The 2018 midterm elections are just a day away and the media is understandably in a frenzy....
The problem with this is that it’s almost entirely pointless. In the frenzy over whether we’re “losing our democracy,” we’ve forgotten something far more important: a democratic society and a well-governed society are not necessarily the same thing. It is the latter that free and responsible individuals ought to pursue.
...The best insights come from a group of Italian social scientists active in the early 20th century. These thinkers are sometimes known as the Italian elite theorists, both due to their nationality and their subject matter.... They don’t have a cure to the problems that ail us—many of their proposed remedies are either impractical or, as the verdict of history has shown, downright dangerous—but that should not stop us from appreciating their insights. There are three who deserve our attention: Robert Michels, Gaetano Mosca, and Vilfredo Pareto.
If you’ve ever heard the phrase “iron law of oligarchy,” you’re drawing upon Michels. He wrote about the tendency of all states, except perhaps those that are both new and small, to develop hierarchically.... In the U.S., this explains why the state and its bureaucracies keep growing regardless of who occupies the White House or has a congressional majority.
Mosca’s pioneering contribution was the idea of the “political formula.” Because all societies in practice have a clear distinction between those who rule and those who are ruled, there needs to be something that legitimates this distinction.... Perhaps it is true; perhaps it is false; perhaps it is nonsense, which means it is so incoherent we cannot even ascribe to it a truth value. What matters is that the political formula legitimates rule, and thus helps rulers maintain the regime. While this sounds sinister, keep in mind that without a political formula, individuals could not cohere into durable institutions for political action in the first place.
...Pareto highlights a crucial difference between political action and market action. For Pareto, action is always rational, because it is always in pursuit of some desired end. But action is not always logical. Logical action means action properly oriented towards its end.... Action is logical in contexts where there is something approximating “experimental” feedback between choice and consequence. But in social environments where there is not a strong link between choice and consequence, action can become illogical. Politics, especially large-scale politics, is a prime candidate for illogical action to flourish.... This lack of clear feedback makes politics messy and fraught with inconsistencies.
From the above, we can get a pretty clear picture of what’s happening in the United States, at least with respect to the problems in the public sector. The state has evolved a network of hierarchies to take on increasingly complex governance tasks. But these hierarchies have become almost totally insular: they are not subject to any effective responsibility mechanism, and thus have become unlawful and oftentimes downright predatory. As the state apparatus has simultaneously grown in size and diminished in efficacy, democracy—interpreted as policy being directly influenced by first-past-the-post elections—became enshrined as the new political formula, at the expense of older and wiser republican ideas. The combination of these two has contributed to the political arena not only failing to punish, but actively rewarding, illogical action writ large. This has all occurred amidst a growing distance, not just physically but culturally as well, between those who rule and those who are ruled. Nobody intended this result, yet it follows predictably from the insights of the Italian elite theorists.
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