I really liked that essay, it gave me something to think about. I always thought that dispersion of power and avoidance of concentration of it has its good and bad effects; you can’t abuse power if you concentrate it, but you also can’t achieve anything which needs to be done. It’s interesting to see more arguments against diffusion of power in demos.
Thanks. One reason for my writing it is that I always see right-wing types going along with the established assumptions that power needs to be more diffused, and that anyone who wants to concentrate any in his hands is a potentially dangerous tyrant, and then doing the "surprised Pikachu face" when whoever they just elected turns out to do nothing but talk.
This essay is sort of ridiculous. Its deeply ahistorical and self contradictory in ways that are so deep it might even be fair to say its outright self-negating. In its whole, it tries to argue that elites don’t rule, while at the same time declaring the existence of centralized institutions and powerful gatekeepers. And LMAO, the "elites" brought out the vaccines to placate the masses who were the real source of the lockdowns, and then, well, what happened next, ah, through their genius 10D chess they knew they had to keep trying their hardest (and succeeding in most places for quite a while) to keep the lockdowns going as long as they could even after the vax was in full swing! Its a really dumb essay
Let me guess, you arrived here from a certain quote restack, and didn't bother to read the essay properly or think about its argument before jumping in to comment. Here's a hint for you: the "demos" or "ruling mob" and the broader "masses" are not the same thing.
categories of “the ruling mob” and “the masses” doesn’t remove the contradiction. you argue that their arent elites that truly rule, but recognize strong elite gatekeeping capabilities, powerful centralized institutions, and centralized enforcement mechanisms, in practical terms thats a huge logical break. And its apparent that youve flipped causality by claiming when claiming elite were responding to others with lockdown-era policy, there was an intensive mass communications campaign across each dimension of the information ecosystem and through each avenue -- public, private, personal -- the social domains to spread the idea of the need for strict and intensive response, and once the vaccine came out, they were still pushing it for years. The very elite institutions whose existence you acknowledge coordinated restrictions and controlled narratives through centralized levers centralized mechanisms within media, finance, academia, public health bureaucracies. That was just a few years ago, people know that and this is a tortured attempt to rewrite history that just happened.
You need to stop throwing your list of logical fallacies at me, and start practicing the basic diligence and courtesy of reading a post before commenting on it. I copied out whole paragraphs of Mosca to support my definition of democracy as an extreme variant of oligarchy; do you have any logical objection? I defined my terms clearly, drew a sodding diagram no less, gave two historical examples of ruling mobs before moving on to the modern one that rules us, and explained that it is heavily dependent on the media for coordination; do you have anything to say about any of this? No – you just keep reading more and more into a single en-passant remark about Covid, and raising objections to your own assumptions as to what I meant by it, which tells me that this is the only part of the essay that you actually bothered to read.
Your Mosca based assertion that democracy is merely a variant of oligarchy is disproven by 100% verifiable -- and with primary source evidence that is so numerous as to be legions -- of history of the USA. The experience of America's Old Republic, from roughly the 1830s until some point after WW2, stands apart from that deterministic pov. The Old Republic was structurally based around genuinely decentralized, diffused, pluralistic, and participatory institutional architectures: mass-member parties with real influence from below and the ability for the mass, or even just a large share, of the many networked with each other local branches to override the center, regionally organized capital systems capital systems with *string* localized capital structures that geographically, sectoraly, and societally diffused both access to money/resources and also decision making related to their deployment, locally controlled education and public works, dispersed legal and civic authority, decentralized and diffused scientific and engineering research and development that was often locally controlled, and even more it would just be too long of a list for here!.
These weren’t superficial democratic veneers on oligarchic cores, and that can be proven by many events where what would be identified as those cores were defeated, including in instances that were quite important to them, this system was very, very structurally distinct from deeply centralized elite controlled systems. And importantly for the next part and some elements of your essay, their functionality didn’t rely on mass media coordination from the top down, but on civic integration and local deliberative mechanisms, embedded in socio-political economic spaces.
And as we move forward in this little history lesson we can interact with your essay more directly. What happened after ww2, particularly from the 1970s onward, was a transformation: elite groups dismantled participatory infrastructure and replaced it with centralized, tightly coordinated, and exclusionary, top-down systems. The party structures were redesigned, mass-member access was cut off, and capital, education, and scientific authority were centralized. This transformation created the conditions that now resemble the Mosca model, not because there is literally only ever, at any given time and place universally, only deeply centralized dictatorship, but because the structural foundation and broader system architectures of the old system were destroyed (similar, or at least "rhyming", things have occurred in past systems, but their dictatorship states passed away eventually, through some ways or others).
In other words, the centralized, technocratic order we live under today is not proof of Mosca’s theory, its just an instance of system state that maps onto it (but btw, there seems to be cracks in the bottom and middle, we'll see where this goes in the coming years). By observing history, and then the transformation, and where we are now we can see that the fact that so many domains, media, capital, science, governance, are coordinated through a small number of elite network dominated nodes with very minimal public input and that directly demonstrates, contrary to your essay's thesis, that there has been a practical centralization of power and decision-making.
Okay, you've made more effort there and seem to have read some of the post (perhaps). But you are still patently arguing at cross purposes to Mosca's theory and my own.
That nothing you say about the USA here contradicts anything I am saying can be demonstrated by bringing in the analogy with ancient democratic Athens. Before Athens started building up its navy in the early 5th century BC, the various other Greek states and statelets in and around the Aegean sea were independent of its control. Later on they were organized into an alliance under Athenian hegemony, in which they still retained some autonomy, and later yet they came under the full-blown imperial rule of Athens (until it lost its empire in 404BC at the end of the war with Sparta). During the same century, however, Athens itself was becoming ever more democratic (i.e. ruled by its citizenry, a large minority of its population but still a ruling mob), due to successive reforms that reduced the power of its oligarchical elements. Over the same timeframe, then, a decentralized culture-area with many small autonomous units became increasingly centralized, but conversely that centre expanded to empower an ever-larger mob of people.
Without suggesting that the structural forces are exactly the same, we can employ this history as a handy analogy for modern Western societies (including but not limited to the USA). As you say, the centre has sucked up more and more power and resources from local institutions that used to be more autonomous; but at the same time, that centre has become more and more bloated and labyrinthine, to the point at which small oligarchies and elected leaders can no longer control the mass of administrators in direct control of the state machinery. This mass is of course still an oligarchy according to the common definition, and is sometimes susceptible to influence by smaller cabals and individuals (as the Athenian demos was susceptible to the influence of demagogues); but it is still a vast mass, and its actions are better interpreted as mob stupidity and irrationality than the serpentine machinations of a small cabal (as they are often assumed to be by people on the right).
I expressed all of this quite clearly, specifically in the following paragraph:
"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."
I have to say that I don't think you *finished* rereading my post before yielding to the temptation to fire off another comment, because I don't see how else you could have read the above paragraph and gone on to write "contrary to your essay's thesis, there has been a practical centralization of power and decision-making". This is not only laziness on your part, but also a form of discourtesy that wastes an author's time, so I don't think I'll be indulging you with another long re-explanation of what I've already said.
The Aethenian analogy doesn’t hold because its not only doesnt map into the history and evolution of us pol and gov, its also actually structurally mismatched with it. history and the U.S. political evolution. This is because the American Old Republic was not built not on a model of popular control over an administrative mass, but rather on the principle of federated dispersal of authority and decision making. The Old Republic decentralized decision-making across geography (state, county, town), function (civic institutions, mutual aid, parties), and epistemic layers (many centers of knowledge and legitimacy). Power wasnt passively ceded upward into a bloated administrative state, it was deliberately located downward and outward with the public not being a "mob" drawn into a bureaucratic maze but instead the public was structurally-institutionally embedded within the population itself through participatory, deliberative, and execution-capable civic machineries. These included, but were not limited to, things such as mass-member parties, localized capital formation mechanisms, school boards, labor councils, local government governance, small and medium sized enterprises, etc. all exercising real discretion over material and strategic decisions and while all existing within a same super-system were not tightly coordinated, and most of their coordination was sub-regional and more often than not generated within the shared socio-political civic spaces that Jackson and Van Buren, for some of the elements, actualized and in some elements, including some big ones, outright just designed from scratch
And if Mosca’s oligarchical law were a hard rule, then Jackson's and Van Buren's system and the party they designed, the Old Democratic Party, simply could not have functioned as they did. But they did. They defeated oligarchs, diffused power, and ran a functional, prosperous, and innovation-rich system without central bureaucratic bloat or centrally controlled mass coordination. If the system of the Old Republic could restrain elites and empower local actors in practice, something which can be fully demonstrated through primary source evidence and long duration institutional performance, for over 100 years, then it clearly contradicts Mosca’s determinism
And the transformation you mention, central power absorbing local energy, civil society merging into professional governance), and I cede that things like that have happened, its still the case that the the USA was more and more deeply centralizing and on the verge of oligarchic centralization in the 1820s and there was a process reversal that was a break from the earlier system and its trajectory of it, not an evolution of it. And in regards to the centralizing direction we have taken in recent decades, because the new system functions very poorly compared to the old one, consolidating knowledge, capital, and control in insulated institutions, that transformation itself demonstrates that these structural choices super matter, the transformation itself into our current centralized order proves your thesis wrong by its own failures: elites do rule now, the public is locked out, and that’s why things aren’t working
The distinction between kakistocratism and kakistocracy is very good, but I'm not sure that the word particle kaki is quite correct either (incidentally kaki in Israeli is a childish euphemism for excrement analogous to 'pooh-pooh' so perhaps I react to the word differently). Women aren't worse than men, children aren't worse than adults, even foreigners aren't necessarily worse than natives (though they are more often than not). There are also various categories of undesirables that are not considered worthy of elevation, namely dysfunctional white people. It's not that the (symbolically) elevated groups are the worst, it's that they are the ones that by nature should be subordinate. It would seem to me that you need a term that denotes 'rule by those that within any given social relationship are most unfit to rule'
*
"Is not the “ever-expanding petty elite” a minority with regards to elected politicians and core civil servants?"
1) That did cross my mind at the time at writing; I've added back a caveat that I omitted from the final draft. Words derived from Greek "kakos" are way too harsh (at least outside the contexts of crime tolerance and degeneracy promotion), because it means "bad", "ugly", "inferior" etc. and may even be related to "shit". Not a term for women and kids. But I only used a Greekified word there for the sake of consistency; that part of the post is just a restatement of Spandrell's theory and his terminology is already well established.
"Clientage", "permanent revolution", "societal decapitation", "poppy cutting" etc. are all possibly better descriptors.
The cynical part of my head doesn't believe there is any sort of education that could hope to reeducate the modern western man into truly understanding democracy or democratism in such a way as to hurt it. In the present, there are so many plans that involve fixing the US like how Rome was 'fixed' - just put the republic in the power of a strongman! So he can... import millions of Syriacs and Anatolians and continue running an empire based on the power of the Roman mob and a bunch of irritable, gold hungry Praetorians. No one ever fixed Rome, it just decayed and decayed until it was carved up and eventually finished off by Turks.
Perhaps the goal of a dissident should not be in preservation, but curation and selective destruction. Taking matches to every putrid piece of garbage ever written praising Rome.
I really liked that essay, it gave me something to think about. I always thought that dispersion of power and avoidance of concentration of it has its good and bad effects; you can’t abuse power if you concentrate it, but you also can’t achieve anything which needs to be done. It’s interesting to see more arguments against diffusion of power in demos.
Thanks. One reason for my writing it is that I always see right-wing types going along with the established assumptions that power needs to be more diffused, and that anyone who wants to concentrate any in his hands is a potentially dangerous tyrant, and then doing the "surprised Pikachu face" when whoever they just elected turns out to do nothing but talk.
This essay is sort of ridiculous. Its deeply ahistorical and self contradictory in ways that are so deep it might even be fair to say its outright self-negating. In its whole, it tries to argue that elites don’t rule, while at the same time declaring the existence of centralized institutions and powerful gatekeepers. And LMAO, the "elites" brought out the vaccines to placate the masses who were the real source of the lockdowns, and then, well, what happened next, ah, through their genius 10D chess they knew they had to keep trying their hardest (and succeeding in most places for quite a while) to keep the lockdowns going as long as they could even after the vax was in full swing! Its a really dumb essay
Let me guess, you arrived here from a certain quote restack, and didn't bother to read the essay properly or think about its argument before jumping in to comment. Here's a hint for you: the "demos" or "ruling mob" and the broader "masses" are not the same thing.
categories of “the ruling mob” and “the masses” doesn’t remove the contradiction. you argue that their arent elites that truly rule, but recognize strong elite gatekeeping capabilities, powerful centralized institutions, and centralized enforcement mechanisms, in practical terms thats a huge logical break. And its apparent that youve flipped causality by claiming when claiming elite were responding to others with lockdown-era policy, there was an intensive mass communications campaign across each dimension of the information ecosystem and through each avenue -- public, private, personal -- the social domains to spread the idea of the need for strict and intensive response, and once the vaccine came out, they were still pushing it for years. The very elite institutions whose existence you acknowledge coordinated restrictions and controlled narratives through centralized levers centralized mechanisms within media, finance, academia, public health bureaucracies. That was just a few years ago, people know that and this is a tortured attempt to rewrite history that just happened.
You need to stop throwing your list of logical fallacies at me, and start practicing the basic diligence and courtesy of reading a post before commenting on it. I copied out whole paragraphs of Mosca to support my definition of democracy as an extreme variant of oligarchy; do you have any logical objection? I defined my terms clearly, drew a sodding diagram no less, gave two historical examples of ruling mobs before moving on to the modern one that rules us, and explained that it is heavily dependent on the media for coordination; do you have anything to say about any of this? No – you just keep reading more and more into a single en-passant remark about Covid, and raising objections to your own assumptions as to what I meant by it, which tells me that this is the only part of the essay that you actually bothered to read.
Your Mosca based assertion that democracy is merely a variant of oligarchy is disproven by 100% verifiable -- and with primary source evidence that is so numerous as to be legions -- of history of the USA. The experience of America's Old Republic, from roughly the 1830s until some point after WW2, stands apart from that deterministic pov. The Old Republic was structurally based around genuinely decentralized, diffused, pluralistic, and participatory institutional architectures: mass-member parties with real influence from below and the ability for the mass, or even just a large share, of the many networked with each other local branches to override the center, regionally organized capital systems capital systems with *string* localized capital structures that geographically, sectoraly, and societally diffused both access to money/resources and also decision making related to their deployment, locally controlled education and public works, dispersed legal and civic authority, decentralized and diffused scientific and engineering research and development that was often locally controlled, and even more it would just be too long of a list for here!.
These weren’t superficial democratic veneers on oligarchic cores, and that can be proven by many events where what would be identified as those cores were defeated, including in instances that were quite important to them, this system was very, very structurally distinct from deeply centralized elite controlled systems. And importantly for the next part and some elements of your essay, their functionality didn’t rely on mass media coordination from the top down, but on civic integration and local deliberative mechanisms, embedded in socio-political economic spaces.
And as we move forward in this little history lesson we can interact with your essay more directly. What happened after ww2, particularly from the 1970s onward, was a transformation: elite groups dismantled participatory infrastructure and replaced it with centralized, tightly coordinated, and exclusionary, top-down systems. The party structures were redesigned, mass-member access was cut off, and capital, education, and scientific authority were centralized. This transformation created the conditions that now resemble the Mosca model, not because there is literally only ever, at any given time and place universally, only deeply centralized dictatorship, but because the structural foundation and broader system architectures of the old system were destroyed (similar, or at least "rhyming", things have occurred in past systems, but their dictatorship states passed away eventually, through some ways or others).
In other words, the centralized, technocratic order we live under today is not proof of Mosca’s theory, its just an instance of system state that maps onto it (but btw, there seems to be cracks in the bottom and middle, we'll see where this goes in the coming years). By observing history, and then the transformation, and where we are now we can see that the fact that so many domains, media, capital, science, governance, are coordinated through a small number of elite network dominated nodes with very minimal public input and that directly demonstrates, contrary to your essay's thesis, that there has been a practical centralization of power and decision-making.
Okay, you've made more effort there and seem to have read some of the post (perhaps). But you are still patently arguing at cross purposes to Mosca's theory and my own.
That nothing you say about the USA here contradicts anything I am saying can be demonstrated by bringing in the analogy with ancient democratic Athens. Before Athens started building up its navy in the early 5th century BC, the various other Greek states and statelets in and around the Aegean sea were independent of its control. Later on they were organized into an alliance under Athenian hegemony, in which they still retained some autonomy, and later yet they came under the full-blown imperial rule of Athens (until it lost its empire in 404BC at the end of the war with Sparta). During the same century, however, Athens itself was becoming ever more democratic (i.e. ruled by its citizenry, a large minority of its population but still a ruling mob), due to successive reforms that reduced the power of its oligarchical elements. Over the same timeframe, then, a decentralized culture-area with many small autonomous units became increasingly centralized, but conversely that centre expanded to empower an ever-larger mob of people.
Without suggesting that the structural forces are exactly the same, we can employ this history as a handy analogy for modern Western societies (including but not limited to the USA). As you say, the centre has sucked up more and more power and resources from local institutions that used to be more autonomous; but at the same time, that centre has become more and more bloated and labyrinthine, to the point at which small oligarchies and elected leaders can no longer control the mass of administrators in direct control of the state machinery. This mass is of course still an oligarchy according to the common definition, and is sometimes susceptible to influence by smaller cabals and individuals (as the Athenian demos was susceptible to the influence of demagogues); but it is still a vast mass, and its actions are better interpreted as mob stupidity and irrationality than the serpentine machinations of a small cabal (as they are often assumed to be by people on the right).
I expressed all of this quite clearly, specifically in the following paragraph:
"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."
I have to say that I don't think you *finished* rereading my post before yielding to the temptation to fire off another comment, because I don't see how else you could have read the above paragraph and gone on to write "contrary to your essay's thesis, there has been a practical centralization of power and decision-making". This is not only laziness on your part, but also a form of discourtesy that wastes an author's time, so I don't think I'll be indulging you with another long re-explanation of what I've already said.
The Aethenian analogy doesn’t hold because its not only doesnt map into the history and evolution of us pol and gov, its also actually structurally mismatched with it. history and the U.S. political evolution. This is because the American Old Republic was not built not on a model of popular control over an administrative mass, but rather on the principle of federated dispersal of authority and decision making. The Old Republic decentralized decision-making across geography (state, county, town), function (civic institutions, mutual aid, parties), and epistemic layers (many centers of knowledge and legitimacy). Power wasnt passively ceded upward into a bloated administrative state, it was deliberately located downward and outward with the public not being a "mob" drawn into a bureaucratic maze but instead the public was structurally-institutionally embedded within the population itself through participatory, deliberative, and execution-capable civic machineries. These included, but were not limited to, things such as mass-member parties, localized capital formation mechanisms, school boards, labor councils, local government governance, small and medium sized enterprises, etc. all exercising real discretion over material and strategic decisions and while all existing within a same super-system were not tightly coordinated, and most of their coordination was sub-regional and more often than not generated within the shared socio-political civic spaces that Jackson and Van Buren, for some of the elements, actualized and in some elements, including some big ones, outright just designed from scratch
And if Mosca’s oligarchical law were a hard rule, then Jackson's and Van Buren's system and the party they designed, the Old Democratic Party, simply could not have functioned as they did. But they did. They defeated oligarchs, diffused power, and ran a functional, prosperous, and innovation-rich system without central bureaucratic bloat or centrally controlled mass coordination. If the system of the Old Republic could restrain elites and empower local actors in practice, something which can be fully demonstrated through primary source evidence and long duration institutional performance, for over 100 years, then it clearly contradicts Mosca’s determinism
And the transformation you mention, central power absorbing local energy, civil society merging into professional governance), and I cede that things like that have happened, its still the case that the the USA was more and more deeply centralizing and on the verge of oligarchic centralization in the 1820s and there was a process reversal that was a break from the earlier system and its trajectory of it, not an evolution of it. And in regards to the centralizing direction we have taken in recent decades, because the new system functions very poorly compared to the old one, consolidating knowledge, capital, and control in insulated institutions, that transformation itself demonstrates that these structural choices super matter, the transformation itself into our current centralized order proves your thesis wrong by its own failures: elites do rule now, the public is locked out, and that’s why things aren’t working
The distinction between kakistocratism and kakistocracy is very good, but I'm not sure that the word particle kaki is quite correct either (incidentally kaki in Israeli is a childish euphemism for excrement analogous to 'pooh-pooh' so perhaps I react to the word differently). Women aren't worse than men, children aren't worse than adults, even foreigners aren't necessarily worse than natives (though they are more often than not). There are also various categories of undesirables that are not considered worthy of elevation, namely dysfunctional white people. It's not that the (symbolically) elevated groups are the worst, it's that they are the ones that by nature should be subordinate. It would seem to me that you need a term that denotes 'rule by those that within any given social relationship are most unfit to rule'
*
"Is not the “ever-expanding petty elite” a minority with regards to elected politicians and core civil servants?"
'Minority' is a type here no?
1) That did cross my mind at the time at writing; I've added back a caveat that I omitted from the final draft. Words derived from Greek "kakos" are way too harsh (at least outside the contexts of crime tolerance and degeneracy promotion), because it means "bad", "ugly", "inferior" etc. and may even be related to "shit". Not a term for women and kids. But I only used a Greekified word there for the sake of consistency; that part of the post is just a restatement of Spandrell's theory and his terminology is already well established.
"Clientage", "permanent revolution", "societal decapitation", "poppy cutting" etc. are all possibly better descriptors.
2) Yep, a typo. Well spotted.
The cynical part of my head doesn't believe there is any sort of education that could hope to reeducate the modern western man into truly understanding democracy or democratism in such a way as to hurt it. In the present, there are so many plans that involve fixing the US like how Rome was 'fixed' - just put the republic in the power of a strongman! So he can... import millions of Syriacs and Anatolians and continue running an empire based on the power of the Roman mob and a bunch of irritable, gold hungry Praetorians. No one ever fixed Rome, it just decayed and decayed until it was carved up and eventually finished off by Turks.
Perhaps the goal of a dissident should not be in preservation, but curation and selective destruction. Taking matches to every putrid piece of garbage ever written praising Rome.