Ruling Class (pp.50-53):

Among the constant facts and the tendencies that are to be found in all political organisms, one is so obvious that it is apparent to the most casual eye. In all societies… two classes of people appear – a class that rules and a class that is ruled. The first class, always the less numerous, performs all political functions, monopolizes power and enjoys the advantages that power brings, whereas the second, the more numerous class, is directed and controlled by the first, in a manner that is now more or less legal, now more or less arbitrary and violent, and supplies the first, in appearance at least, with material means of subsistence and with the instrumentalities that are essential to the vitality of the political organism.

…If we reason otherwise in theory, that is due partly to inveterate habits that we follow in our thinking and partly to the exaggerated importance that we attach to two political facts that loom far larger in appearance than they are in reality.

The first of these facts…is that in every political organism there is one individual who is chief among the leaders of the ruling class as a whole and stands, as we say, at the helm of the state… The second fact, too, is readily discernible. Whatever the type of political organization, pressures arising from the discontent of the masses who are governed, from the passions by which they are swayed, exert a certain amount of influence on the policies of the ruling, the political, class.

But the man who is at the head of the state would certainly not be able to govern without the support of a numerous class to enforce respect for his orders and to have them carried out; and granting that he can make one individual, or indeed many individuals, in the ruling class feel the weight of his power, he certainly cannot be at odds with the class as a whole or do away with it. Even if that were possible, he would at once be forced to create another class, without the support of which action on his part would be completely paralyzed. On the other hand, granting that the discontent of the masses might succeed in deposing a ruling class, inevitably, as we shall later show, there would have to be another organized minority within the masses themselves to discharge the functions of a ruling class. Otherwise all organization, and the whole social structure, would be destroyed.

…

If it is easy to understand that a single individual cannot command a group without finding within the group a minority to support him, it is rather difficult to grant, as a constant and natural fact, that minorities rule majorities, rather than majorities minorities. … In reality the dominion of an organized minority, obeying a single impulse, over the unorganized majority is inevitable. The power of any minority is irresistible as against each single individual in the majority, who stands alone before the totality of the organized minority. At the same time, the minority is organized for the very reason that it is a minority. A hundred men acting uniformly in concert, with a common understanding, will triumph over a thousand men who are not in accord and can therefore be dealt with one by one. Meanwhile it will be easier for the former to act in concert and have a mutual understanding simply because they are a hundred and not a thousand.

This is the ‘iron law of oligarchy’ (not Mosca’s term, but that of Robert Michels) – though one would be forgiven for thinking that Yarvin does not believe in it, since he accepts the theoretical possibility of a democracy in which “the people, through their elected representatives, are absolutely sovereign”, arguing only that modern Americans are no longer virtuous enough for this. But the ‘iron law’ is by not abolished in a state where the ruling oligarchy is elected by the people, whether they be virtuous or vicious. The masses are too unwieldy, too divided, and exert their ‘sovereignty’ too infrequently and indirectly to maintain meaningful control over those who operate the actual levers of political power.

Of course this doesn’t mean that the mass electorate exerts no influence at all. Perhaps it can even be said to exert power, but not at all in the direct way that a ruler exerts his power. Yet the word democracy literally means ‘power of the people’ in the sense of ‘power to rule’. Evidently it has become even more debased and descriptively worthless than elite, and those who would make sense of modern political structures ought to start using it with a bit more precision.

Let us start by speaking only of power, not sovereignty. The latter is a theoretical construct, initially applied to absolutist kings, and later relocated to the people after these kings had lost both sovereignty and power (see Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, Bourke and Skinner ed.). Of course this does not bode well for the argument that this construct corresponds to reality. The sort of theoretical sovereignty that comes into play at election time might be bestowed on anyone, even a child-king or a magic 8-ball; but as Mosca says, effective power can only be exercised by some sort of reasonably cohesive group.

Strictly speaking, we should describe a group of power-holders elected by a mass of voters (however constituted) as an elective oligarchy. Similarly, a dictatorship or absolute kingship established by any sort of vote would fall into the category of elective monarchy. In the event that such elective monarchs and oligarchs became ceremonialized, so that they ‘reigned and did not rule’, these terms would become detached from them and conferred upon whichever oligarchy or monarchy or other distribution of power had usurped their rule.

This, of course, is the situation in which we find ourselves today, as not only the electorate but also the elected become increasingly ceremonialized and irrelevant. There is no need to seek the usurpers behind a curtain or at the bottom of a rabbit-hole; they are none other than the “ever-expanding petty elite” created by the bloating of the modern state. But that which stands in plain sight may yet be hidden when it is not recognized for what it is. Few indeed would recognize this so-called elite as the true referent of that much-debased word, democracy.

The Elite Theory of Democracy

Ultimately, the notion of three fundamental regime types goes back to Aristotle, who introduces them in his Politics (Book III, chapter 7):

The words constitution and government have the same meaning, and the government, which is the supreme authority in states, must be in the hands of the one, or of a few, or of many. The true forms of government, therefore, are those in which the one, or the few, or the many, govern with a view to the common interest; but governments which rule with a view to the private interest, whether of the one, or of the few, or of the many, are perversions.

Leaving aside the lack of rigour in Aristotle’s own definitions,³ it is clear that his fundamental terms ‘one, few, and many’ cannot possibly have had the meanings applied to them by Yarvin. Aristotle lived under the democracy of ancient Athens, long before the usurpation of its name by the modern imposter of ‘representation’. Power (kratos) was understood to be direct and continuous, and democracy (demokratia) simply meant that it was exercised by the ‘many’. This term referred not to the majority, but to the Athenian citizenry, a large minority in a state composed mostly of slaves and resident aliens (metics).

Near the beginning of The Ruling Class (p.52), Mosca writes that “what Aristotle called a democracy was simply an aristocracy of fairly broad membership” – that is to say, a relatively large oligarchy. This is exactly right – and might have served as a good starting-point for an elite theory of democracy – but Mosca declines to elaborate and goes on to refer to Athens only in passing. Michels, whose theory is narrowly focused on the party system in ‘representative democracy’, has even less to say. And if Vilfredo Pareto wrote anything about it in his vast tomes, I wouldn’t know (I only made it through the first one), but summaries of his work by others⁴ suggest that he didn’t. So it would seem that the very state from which our current regime takes its name – and the one that most seems at first glance to defy the proposition that minorities always rule – constitutes an unfortunate lacuna in elite theory.

So let’s proceed to fill that lacuna, starting with the basics.

Much as the body of a woman does not much resemble that of a ‘transwoman’, the structure of Athenian democracy little resembles ‘representative democracy’, and the most obvious sign of this is the minimal role of elected rulership. Most officials at Athens, whose terms were strictly temporary, were chosen not by vote but by random lot.⁵ A vestige of archaic monarchy survived in the form of the chief magistrates known as archons (one of whom was called basileus ‘king’); these held life membership in the Areopagus (an aristocratic council of elders) after finishing their terms. But these institutions, as well as the aristocratic class that staffed them, were restricted in their powers and subordinated to the citizenry.

The ruins of the speaker’s platform on the Pnyx, where the Athenian Assembly used to meet

The best primary source on the workings of this system is the Athenaion Politeia (Athenian Constitution, not a statement of principles but a description of realities), written by either Aristotle or one of his students. A more accessible, and quotable, summary is given in Scott Gordon’s Controlling the State: Constitutionalism from Ancient Athens to Today, and most of what follows will be drawn from this. The broad overview (found on pp.66-7) is quite attentive to the limitations of ‘people power’:

In writing, as I have, of Athens as a “democracy” with the demos occupying positions of political power, one must not lose sight of the fact that, even at its fullest development, participation in politics was reserved to male citizens over the age of eighteen (thirty was the minimum age for holding state office). Women and slaves were excluded. Moreover, “citizenship” was strictly defined to include only persons born of parents who were both Athenian citizens. The total population of fourth-century Attica was perhaps as high as 300,000, a third of whom were slaves. Less than 15 percent had the right to attend the Assembly. Even without taking into account inhabitants of the subject territories, the Athenian political system was government of the many by the few…

…I should also note that much of the income of Athens was derived from sources other than the productive effort of Athenian citizens. Rich silver mines in southeast Attica, owned by the state and worked by slaves, provided the wherewithal for Athens to build the navy that enabled it to conquer an empire… The empire, in turn, produced revenue from tribute, the sale of slaves, ransoms, and so forth… Only the richest Athenians were subject to regular taxation… Common employment, even of a skilled sort, was not held in high esteem by Athenians, and a large proportion of the citizenry were state employees or were supported in other ways from the public purse, while slaves did most of the work. Participation in politics takes time, and the Athenians were able to engage themselves in government at least in part because the pressure to earn a living was not as great as most people, even in wealthy “developed” societies, find it to be today… It remains an open question whether a political system like Athens’s “democracy” can function without slavery and foreign exploitation.

Power is conserved; the reality observed by Mosca, that the rulers are always less numerous than the ruled and tend to live off the fruits of their labours, is not contradicted. And yet the Athenian demos presents a fascinating picture of the maximum possible extension of a political class, to the the point of coterminousness with an entire people (albeit a relatively small and concentrated one).

In this state of affairs, the ‘middle’ siphons off power and resources from both the ‘high’ (elites) and the ‘low’ (subjects). Note that the only Athenians subject to regular taxation were the rich, who were also obliged (ostensibly on a voluntary basis) to finance the city by a tradition known as the liturgy. The citizenry also had the prerogative to ostracize any person by majority vote, which meant expelling them from the city for a decade; as Gordon notes, the mere threat of this would have done much to prevent the private concentration of power.

The citizenry exercised power through three main institutions: the Assembly, the Council, and the jury-courts. The first of these was a mass meeting, held on four days each month, the main business of which was not to elect leaders but to make decisions on matters of state. It took place on a hill called the Pnyx, which was too small to accommodate all those entitled to attend (some 40,000 men), so the composition of the Assembly was likely to be different at each meeting. All who attended were entitled to speak, as long as it was on the agenda set by the Council, and voting was by a majority show of hands. In practice most citizens took a passive role in everything except the voting, and allowed discussion to be monopolized by a minority of upper-class demagogues (‘leaders of the people’, a word that had no formal status and soon acquired negative connotations).

The Council was the main institution of government: it ran the administration, exercised financial control, and set the agenda for the Assembly. It consisted of 500 members, fifty from each of the ten tribes into which the people were divided, selected by lot from among the male citizens over thirty (none of whom was allowed to become a councillor twice in his lifetime). It had a smaller standing committee called the Prytanes, consisting of fifty men from the same tribe selected by lot and rotated each month (with one of the fifty selected to lead each day), and this more cohesive group may have done much of the important work for which the Council as a whole was too unwieldy. But as Gordon points out, the sortition system would have worked to rotate a great many of the citizens into and out of the Council, familiarizing them with the business of state.

Last but not least we have the jury-courts. The first thing to know about them is that they dispensed actual mob justice, with juries composed of hundreds or even thousands of men.⁶ The second thing to know is that they provided ample opportunities for what we would call vexatious litigation. As Gordon says (pp.70-71):

The courts played a role in the Athenian political system that goes well beyond their role in a modern state. There were two classes of cases. Dikai were cases in which charges could be brought only by an injured party… The other category, graphai, were cases “which were held to involve matters of public concern…interpreted very widely”… Graphai included cases in which charges were made against state officials, which could be initiated by any Athenian citizen, not necessarily the injured party. Such cases were processed only in a jury court (dikasteria). The extraordinary importance of these courts in the Athenian political system derived from their authority to hear and determine cases of political import, and their role in constraining the power of the Athenian bureaucracy.

The jury-courts provided a way for the citizenry to control those officials who were not rotated by lot, such as the life members of the Areopagus and the elected strategoi (military commanders) who could be repeatedly reappointed to their posts. Any official, whether elected or allotted, had to be assessed and voted in at a jury-court hearing at which any citizen could raise objections against him. During his term of office, any citizen could denounce him “for personal impiety or for embezzlement, treason, conspiracy, or other high crimes, which, if sustained, could carry the death penalty” (ibid., p.74), and at the end of his term he was subjected to an extensive review of his conduct in which any citizen could bring charges against him. Such denunciations were usually handled by the Council, but in serious cases would end up before a mass jury-court or even the whole Assembly.

One question often asked about Athenian democracy is whether it ‘worked’. Certainly one gets the impression that the verdict of Athenian philosophers, historians and satirists – that their city was disorderly and ill-governed – was no upper-class prejudice but a statement of self-evident fact. The demos did not do well under the strain of the Peloponnesian War with Sparta (which Athens lost): we hear of erratic and paranoid actions by the Assembly such as the rapid countermanding of orders, the sentencing of victorious naval commanders to death, and so on. Yet on the two occasions in its history when the democracy was overthrown, it was quickly restored, and was finally suppressed only by superior military force – which suggests that it was basically viable, resilient, and desired by its citizens, and not some freak social experiment that proved itself harmful. Democracies also existed in other Greek cities, though less is known about their workings.

But the more interesting question from our perspective is whether Athenian democracy was that elusive spirit, Real Democracy, which almost all modern Westerners agree has Never Been Tried. And I am inclined to think that it was.

Let’s deal first with the regime-left critique: that Athens was not democratic because it did not enfranchise slaves, foreigners, women, the populations of conquered cites, and no doubt also random barbarians who washed up on its shores. Here it behooves us to remember that it was ancient Greece that invented the word democracy, and the modern West that has shamelessly distorted it. For the partisans of so-called representative democracy, who cannot tell power from sovereignty or decision-making from elections, to give the Athenians a D for democracy is mere chutzpah. One point that never seems to figure with such people (and it is not difficult to figure out why!) is that the promiscuous extension of political rights can only debase the real powers of a democratic citizenry.

This brings us to an important point: that the word demos, that is to say ‘people’, implicitly meant some people or one people and not all people everywhere. The same is of course true of people in English, at least when it is evoked politically. There is nothing more natural or normal than this limited usage; the ancient Germanic tribe Alemanni, which means exactly what it sounds like, was not as far as we know a universalist cult.

Given the composition of Athens, it follows that when Aristotle said that democracy/polity was the ‘rule of the many’, all that he meant by this was the rule of a multitude.⁷ In light of the modern concept of the ‘Dunbar number’⁸, which is supposed to distinguish a cohesive group from a mob, this is a rigorous definition with a qualitative difference from oligarchy. It certainly makes more sense than the sloppy or fantastical glosses that we append to the word democracy today.

But did the people, the multitude, actually rule Athens? This brings us to the rightist, elite-theorypilled critique. Many would be tempted to say that, since Athenian government in practice depended on smaller oligarchies – the demagogues, the Prytanes, etc. – there was an element of illusion to democratic rule. And as per Mosca’s iron logic, this is quite defensible: all government, boiled down hard enough, really does reduce to oligarchy.

But a state in which the ruling cabal is concentrated around a single man, who can appoint or dismiss its individual members at will, can be described without too much violence to reason as a monarchy. Likewise, we can use the word democracy for a state like Athens – in which decisions are taken by the multitude, in which disposable officials are subject to mob inquisitions, in which ‘leader of the people’ is a dirty word and the wealthy cannot easily translate their wealth into power. Just as long as we remember that we are ultimately talking about two extreme variants of oligarchy.

This brings us to another important question: whether Real Democracy has or ever will be Tried More Than Once. It is a truism in ‘representative democracies’ that Athenian-style ‘direct democracy’ (there’s that chutzpah again!) is practically impossible in any state larger than an ancient city, where the citizens can meet together to orate and debate and vote by show of hands. This is a fine excuse for putting actual democracy out of everyone’s minds. But I don’t believe a word of it.

Fundamentally, democracy is just an extremist variant of republicanism, which typically takes the form of a power-sharing arrangement among a more select oligarchy. For such a form of government to function, at least for a time, it must 1) break up the natural tendency for power to concentrate in the hands of individuals and smaller groups, and 2) establish collective institutions through which a wider ruling class can exert power. A state that carries this precarious balancing act far enough – and in Athens, it was carried very far, often with much ingenuity – will end up with that wonder of the world, democracy, the rule of a mob that succeeds in maintaining its right to command despite its natural disadvantages against oligarchy and monarchy. The paradox of democracy is not that it is the “worst form of government apart from all the others”, but that it is the worst form of government full stop, and yet can only be attained by the best (or most fortunate) states.

Democracy entails, or requires, the emergence of a mass ruling class that in many ways more resembles a nation than a nobility. Hereafter we shall take the liberty of referring to any such class as a demos – a word that in ancient Greek simply meant people, but in modern English carries the helpful additional connotation of ruling people. For consistency’s sake, we shall also use Greek terms (in modern senses!) for the other three categories of democratic society:

1. The archon (literally ‘ruler’), or archons, a subordinate or ceremonialized monarchy. In Athens the archons were highly ceremonialized; but in theory, the word might be used in a wider sense, to denote leaders with more power or even Roman-style dictators appointed by the demos in times of crisis. An archonate may or may not be strictly essential to democracy; but since any social hierarchy tends to be topped by a single individual, it may be that an archon must occupy this place to prevent its being taken by a tyrant.

2. The oligoi (i.e. the ‘few’ – note the absence of -archy ‘rule’), a term more or less equivalent to modern elites in its strict sense. The oligoi in a democracy are all notable groups that might potentially form oligarchies – at Athens they were the senators, the nobles, the wealthy, perhaps also the demagogue class and the ‘expert-class’ of the sophists. Given that it cannot hope to wipe out the oligoi without causing terminal damage to the state, a successful democracy must instead co-opt them, by allowing them wealth and honours while denying them excessive political power (the Athenian liturgy is a good example of this).

3. The polloi (‘the many’ or ‘the masses’), a term that might be applicable to the demos in a monarchy or oligarchy, but which in the case of a democracy refers strictly to the subject classes ruled by the demos. At Athens these were of course the slaves, the resident foreigners, and the populations of the various conquered cities that made up the Athenian empire.⁹ Just as the oligoi are a constant, ineradicable presence in democratic society, so too are the polloi; to dispense with them would cause the burdens of subjection to fall upon the demos, and to grant them effective power would be impossible without shattering the state into anarchy (which stands to the polloi as monarchy to the archons and oligarchy to the ologoi, as the form that would naturally result from their empowerment.)

All four categories can be basically represented as follows:

The elite theory of democracy

As shown here, the normal social hierarchy described by Mosca is not exactly abolished by democracy. But political power (represented by the black colouring) is concentrated in the demos, by means of the various republican artifices that prevent its taking a more normal course into the upper two strata.¹⁰

Having sketched this general theoretical description of democracy, I have yet to answer the common opinion that it is nothing more than a freak occurrence in ancient Greek city-state culture. Certainly this is the idea one gets from Gordon – who, after moving on to survey various essentially oligarchical republics including ancient Rome, early modern Venice, the Netherlands, England/Britain, and the United States of America, concludes his book as follows (p.358):

In common perception, a democratic polity is one in which “the people” determine public policy. As we have seen, this is an inaccurate description even of Periclean Athens¹¹, and it is clearly inappropriate for republican Rome, Venice, the Dutch Republic, and eighteenth-century England, all of which were aristocracies in terms of Aristotle’s classification – governed by the few. In many countries today, the franchise is held by all adult citizens, and the opportunity to achieve political office is not restricted by religious, racial, or property qualifications. Nevertheless, it is simplistic and naive to construe such polities as ones in which the people govern themselves.

The thrust of his argument is that democracy in the strict sense of the word is unattainable (and in any case not particularly desirable), hence irrelevant to modern checks-and-balances constitutionalism. But he has left off his list of examples at least one other state in history that carried republicanism all the way to democracy, in a way that was very different and yet analogous to that of ancient Athens. Moreover, this state was much less influenced by Athens than by Rome, and was not located in a small city but in a vast open territory. I am speaking of the 16th-18th century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.

In this state, the ruling demos (using the word in accordance with our theory) was the nobility, known as szlachta. Unlike other contemporary nobilities, this was no small aristocracy, but a teeming mass whose members were legally and formally equal to one another. As Norman Davies writes in God’s Playground: A History of Poland (p.167):

At all events, by 1569 when the united Republic of Poland-Lithuania was formed, the supremacy of the Nobility was secure. By general European standards, they were extremely numerous. Some 25,000 noble families, including at least 500,000 persons, represented 6.6 per cent of the total population of 7.5 million. In the later seventeenth century, this was to rise to about 9 per cent, and in the eighteenth century still further. Not even Spain or Hungary, whose nobility represented up to 5 per cent of the population, could rival them on this score; whilst France with 1 per cent, or England with 2 per cent, stood in marked contrast. The formal privileges of the Nobility protected them from the political pretensions of the king, and from the growth of a modern state. Their relative prosperity was guaranteed by a mass of detailed legislation. They were a closed estate, in control of their own destiny and that of everyone else in their Republic. Their obligations as a military caste were minimal. Their civic duty as a ruling class was governed by their private inclinations. By 1569, they had won their 'Golden Freedom'. It held them all in bondage for as long as their Republic lasted.

It was not to last – for by the close of the 18th century, this largest of all European states had been entirely wiped off the map by the absolutist powers that partitioned it. And the most obvious cause of this disaster was the ‘noble democracy’, which may or may not be one reason why modern democrats like to leave it out of the histories. We, in any case, have every reason to acquaint ourselves with it.

Much like the Athenian citizenry, the szlachta ruled from a ‘middle’ position carved out at the expense of ‘high’ and ‘low’ alike. They raised themselves above the polloi – in this case the clergy, the burghers, and the very numerous peasantry – by means of laws that disbarred non-nobles from high office, and established a noble monopoly on ownership of land, which was held allodially (i.e. without feudal obligations) and exempted from taxation. Not all szlachta owned land, and economically there was a huge gap between the wealthy noble magnates and the armsbearing rabble, which widened in later years as the class of middling szlachta shrunk. Yet even the lowest szlachta managed to hold onto their rights throughout the republican era.

Regardless of wealth, all nobles were disbarred from ‘ignoble’ trades (i.e. anything other than agriculture, politics and war). To get around this vicariously, they “cultivated a special relationship with the numerous Jewish community” (Davies, p.165). The richest Jews put on noble airs and graces, got around the restrictions on land ownership with the help of the nobles, and were sometimes formally ennobled – hence the contemporary saying that Poland was “heaven for nobles, purgatory for burghers, hell for peasants, and paradise for Jews”. This somewhat resembles, and yet exceeds, the utilization of Jews by other European rulers.

The landowning nobles enjoyed total control over the peasants who worked their land, since the latter had no recourse to the royal courts. Interestingly, the szlachta as a whole defined itself against the rest of the population as a racially distinct class, descended not from Slavs but from the Sarmatian horse-lords who had reduced them to just subjection. This ‘Sarmatism’, which lent an Oriental style to the dress and culture of the nobles, was more like a romantic nationalism than the sort of blue-blood elitism found elsewhere in Europe. In theory, the members of the ruling nation avoided formal distinctions of rank, and were supposed to address each other as brothers (and, presumably, sisters – according to Davies, p.185, “equality was practised between the sexes” in that “noblewomen enjoyed the same rights of property and inheritance as noblemen, and did not feel dependent”). Plebs who tried to ‘pass’, as they often did, could be sued in special courts of nobility.

Depiction of upper-crust szlachta (from here). Even the most impoverished of their brethren and sistren made sure to dress differently from the plebs.

Of course there is no question of the szlachta meeting and orating and deciding everything at a popular assembly. But they had other institutions. Direct political power was exerted at the local dietines (sejmiki), each of which sent envoys to the general parliament (sejm) with specific policy instructions. This parliament was based on unanimity, so any single member could stall its proceedings – and potentially annul them altogether – by exercising what was called the liberum veto. In the late days of the Commonwealth, when foreign absolutist states like Russia and Prussia were circling it like vultures, members of parliament were often bribed to paralyze Polish governance by exercising their veto.

In addition to the dietines, which were considered senior to the general parliament, other direct power-levers were available to the szlachta. The royal election that appointed the king could in theory be attended by all of them, and at the first one 40,000 turned up to vote (though the more usual turnout thereafter was 10-15,000). The king could not be sworn in without agreeing to respect the various liberties and privileges of the nobles; and if he broke any of these promises thereafter, they were instantly released from their oaths of loyalty to him. Military action could be legally taken against the king by means of the confederation, of which Davies says (pp.259-60):

The Confederation – confederatio, konfederacja – was an institution of ancient lineage in Poland, and an expression of the citizen's fundamental right to resist. It was an armed league, an association of men sworn to pursue their grievance until justice was obtained. It could be formed by any individual or group of individuals. It could be formed by the King, or against him... In the seventeenth century, major confederations were formed in 1656, and again in 1672: and in the eighteenth century, in 1704, 1715, 1733, 1767, 1768, and 1792. By that time, they were almost as frequent as sessions of the Sejm. … When their ends had been achieved, or when they had been defeated in battle, their association was formally terminated, and they were released from the consequences of their oath. In effect, the Confederation was a legalized form of civil war, and no one thought it unusual.

Although the elective king had too much power to be regarded as a mere figurehead, he was certainly an archon according to our definition: an appointed servant of the citizenry, and not its master. As for the oligoi – in this case, the wealthy noble magnates and parliamentary senators, who as time went on increasingly monopolized land and drew poorer szlachta into their retinues – there is more of a case for regarding them as truly subversive to the democracy, since its anarchic constitution lacked measures such as ostracism and liturgy by which they might have been curbed. Yet they were never able to disempower the mob and establish the sort of aristocracy that prevailed everywhere else in Europe.

With that caveat, therefore, we can regard the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth as a real democracy analogous to that of Athens. Perhaps there are other historical examples waiting to be turned up by investigation.¹² But one is enough, I think, to demonstrate that this form of government is no isolated occurrence and does not depend on the city-state culture of ancient Greece.

At this point we are in a position to return to the nations of our own ‘Commonwealth’, and the sort of democracy that has emerged within them.

Democracy, Democratism, and Populism

As Scott Gordon more or less admits at the end of his book, the official political system of the US and other Western bloc states is not democracy, and the established convention of referring to it as such is an agreed-upon lie. The right of a vast mass of ‘shitizens’, who support the state by their taxes, to elect the members of a political oligarchy once every few years – without ever being able to instruct them on policy, bind them to their promises, or replace other important officials such as civil servants – can hardly be compared with a straight face to the powers of the Athenian citizenry or Polish szlachta.

At the same time, these common political rights are not at all inconsequential. They are best understood as rights of participation in a ritual civil war – fought without violence, at least in principle, and won by a mere count of heads – by which the factions of the political class settle their differences and achieve the age-old republican goal of sharing power. Like footsoldiers in a real war, the voters are the means and not the end of victory, but they are still entitled to the spoils – many of which, such as welfare provisions and special rights, have become very lavish indeed. The tendency of the system to dilute the voting rights by expanding the suffrage, and to manufacture dependents on the state at an ever-increasing cost, is as natural as the tendency of all unresolved warfare to escalate in scale and scope.

Another important element to consider is the doctrine of popular sovereignty. As we have mentioned, even the sovereignty of kings was always something of a fiction, and this goes double for the sovereignty of the masses. And yet the more it is fictionalized in practice, the more it is elevated in theory, to the point at which the abstract notion of the ‘sovereign people’ takes on the stature of a mystical idol. This ‘political formula’, as Mosca would call it, exerts huge influence on those who rule in its name. But it should always be thought of as democratism, not democracy – that is to say, as a system of belief, not a structure of power.

And yet, like the man who summons up the devil by speaking his name, this democratist elective oligarchy more or less inevitably decays into actual democracy. Under the pressure of politics, the modern state expands into a sprawl of institutions and a horde of administrators, steadily usurping more and more vital functions from a subjected society. Conversely, as society becomes passivized, its normal political energies flow into the state – so the old political leaders are jostled by an ever-larger crowd of activists, pressure groups, journalists, social scientists, etc. etc. etc. ‘Civil society’ becomes an extension of the professional political class and no longer a counterweight to it. Once enough power has ebbed away from those who nominally rule all this political machinery to those who actually run it, the latter become a ruling mob – or, to use the word that we have chosen, a demos.

In many ways this modern demos – corresponding to Yarvin’s Bureau, Cathedral, and political classes (politicians, activists, and lobbyists) – is unlike the Athenian citizenry or Polish szlachta. The most essential difference is that it is a clerisy – in essentialist terms, a priestly class. It is tied to abstract institutions, not blood and soil, which creates a certain social openness coupled with stricter control of opinion (not entirely unlike the medieval Catholic clergy). It is bound to revere the sovereign people, the idol to which it is the priesthood – so instead of differentiating itself from the ruled, it identifies its power with theirs, in a sort of political coverture. The media slogan that ‘populism is a threat to democracy’ – which ought to be nonsense according to the accepted meanings of these terms – is as close as it is likely to come to an admission that ‘demos’ and ‘people’ are not one and the same.¹³

Another difference, which again has to do with the clerical essence of this class, is that its group cohesion is heavily dependent on the authority of the academy-media complex. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that there would be no demos without it, since the ruling mob would lack a regular mechanism of coordination. Hence Yarvin’s correct perception that the ‘Cathedral’ holds immense power. But it is sophist and demagogue to the clerisy, not lord and master.¹⁴

The similarities, or at least analogies, with historical ruling mobs are unmistakable. The clerisy has its titles of nobility, in the form of advanced non-vocational academic degrees (although some paths into its ranks, such as activism, can dispense with them). Although its members are formally subject to taxation, in reality they are exempt from a great deal of it, since their work is by definition non-productive and funded by public money.¹⁵ The fact that many of them are materially worse off than businessmen and even workers means nothing; other democracies had their poor citizens and barefoot nobles. The clerisy also carries the democratic curse of irrationality and incompetence, which is liable to fall upon any ruling mob regardless of its average intelligence. (The Covid debacle, in which the mass hysteria for lockdowns had to be ended by ‘talismanic’ dodgy vaccines, ought to be treated as a classic case study of government-by-mob).

This brings us to another analogue, which might be called political ethnogenesis. Contrary to populist belief, the clerisy is no more ‘anti-nationalist’ than the Sarmatist szlachta, who dressed as Orientals and cultivated a special relationship with the Jews. Rather, its cosmopolitanism – and given the etymological translation of cosmopolite as ‘citizen of a world polity’ there could be no more apt name for it – is itself a powerful form of nationalism, which serves to differentiate the demos from the people and bind it to the greater patria of the global democratist commonwealth. In light of this, it is not hard to see why this world citizenry is bent on colonizing and dissolving the nations that outnumber it in its heartlands (while obsessing over the slightest trace of foreign influence from non-democratist powers, and spending billions to defend the commonwealth’s borders with them). Two ‘folk beliefs’ of the clerisy – that nations are artificial modern creations and that they are defined by paper qualifications – reflect above all the parochial insecurity of this most modern and artificial of nations.

Most importantly, the clerisy occupies the fundamental strategic position of a demos, which we might call the middle versus high-low alliance.

As a consequence of the usurpation of power by the demos, the old elective officials are reduced to ceremonial archons and heavily constrained oligoi. This of course increasingly negates the common voting rights held by the polloi – who are then invited to take out their frustrations on the ‘Girardian scapegoats’ (in Yarvin’s phrase) that they have just elected. The joke, of course, is on them. Since the official constitutions of Western states are set up for an alliance of voters and politicians, in which the latter must be able to act, the resort of the usurpers is to strict legalism, ‘accountability’ and doctrines of institutional countervailance. Yet these need never be invented from scratch; all republicanism or constitutionalism, carried far enough, naturally decays into democracy (or anarchy).

Yet it would be a mistake to dismiss the electoral ‘show’ as a mere legitimizing illusion, a distracting sop to the polloi. It is no longer what it was, but it has been repurposed into an important democratic assembly, in which the majority ‘progressive’ faction of the clerisy – which favours its further expansion, empowerment and enrichment – gauges its strength and negotiating power against the minority ‘conservative’ faction that acts as a protection racket to the productive elements of society. The progressives can advance or hold still; the conservatives can defend or retreat; but the mounting demand from the voters for offensive action against the ‘swamp’ or ‘blob’ of demos institutions is kept as far as possible off the agenda. Like medieval parliaments, the verdict of elections is advisory, since the clerisy in any case runs the state: so during the first Trump archonate, it defiantly steamed ahead with its own agenda, but the muted response to the second one represents a real desire to pull back from its excesses. (Even so, predictably enough, outright attacks on the clerisy are being struck from the agenda.)

This brings us to the ‘culture war’, or permanent social revolution¹⁶, by which the clerisy recruits the maximally dependent and incompetent as client groups and empowers them to cannibalize the rest of society. We all know the drill: the foreigner must rule over the native, the woman over the man, the child over the parent (looking ahead a bit here), the criminal over the law-abiding, the degenerate over the healthy. This client system was described by Spandrell as Biological Leninism; for reasons of terminological consistency, we shall instead call it kakistocratism (from kakistocracy, ‘rule of the worst’, here used strictly in the sense of ‘worst suited to rule’).¹⁷

The object of kakistocratism is less to create a strong government than to obsessively dissolve all rival centres of power, even minor ones, replacing them as far as possible with those beholden to the clerisy and invested in its rule. Perversely, the degeneration of basic public order under crime tolerance and the ruinous increase in dependent classes are considered acceptable trade-offs to negate the political threat from the leading elements and ‘better sort’ among the polloi. The ever-dangerous oligoi, a.k.a. elites, are another target. Rich and ambitious men might be able to avoid cities terrorized by criminals and migrants (although often they do not), but they can hardly escape the threat of arbitrary denunciation by sexual partners and legalized property theft by wives; and their children may be ‘turned’ in more ways than one. A general culture of stultifying collectivism (probably not unlike the one that Athenian critics of democracy were rebelling against) also serves to stigmatize any expression of ‘toxic’ and ‘narcissistic’ personal vigour and will-to-power.

So much for a basic sketch of our current state of affairs according to the present theory of democracy. I suspect that by this point the reader is patiently awaiting some sort of answer to the question of what is to be done about it. The fact that both the Athenian and Polish democracies had to be ended by foreign conquest perhaps ought to dampen our expectations for this.¹⁸

Yet there is an obvious path out of perdition. We began this second part of our post with a criticism of the average dissident rightist, who combines nationalist populism with dreamy nostalgia for benevolent kings and aristocrats of yore. Yet at a deep, instinctive level, there is nothing wrong or self-contradictory about this: it is an expression of hope for an alliance of dispossessed polloi and dissident oligoi, one that would squeeze the clerical demos in the hammer-and-anvil way described by Bertrand de Jouvenel in On Power. For all its faults, the populist movement led by Trump and Musk has shown one or two promising signs.

But the problem with populism is that it can never emerge from the intellectual shadow of democratism. Convinced like all rightists that their task is not to think and speak truly, but to do something, critics of the current regime are happy to inhabit a moral and conceptual framework built by their enemies as long as they can gather the biggest possible crowd within it. This means taking up different versions of long-habituated positions – that elite conspiracies are the root of all evil, that majority rule is the last word in justice, that salvation lies in the neverending quest for the Real Democracy That Has Never Been Tried.

But this is a grave error. It means seeing the enemy through distorting lenses, focusing on the demagogues and liturgists¹⁹ of the ruling mob instead of the structures that preserve its power. It means letting rhetoric get in the way of clear thinking about the nature of democracy, the way in which it decays from republican political arrangements, and the possibilities for promoting it in more healthy local forms. It means never attaining to the mass exhaustion with democratism that the Eastern peoples eventually reached with communism, since all sides lay claim to the true spirit of the ideal and pretend that it is tantalizingly out of reach.

And it means always taking up the lower ground, the weak position, on the field of rhetorical battle. Just as rightist nostalgia for oligarchy is not really inconsistent with populism, neither is democratism inconsistent with democracy, for all its little contradictions and hypocrisies. Is not the “ever-expanding petty elite” a majority vis-a-vis elected politicians and core civil servants? Are not the kakistocratist client groups, when formed into a coalition, a majority among the polloi? And what could be more democratist, in principle and practice, than anti-white racism?

Stop coping

Those of us who find all of this as unjust as it is disastrous are better off betting on the comeback of anti-democratist thought – which, as any historical survey will tell you, was the dominant tradition throughout the centuries between Athens and Anglo-America. But the necessary first step is to rectify the name of democracy, to educate people on what it really is. This has been much-neglected so far, but it’s never too late to start; or at least, it’s better late than never.

1. The modern, Bodinian concept of sovereignty is “the notion that within each individual state there is an entity that constitutes the supreme political and legal authority” (Scott Gordon, Controlling the State, p.19). It is by no means an axiom of political science that such a supreme power centre need always exist. Yarvin’s dictum “sovereignty is conserved” does not hold true in a regime that is intent on breaking up concentrations of power, and it is only a partial analogy to the law of conservation of energy; a truer analogy would be that between energy and power (i.e. power to command), of which sovereignty is a special case.

2. In case it is not obvious, I am raising objections and being a bit pedantic for the sake of clarification. I do think that academics and journalists exert a form of power, but this comes from their intellectual authority, not Bodinian sovereignty.

3. Aristotle gives different names to his three types of state (monarchy vs. tyranny, aristocracy vs. oligarchy, and polity vs. democracy; he also admits the possibility of mixed regimes, and different gradations of each one) that depend wholly on the question of whether they are ruled in the common or the private interest. This is a subjective criterion that is liable to change from one king to another, one generation of the people to another, etc., as well as from one observing mind to another. Thus we should say monarchy, oligarchy, and democracy, as Yarvin does, and reserve the task of description to adjectives like ‘virtuous’ and ‘corrupt’.

4. E.g. Neema Parvini, The Populist Delusion, Chapter 3.

5. Interestingly, according to Paul Cartledge (Democracy: A Life, p.95), election was associated with oligarchy and sortition with democracy.

6. This Athenian notion that any sufficiently numerous jury can stand in for the will of the people is similar to the modern convention, by which any poll or social science study of a certain demographic is reported as the actual facts on that demographic as long as it covers a sufficiently large number of individuals.

7. Ackshually this is contradicted by Aristotle’s subsequent argument that democracy and oligarchy mean the rule of the poor and of the rich respectively, and that a hypothetical state ruled by a poor minority would still be a democracy. But this is an attempt at reasoning from first principles that (in my view) grasps the wrong end of the stick. Aristotle’s initial statement that regimes are ruled by one, few or many would seem to better embody the collective wisdom of his time.

8. According to its Wikipedia page, the Dunbar number is defined as “a suggested cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships”, and the exact number “has been proposed to lie between 100 and 250”. Judging from what I have read on historical republican regimes, whatever variant of this number serves to differentiate a large oligarchy from a democracy would seem to be quite a bit higher, in the low thousands. An example of a relatively large oligarchy would be that of 16th-century Venice, the Grand Council of which was attended by 2,500 enfranchised males from around 150 noble families representing some 5% of the population.

9. This subject group does not in my view include Athenian women, who cannot be seriously compared to slaves and conquered peoples on the grounds that they were excluded from politics. In Citizenship in Classical Athens, Josine Blok points out that Athenian women were viewed as ‘citizenesses’ (politides), and that certain priestly offices were quite open to them.

10. Obviously this diagram is not drawn to any sort of scale. Based on what I have read of democracies old and new, I would roughly estimate the polloi as 85-90% of a population; the demos as 10-15%; and the oligoi as 1-2% or less (though this could be larger depending on definition). Needless to say, there is no question of abolishing the iron law of minority power by simply expanding the demos; supposing that this group were to constitute 10% of a population, and somehow manage to expand to 20%, it would simply become a bigger burden (not to mention a more incompetent ruler) to the remaining 80% of the population.

11. Needless to say, I do not agree with this assessment of Athenian democracy, and need hardly do more than quote the next paragraph in Gordon’s book to demonstrate its falsity:

In pure terms, we can speak of the people as governing themselves only in a polity where public policy is determined in an assembly of all the citizenry operating with the decision rule of unanimity. Under that rule, no collective action could be instituted without universal assent – but each citizen would have absolute power to negate any proposal. This procedure would clearly be unjust, as well as impractical. If the rule of unanimity is broached, however, it follows necessarily that public policy will be coercive, violating the perceived values or interests of some members of the community. The adoption of majority rule as the modus of determination does not change this fact and, in itself, it has no ethical foundation… Aristotle pointed out that the majority rule procedure of the Athenian assembly exposed the individual citizen and minority groups to the coercion of a tyrannous state. This observation is commonly disregarded by writers who regard Periclean Athens as the ideal that we should seek to emulate and by those who embrace the doctrine of “popular sovereignty”.

“In pure terms” Gordon is describing not democracy, not oligarchy, but some sort of impossibly chimerical dream of orderly anarchy. Not one of the non-democratic republics surveyed in his book operated on such a system of strict unanimity and liberum veto; so if the demos of Athens did not in reality rule the state, because it could not allow all of its groups and individuals to have their way 100% of the time, then the collective rule of Rome and Venice by their aristocracies must have been equally illusory. Needless to say, given the ever-present threat posed to the demos by the oligarchic and monarchical forces in society, its rule would not have lasted long had “individual citizens and minority groups” not been subject to state coercion at the behest of the majority.

12. Some that spring to mind are the other democratic cities in ancient Greece and the town meetings in Switzerland and New England. The study of egalitarian tribes with rudimentary lifestyles might even provide some examples of the demos without the subject polloi. But the Polish example is valuable because it refutes the widespread notion that real democracy cannot be implemented in a large, populous and civilized territorial state.

13. In his book The French Revolution (p.31), J.F. Bosher identifies a somewhat similar distinction of terms in pre-Revolutionary France:

Among the many social differences in France, the most universal and enduring was the one between all these middling and upper groups taken together, whom we may call “the public”, and the classes whom they regarded as inferior and called collectively la foule, or le peuple – that is, the “masses” or the “populace”.

‘The public’ is apparently Bosher’s term, just as ‘the demos’ is mine, but real common ground is found in the use of ‘populace’ or equivalent words for the lower orders.

14. In case this distinction seems a bit pedantic, consider the ‘Nazi Harvard’ thought experiment in Yarvin’s descriptive constitution post, in which he suggests that the conversion of top universities to Nazism (by extension, any proscribed ideology) would carry the rest of the state in its wake. This resembles the statement made on his old blog that a new locus of neoreactionary intellectual authority would ‘replace the brain’ of USG, after which the new ‘brain’ would presumably be able to shut down the old ‘body’ with a few commands. That seems unlikely; a locus of intellectual authority might convert elites, but the mass of the extended political class who benefit from the current deformation of the state would have to be dragged kicking and screaming.

15. Admittedly this is not clear-cut, because although the demos is a political and not an economic class, many nominally-private organizations are actually political institutions belonging to the extended state. Many companies truly oriented to economic production are also forced by the law to maintain essentially political personnel, almost in the same way as a protection racket. The huge lobbying industry described by Jonathan Rauch in Demosclerosis, from which corporations and industries cannot abstain without risking harm from the lobbying activity of their rivals, is one example of this.

16. Historical comparison suggests that this revolutionary war against society has more to do with democratist ideology and the modern total state than with democracy as a power structure. Szlachta egalitarianism had definite limits, and in some respects (notably the role of women) Athens was more conservative in its time than Sparta.

17. The alternative term actually used by Spandrell is kakistocracy, which is more elegant than kakistocratism; but we must be consistent with our terminology, according to which X-cracy denotes a structure of power and X-ism a system of belief. Strictly speaking, kakistocracy would be the direct takeover of power by the ‘Bioleninist’ client groups (or by some other group minimally suited to rule), which does not seem a terribly likely prospect.

18. It gets worse: during the last agony of Poland-Lithuania at the end of the 18th century, Catherine the Great’s Russia actually sought to protect the ‘Golden Liberty’ of the szlachta that allowed every attempt at reform to be vetoed into submission. I suspect that modern-day autocracies, like China and Russia, would do much the same thing in a similar position of power over America and Europe.

19. I am thinking here especially of billionaires who are incentivized to found new ‘civil society’ institutions in the form of philanthrophic foundations, which are likely to pass into generic managerial control after their deaths.