I was reading the Zman today inveighing against Democracy, because "one man one vote" and equality goes against the whole of history -- and pre-history.
Democracy flies in the face of everything we know about human organization, because it rejects the natural hierarchy we see everywhere.
I'm not so sure. The point about democratic elections is that the voters in a community can divide over governance and fight to the finish in an election rather than a civil war. Much better than the alternative.
There is plenty of hierarchy in democracy, if you ask me. And, as the last election proved, most voters are influenced by high-status influencers, like scientists and intellectuals and the journalists that make everything "real simple" for the masses. The rulers and the talkers set the agenda: there is hierarchy for you.
No, I see the problem in the basic problem of all human governance. The job of a government is to protect us from enemies and raiders. And governments have paid the soldiers that protect us since time immemorial in the coin of loot and plunder.
So just as the sham fight of elections has replaced the real fight of border wars, the entitlement state has replaced loot and plunder.
Really, you can say, what has changed?
Or, more to the point, will we ever change?
Because I see our current problem as the problem that politics and elections inevitably descend into loot and plunder. It's in our genes.
So if we had a really wise and sensible ruling class, it would get together with a nod and a wink; it would still play the game of loot and plunder to pander to the peasants. But when it came to the usual deals in the corridors of power, the game would be reduced to something harmless. Just as an election is an extremely harmless alternative to a real civil war.
But that's not where we are. Over the weekend I read how the $3.2 trillion infrastructure plan -- with free Pre-K and free college and Medicare-for-all -- is a mere shadow of the $30 trillion plan that Bernie Sanders was originally pushing.
See, my reaction is incredulous. Surely, I would say, we now know that the entitlement state is really not a good idea. Maybe it's a good idea to help people in trouble. Certainly it makes sense to deal with the usual and periodic financial crisis. But surely it is time to stop the expansion of routine loot and plunder and think about how we can reform the welfare state. To make it more social and less rigidly administrative and bureaucratic.
I don't think that "the people" demanded the welfare state. I don't think that "the people" have ever had the imagination for that. A "free" universal education system? It takes an educated person to think that up. Ordinary people don't think above the level of labor-union members trashing their employer's factory when the employer wants to lower wages during an economic downturn.
I say that the welfare state was concocted by ruling-class intellectuals because the welfare state creates a lot of jobs for bossy intellectuals and educated middle managers. The attraction of entitlement programs is that We the Special People get to run them.
Oh yeah, sure. When you appeal to The People during an election and ask them if they would like free health care, of course they are going to say yes.
But it is the job of a Wise and Educated elite to look down the road and think: "wow, this is all very well, but how are we ever going to adjust the program to changing conditions and keep it from descending into corruption and incompetence?"
I mean, it's not as if the idea of a useless bureaucracy is new. Charles Dickens was making hay in Little Dorrit with the Circumlocution Office staffed by useless Barnacles and Stiltstockings. This was back in 1855!
I think that a Wise and Educated elite would be thinking about how more people need to be engaged in society contributing to our social welfare, rather than being cogs in a bureaucratic machine and helpless recipients of welfare from a beneficent Oz.
In other words, I believe that we should have a society in which people are engaged in helping each other, educating each other, benefiting each other, rather than voting for a politician to do it all for us: paid for by the rich, of course.
Yes, but, you say. How can the ruling class change direction of society? How can they ignore the will and the appetite of the people for free stuff?
Really? Serious? The ruling class ignores the will of the people all the time.
Look at it this way. Our ruling class has decided that we need to completely change our energy economy, because global warming. Whether or not global warming is true, there is no popular enthusiasm for transformation of energy; it is all ruling class. Our ruling class has decided that the biggest social problem is "systemic racism." But ordinary people didn't come up with that. It was an elite thing, from start to finish.
So here's my idea, ruling class. It's time for you to lead us. To lead us to a more social society. Not a society where you guys get to strut and fret your hour upon the stage saving us from a climate apocalypse, or pursuing the will-o'-the-wisp of systemic racism.
Indeed, your enthusiasm for climate change and systemic racism is a "tell." It is a tell that you don't have anything serious to do. That you have had to invent issues like climate change and systemic racism in order for you to have something to do. In other words, it tells us that you are empty-headed fools and knaves that just aren't serious about being a responsible and responsive ruling class.
But to reform the welfare state, to make it more social, more interactive, to give more responsibility to ordinary people to contribute to the welfare of society: what a glorious vision! Think of how the leader of such a movement would go down in history!
Instead of which we are teaching our Good Little Girls to be "activists," to cancel university professors that don't toe the lefty line. To pursue United States Senators into the bathroom.
Really? This is all that you ruling-class geniuses can come up with?
In other words, we have a clueless ruling class pursuing useless ideas that lead nowhere. Hey you guys make the ancien régime of France look like political geniuses.
No, Democracy isn't the problem. It's the rulers that are the problem.
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