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Jul 11, 2022·edited Jul 11, 2022

Some thoughts about elite domination of politics and how it's changing.

There's an American centric corollary to Montesquiou thinking, best encapsulated by David Mayhew's 1974 book (which, unfortunately, is taken to be a book about electoral basis of congressional politics, partly due to the unfortunate title and Mayhew's own discursive writing style). He noted that American politics is, or was, dominated by elites, but a peculiar group of elites. Because of the way American politics has been traditionally practiced, these elites are made up of those whose interests and stakes are parochial and limited scope and their interests are not really in conflict with each other: so the politics winds up being dominated by localized wheeling and dealing among farmers, small businesspeople, manufacturers, activists, and so forth at the local level and the representatives are not really agents of any single interest, but facilitator of the bargaining among these. These representatives, in turn, engage in their own bargaining in Congress, mostly behind the scenes, reflecting the bargains they had struck back at home. Bargaining is possible because these politics are not zero sum--their goals are not at odds with one another. These also allow for formulation of effective national politics, as long as the promoter of the politics are willing to get down and dirty negotiating with these varied interests.

But Mayhew also foresaw that this system was in danger at the time of his writing. Changing informational environment and the ability of various political actors to take advantage of them was creating nationalized politics, around issues that were much larger and, far more important to his thinking, not nearly so fungible. And it was increasingly becoming easy for enterprising politicians to ignore dealmaking with the localized interests and appeal directly to the big issues. This, in turn, makes for a more "democratic" politics, in that, say, if 60% of the national population want to do X, why should it have to negotiate at length for approval from a handful of farmers who happen to be important to a senator from Nebraska? But what exactly is this issue X to the vast majority of the people? Usually, it is only an abstraction of which they have little understanding. Because of the informational environment today, everyone knows about it, but understanding takes real effort and it is still true that very few people have an interest in actually understanding it. So the opinions of this large majority of people with regards to X is built on very shallow foundation--it appeals to their sense of "morality," based on their sociocultural backgrounds or whatever and very limited understanding of what's actually going on. Take, for example, the current crisis in Ukraine, or even the 9/11 attacks. Vast majority of people don't have an understanding of what's going on around the world. They have no connection to Ukraine. And vast majority of Americans are neither New Yorkers or have direct dealings with New York (not counting indirect ones--but people don't know them anyways). These events spark strong emotions because they strike at a "moral core" of their consciences and not because they have anything to do with their interests or knowledge. And you can't blame the masses for not knowing about these things: it's not their job. Making sure that they and their families are happy and healthy is and that's a difficult enough job for almost everyone. But on any issue, the mobs of uninterested people motivated mainly by moral impulses based on mostly symbolic considerations far outnumber the elites motivated by actual interests, especially if those elites are local in scope. All the farmers in Nebraska stand no chance if everyone else thinks corn should be declared a flower rather than a grain for whatever moral reason. In the past, it did not matter because nobody would pay the political costs to do something about making corn a flower, but this cost has steadily fallen--mass communication is cheap, especially if it's short and succinct (i.e. make an "obvious" appeal to people's moral core). Cost of participating in politics in all forms has been falling, in the name of making politics more "democratic." It does not take much to sell a moral slogan based on a single vacuous word if you are skilled enough and the situation fits (yes, I'm talking about Obama. It's worth remembering that, long before Obama sold the nation on "Hope," Bill Clinton, in 1992, tried to be "the man from Hope." The latter didn't sell very well, although it would get pointlessly complicated to get to the "real reasons" behind this failure were.) Of course, if you can pull this off, you don't really have to negotiate.

This change applies to not just politics at the national level, but at the local levels as well. In the Mayhewian universe, members of Congress were not just representatives of the dominant local interests, but were facilitators of the bargains struck among various local interests--even if some interests were more important than others. Who in Congress today does that now? They, too, sell themselves on the local equivalents of "Hope," whether's it's named Pride or God or whatever. These are national slogans, devoid of local contents, the ones that just happen to be more popular than others in a particular area. The essential localism in Mayhew's universe is now gone.

Now, these message don't just drop out of the sky. They are fashioned and sold by elites, but of an entirely different type of elites than the localized parochial elites of yesterday (at least in American politics). They are national, or rather, transnational in scope and are joined together by their own sense of quasi religious "morality" which to them is intuitively obvious and just (thus, quasi religious). Some of them, like certain corporations, may well be connected to their causes for practical reason, i.e. they are involved in oil, manufacture weapon systems, or whatever. But many of them are doing what they do, indirectly, for moral reasons, too: Apple pulls out of Russia not because Russian market is not (directly) valueless for them, but so that they can appeal to the collective morality of the majority of their consumers (and it is not clear if this will necessarily make Apple more money compared to them staying in Russia--granted, there are also matters of economic sanctions and so forth, so these are all interconnected, which makes the counterfactual difficult to contemplate). But one thing that sets apart these elites from the elites of yesterday is that they too are largely divorced from material interests: they don't have anything at stake in Ukraine either, for example. The old elites were almost entirely motivated by actual interests: farmers were interested in corn, people importing goods were interested in tariffs (for the stuff they were importing), people competing with foreign products were interested in tariffs but on different goods. So not only were their interests mutually non-exclusive, they had a clear basis on which to negotiate--so you lower tariffs on good A, and raise tariffs on good B--everyone is happy, except the free traders who believe that all barriers to trade are bad--but they are not part of the local elites that mattered back then. If you have a group of elites who are motivated by moral concerns devoid of material moorings, you can't negotiate with them because there's nothing to bargain on. Morality is absolute and nonnegotiable. You can't (easily) countermobilize the masses because whatever message that clicks does because it does find resonance with the common moral fiber of the society where it sells (you can't tell devout believers that God is irrelevant). Maybe, in the God example, if you (and the audience) can find enough time to discuss the issue on the basis of theology (of whatever denomination that is applicable) at length to find why X is actually sacrilegious, but, as noted above, most people don't have the time to actually "understand" things and this is why short simple slogans, if the circumstances are right, sell.

But at the same time, this is not to say that these new elites have a free rein on what messages and slogan they can push. They can't invent issues out of thin air. They are limited only to choosing between the potential moral positions that arise from the prevailing ethos of the society that they want to target, and making sure that the message succeeds can take a long time in preparation. So, ironically, then, the "people" win--it is their latent moral beliefs that come to prevail, even if the context might be somewhat distorted and manipulated by the elites. As Richard III (sort of) said in the first act of the Shakespeare play: We said X, Y, and Z are what people want. Can you deny (or refute) any of these?

So in a way, politics today is more "democratic," in that small localized interests are effectively broken and politics is being carried out in the interests of what people "want," at least in a big picture sense. But it is being carried out with much less "understanding" because almost everyone is unmoored from material interests that motivate such understanding, but on the basis of somewhat esoteric "sociocultural" values that define whatever that passes as "morality" in different segments of the population. Because the material underpinnings are lacking, there is no room to negotiate, only the shouting of absolutist slogans. Either people shout at each other endlessly (if there are mutually opposed moral communities of comparable size and influence) or no one objects to the popular moral slogans of the day audibly (if the morality being appealed to is very widely shared among everyone in the society in question).

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Nominalists (reality is what I say it is) and Realists (reality is what it is), traditionally, are posed as polar opposites. I think they are more akin to bedfellows who procreate. Realists being the man aspect of affairs and Nominalists being the woman.

Calls for accountability, I think, grow in volume when the Nominalist impulse grows impudent towards the Realist impulse. Then Realism gives Nominalism a whack and some accountability returns.

For example, the enmity against Russia cultivated and thrown thither by Nuland, Truss, Freeland, Lambrecht, Hicks, Zelensky, and von der Leyen has taken an atoning whack. I do not know how all that turns out, but I feel an entirely new accountability architecture (multipolar world) is in the offing, maybe something like this, updating Mackinder to account for the electronic envelope he could not be expected to have seen:

Eurasia (new geographical pivot of history):

Lisbon to Vladivostok, to include The 'stans, Iran, England, Scotland, Ireland, The Balkans, The Baltics, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Turkey, and Mongolia -- under the protection of Moscow;

Asia:

China, Oceana to Hokkaido, Pakistan, and Korea -- under the protection of Beijing;

South Asia:

India, Southeast Asia, and The Malay Peninsula -- under the protection of New Delhi;

Afro-Arabia:

The Arabian Peninsula and Sub-Saharan Africa, to include The Levant, Egypt, and Libya -- under the joint protection of Cairo, Jerusalem, and Nairobi;

The Americas:

North, Central, and South, The Caribbean -- under the joint protection of Mexico City and Washington, D.C.

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