08-31-2017, 10:57 PM
(08-31-2017, 09:42 PM)Bob Butler 54 Wrote: I see the identity of the ruling elites evolving. The agricultural age had a nobility that attempted to monopolize weapons and thus political power. As first the longbow and then muskets become dominant, we had citizen armies and the old nobility became land owning aristocrats. The land owning aristocrats eventually contested with the robber barons as the means of gathering wealth changed.
I’m not thrilled by any group of elites being in control, and would emphasize feedback mechanism that allowed the People as a whole to keep the elites in check. This has tended not to happen with representative democracy, in great part as the representatives tend to become corrupt. Thus, I’d like to see direct vote networked democracy tried.
Yes, the current military has its virtues, but power corrupts. The key is allowing a clear enough vision to spot the corruption, and a clear enough tool to pull the corrupt.
We have several possible ruling elites. Among them:
1. Traditional landowners -- the people who own the land and literally lord it over agricultural laborers and sharecroppers who have no alternatives. Those are the exploiters of the agrarian era who may have even had literal ownership of their workers as chattel slaves. In more recent times, urban landlords can be the worst exploiters of the time. See the desirable parts of California, new York, and New England.
2. Financiers and industrialists -- the capitalists, whether bankers or factory owners. Maximal profits came from sweating the industrial workers. These people are the evil bourgeoisie of Marxist caricature.
3. Bureaucratic elites -- people who do not need to own property but exploit political or administrative power over workers. In Commie countries they were the infamous nomenklatura, people with connections and began to act like aristocrats, even pushing their children into such roles while doing everything possible to keep people with no connections from joining them (What loving parent who has a great way of life wants his beloved son or daughter to become a prole or peasant?)
4. Intellectuals -- people who create ideas and images and expand knowledge. These people create the cultural legacy and expand the scientific lore. (In America they are mostly under the thumb of the previous three elites).
5. Organized crime.
Democracy is in grave danger when four of the five have unrestrained power and the fourth is inder the thumb of others.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.