“Once it was “the revolt of the masses” that was held to threaten social order and the civilizing traditions of Western culture. In our time, however, the chief threat comes from those at the top of the social hierarchy, not the masses.”
— Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, 1995
A rebellion is brewing and may soon erupt. Since the 1960s, the average citizen in the Western democracies has ceased to take much interest in political life. Citizens have left the business of politics to a self-created caste of politicians and opinion makers. This state of affairs may soon end and states are already trembling as a result.
It has been very interesting to watch various reactions to the American Tea Party Movement or to the so-called ‘Right Wing’ resurgence in Europe. Between the frissons of horror, media commentators with the vapours, and sundry denunciations, it seems very clear that most observers simply do not understand what they are seeing.
One of the great advantages of having read history widely is that there is very little that is truly surprising or all that new. Here is some news: The Jacquerie is getting restless and the Helots are getting angry.
Of course, the disadvantage of having read history widely is that few historical analogies are precise. The14th Century Jacquerie and their contemporary English equivalents never deserved much of the bad press they got which is also very true of the Tea Party Patriots. Nor have the citizens of the Western democracies devolved into Helots, although sometimes it seems such could happen.
A healthy democratic or republican system has always demanded a high level of involvement from its citizens. While citizenship in the Athens of Pericles and Socrates was largely limited to free-born males, it was expected that as many of them as possible would involve themselves in affairs of government. In the days of the Roman Republic even the most humble toga-clad citizen was proud that he could assemble by Tribe in the Well of the Comita.
With the flowering of the British Parliamentary System in the late 18th Century, it was expected that enfranchised citizens (those who owned enough property to qualify to vote) would remain deeply involved in political life. Most did. Likewise, in early 19th Century America, citizens understood that the business of government was their own business.
We do not see that level of involvement now. If anything, over the past 40 years, the average citizen has become less and less involved in political life and has ceded politics to an emergent caste of politically involved people. There are a number of causes that underlay this trend and there are some discernable results.
Voter apathy is one measurable symptom. British voter turn-out shrank from 84% in 1950 to 65% in 2010. Other Western countries where voting is not compulsory (which it was in Classic Athens) have all experienced a drastic downturn in voter turnout. This betrays a fundamental lack of confidence or interest in the election system. In Canada’s 2008 National Election, less than 60% of eligible voters turned up at the polls. A 60% turnout would flood the polls in a municipal election where participation routinely hovers around 30%.
Political debate has become moribund. The contents of the political section in most North American bookstores contain a variety of texts all from the ‘left’ or ‘right’ describing the other side as a “socialists” or “fascists”. None of these labels mean much anymore, but the orthodoxy of contemporary discourse is virtually set in concrete. Yet even this pales against the shibboleth that tolerance is the only true value in public life. Only those who define themselves as ‘tolerant’ (although not towards traditional elements of society) are fit to be involved in governing it.
Political castes are not new in the Western World, but they have never been so entrenched or inimical as they are now. It is a simple fact of human nature that some people will be more attracted to political office than others will for a wide variety of reasons. It is also a simple fact of human nature that some people will be attracted to the proximity of power but do not want responsibility. What is different now is that the political caste believes they are the experts who alone can be trusted with power.
Two early views of this state of affairs came from American writers. The perceptive humourist P.J. O’Rourke observed in the foreword to his 1991 book Parliament of Whores, that a new elite had been created in America’s political class. This elite was based not on wealth, bravery or birth, but on holding particular opinions and embracing a progressive, inclusive gestalt. Joining this elite did not require anything more than cleaving to their views. The eminent sociologist Christopher Lasch also wrote about what was emerging in his final book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy.
According to this caste of elites, the practice of politics has become a specialty that only those properly trained in its nuances can be expected to play. The hoi polloi and the average citizen do not understand how it works. They should not be involved except at the very basic level of voting as expected, delivering proper answers to carefully designed polls and paying their taxes without complaint. This is not a healthy trend in a democratic society.
It is in the nature of a caste to be exclusionary, self-referential and dismissive of outsiders. The Western political caste that has grown up over the last 40 years does not perfectly fit this description. After all, its various factions still need to win elections. But techniques for controlling public opinion have become common practice and most political technocrats eventually came to the conclusion that, since the public could be led around by the nose in such a docile manner, this state of affairs would always be true. Care to guess what happens when one doesn’t read history? Circumstances do not endure forever.
In the United States, when the beautiful vision of easy wealth hit the windshield of economic reality, American middle class expectations got smashed. This hit was hard enough to turn mild resentment at being largely ignored by Wall Street’s economic elites and Washington insiders into burning resentment. Some 14th Century French aristocrat might have ignored the Jacquerie until they started piling dry brushwood around his castle… dissing the Tea Party Movement is an error of similar magnitude. The middle class reflects an acute frustration and the longer it takes to hear them, the more frustrated they will become.
This political caste is not an elite in the normal sense (Bill Clinton, for one, was certainly not born with a silver spoon in his mouth), but it behaves like one. In some respects in seems like a Medieval Guild.
Often in human history, cities carried out a vital demographic function – that of a death trap for the excess of population above a society’s carrying level. In Medieval Europe, for example, the surplus from the countryside gravitated to urban centres and looked for a way to make a living. They managed to scrabble for a few years and then, between poverty, crime and an active disease environment, they usually died early. In some ways, this state of affairs endured in Europe until the Industrial Revolution was well advanced and demands for labour competed with emigration opportunities.
In medieval cities like London, Heidelberg or Paris, the established urban families took pains to secure themselves from the hordes of incoming rural poor by restricting access to political and economic power. However, they usually remained cognizant of the destructive power of an aroused mob and allowed enough social mobility so as to have a safety valve.
One of the most widespread institutional measures was the Guild System. While some cities were ‘free’ in that the Guild system was not present, it did exist in most major cities. Essentially, Guilds controlled access to capital, regulated standards and made it almost impossible for the incoming poor to break into the civic economy and endanger the prerogatives of established urban families.
Guilds did demand expertise from their members to support exclusionary practices. This is exactly where the parallel to our political caste kicks in.
The post-war education system pushed vast numbers of university graduates into rapidly expanding economies which were prepared to absorb them. The situation started to change in the 1970’s after the older baby boomers followed their parents into the work place. The economic shocks of the early 1970’s curtailed the spectacular growth of the 1950’s and ‘60s, but the avalanche of students continued to pour out of universities.
One inevitable result was that the over-supply of college graduates facilitated the growth of the service economy just as labour shortages and environmental concerns started to affect the industrial economy. We eased the factories out of our cities and built more office towers. The minimum standards for entry into some fields started to rise from those in the 1950’s when requirements for entry level education for programs for accountants, lawyers, stockbrokers or reporters were not that high. Often, entry into these careers did not require a university degree.
By the early 1980’s, university students were increasingly aware that the more lucrative careers required highly specialized degrees and even post-graduate courses. Growing specialization was but one reaction to the oversupply of graduates. The problem is that we have come to expect it all across the board.
The oversupply of lawyers, especially in the United States, has contributed to the rise of a culture of litigation which has added expenses to almost every field of activity. Growing standards of accountability are creating higher standards of work for accountants, now likewise widely reflected in the price of goods and services.
The minimum requirements for reporters used to be an ability to write, an instinct for narrative and that they were observant. Curiously, the Economist Magazine still demands only those basic skills and yet it manages to retain a reputation as the best news magazine in the world. The specialists hired by many other news organizations nowadays don’t seem to be nearly up to scratch, but then there are lawyers and accountants constantly peering over the shoulders of editors and producers.
This contemporary political caste does aim at high education, especially for senior office holders. Almost all of the top-level Democrats in the United States are lawyers, most of who have been to the same law schools in the Ivy Leagues at one point or another. Senior Republicans often tend to go to the same schools, but end up as businessmen. It should be pointed out that the lawyers rarely have a record of being involved in court battles where success is clear cut. Likewise, the businessmen are not entrepreneurs but instead tend to be found as senior executives in established companies. The European political caste also comes from similar backgrounds.
Involvement in political life both as elected office holders, lobbyists and staffers (equivalents of yesteryear’s courtiers) are not specialized roles. Native wit, cunning and an appetite for long work hours were all that were necessary before and to be fair, most politicians worth their salt still work very long hours. Regardless, politics is not specialized and requires no particular expertise; the self-selecting caste has based everything on an erroneous premise. They are not indispensible, and one might wonder if their horror at the rising of the hoi polloi reflects a buried knowledge that this is true.
Castes also often hold specialized views – care to guess what ‘political correctness’ and ‘tolerance’ are? These are the products of a post-modernist gestalt which places little value on history. They are also a part of a post-war mechanism to defray violent nationalism which, as is typical of human nature, has overreached itself by insisting that our own traditional identities and values mean nothing. Overcompensation when looking for a rational medium is always a bad idea.
As we have learned from dozens of examples around the world, not the least from the violent Islamic movements that threaten us today, nothing is so irritating to most people as a threat to their self-identity. The new political elite has tried to redefine traditional national identity (sweepingly so in the U.K.) over the last decade. In the U.S., the new elite has constantly belittled Christianity and firearms ownership. One could leave the last word on this to P.J. O’Rourke who famously observed:
“The Clinton administration launched an attack on people in Texas because those people were religious nuts with guns. Hell, this country was founded by religious nuts with guns. Who does Bill Clinton think stepped ashore on Plymouth Rock?”
The Tea Party Movement in the United States is made up not of religious nuts with guns but of a lot of practicing Christians including a large majority of the nation’s firearms owners. By the way, the Tea Party demographic is also the source for a very large number of America’s military personnel. Nor should those involved in the Tea Party Movement be denigrated as extremists, although many attempts have been made to portray them thusly.
The predictable slur on the Tea Party is to describe them as naught but Whites. This is absolutely untrue; their rallies draw Blacks, Hispanics and Asians – Middle Class ones who are also likely to be regular churchgoers and to own firearms. The movement is self-organized through social networking media and polices itself quite successfully. Attempts at provocation or ‘entryism’ have all failed.
In Europe, attempts to denigrate traditional identities and to urge tolerance are fast failing. This is not least because many ordinary people are growing increasingly disturbed – for good reason – by rapid Islamic immigration. Political authorities who denigrate calls to curb Islamic militancy and diminish immigration to manageable levels are casting aspersions on the likes of Geert Wilders in the Netherlands and/or efforts in France and Switzerland to reign in controls on the visible images of Islamic extremism. Ordinary citizens are growing frustrated.
So far, the growing opposition in Europe to the political elite and Islamic immigration has naturally been described as “Right Wing”, “Neo-Nazi” etc. In truth, some of these types are about, but if they are gaining in popularity and influence, whose fault is that?
In Europe’s year of revolutions, in 1848, as unrest and protest convulsed many cities, the Prussian King, Frederick William IV, abandoned his initial reactionary impulse and acceded to the reforms that made him a constitutional monarch. One saying attributed to him was “If we don’t have a revolution from above, we will have one from below”.
And history is studded with incidents where elites failed to listen to the masses when the situation called for a revolution. Today’s contemporary political caste doesn’t bother to study history very often and tends to discount it. They are going to regret this. Heads on pikes might be a metaphor for now, but if they don’t change their ways, there is always the possibility that it might become literal. A time of revolution is coming and the revolutionaries are in a hurry. If there isn’t a revolution from above, there will be one from below.
