Elites and Democracy Part 1

This is the first of a three-part article series on elites and democracy. I hope you find this interesting, and as always, please read, subscribe, and share :)

We are regularly told by politicians, across the political spectrum, that they will ‘fight the elites’. When both Nigel Farage and Zack Polanski implicitly claim to be one of the people, a distrust and dislike of elites festers. They paint the picture that elites and their existence are anti-democratic. That democracy is crushed under the weight of elite rule.

However, this is the paradox of representative democracy. Much to Rousseau’s angst, representative democracies accept that the people’s will has to be filtered through elites. As opposed to sortition, or direct democracy, representative democracy acknowledges the people’s will but attempts to navigate it through a layering of sensibility. Just as Edmund Burke demanded, representatives not simply bow to popular pressure, but owed citizens their industry and minds.

All too often, the mere existence of elites is presumed to undermine democratic will. However, as Hugo Drochon tellingly writes in Elites and Democracy, democracy functions within elite formations. This does not negate democratic will as populists would have us believe, people can still shape and form our public space even when an elite ‘decides’ politics.

In 2016, Barack Obama stated ‘If I hear anybody saying their vote does not matter, that it doesn’t matter who we elect, read up on your history, it matters’. Ever eloquent, Obama’s call to action reflects the paradox at the heart of representative democracy. The people may elect their leaders, but they never truly rule. Instead, elites will always make the decisions, and the people merely get to judge the decisions made.

But this approach, to some extent, assumes that elites are responsive to democratic input. Yet those who shape ideology and those who are said to make up the ‘deep state’ within the government bureaucracy are accused of operating outside the boundaries of democracy. They cannot be voted out and use their influence to shift policy, much like in the drama, The Diplomat, they remain advising elected officials for many years. Fear of the deep state in the US has grown with the rise of populist politicians who frequently refer to a shadowy cabal directing national policy, which, in turn, has led to a rise in the lexicon in common parlance and significant numbers agreeing that the demos is secondary in policy creation. Unlike representatives, who are and exist amongst the elites but are held directly accountable to the people, these elites remain out of democracy’s grasp.

This necessarily leads us to the question of who the ‘elites’ really are. Elites remain a broad term encompassing both elected and unelected officials. In one way, we can easily point to the elected elites who ‘rule’ our country, such as Presidents, Ministers, and lower-level officials, such as members of Congress. But there are also those unelected officials and experts who govern outside of the democratic framework. The civil servants, who, in Ken Clarke’s memoir, ‘A Different Kind of Blue’, were highlighted, would slow down democratically chosen initiatives because they were deemed bad policy. The experts who make forecasts craft plans for change and reflect institutional wisdom supposedly immune from democratic discourse. This is what led Michael Gove, in the Brexit referendum, to declare the British public had had enough of experts.

The boundaries of contestation over ‘elites’ in today’s democracies are themselves confusing. The conspiracy theories of shadowy individuals running governments as puppets, much like Alex Jones and QANON propagators would have you believe, become wrapped up with concerns over powerful people using their offices, education, or their wealth to help formulate policy positions. Indeed, even aspects of the ‘deep-state’ have been shown to exist in democratic countries, reflecting serious concerns about the relationship between security services and democratic norms. Although the essence of the conspiracy theory is never-ending, there is, alas, a nugget of truth about elites and their role in shaping politics outside the boundaries of the vote, even if the conspiratorial crowd take it too far.

Elitism, therefore, is not merely a question of democratic mandate. Even in democracies, some institutions and actors remain out of direct reach of the ballot. But is this really a bad thing? Running a modern state is a gargantuan task, filled with complexity that cannot spin on the dime of every election. Every state, even democratic ones, requires professionals who can implement policies and maintain the structure of the state successfully. If we accept professionals and a level of permanence in institutions outside of governance, then why not inside of it?

Stating this fact of politics, even democratic politics, makes one sound vaguely conspiratorial. As if a huddled cabal of a few rich and well-educated plutocrats decides the fate of millions. As Hugo Drochon addresses in his new book, Elites and Democracy, theorists such as Charles Wright Mills, who spoke of elite domination via collusion of rival elite groups, were labelled by other academics as mere conspiracy theorists. But, speaking of elite rule, is not a fantasy from the dubious works of David Icke. Neither does it lead to disempowering the electorate from guiding politics, even if ultimately the electorate cannot rule itself. The elites may make important and world-changing decisions, but in democracies, the representatives still have to answer to the electorate to justify themselves and make decisions in the future. That is, after all, the primary rule of the democratic game.

To justify this, we turn to dynamic democratic theory as posited by Hugo Drochon. Drochon does not deny that both elected and unelected elites possess significant political power. They are either members of the financial, political, or educational 1%. If we were to look at Presidential elections between 1992 and 2016, it would reveal that the candidates frequently contained familiar last names in American politics. Bush, Clinton, and Romney all form a set of political dynasties. Yet, democracies, if they so choose, can overturn the board and demand a new set of elites to address the mass failure of policy-making and politics. In these conditions, and if the demos become angry enough, even those elites not directly chosen by the demos come under threat of replacement.

Nowhere is that clearer than today in America. Trump’s Republican Party has overturned a crystallised set of political elites, leading to a significant rearrangement of America’s democracy. Such ferocity can produce dangerous forces, even to the notion of democracy itself. Elite rule, even if it is a fact of politics, contains the seeds of danger if a small vanguard of the elite is unwilling to abide by the norms that have preceded it in democracies. This is especially the case in democracies which bare significant ill-will towards an already established set of elites deemed to exist and survive outside of the mechanism of the vote.

Paradoxically, elitism contains the fruits of democratic discourse while seeking to limit the power of the mob alone. Elite competition can guide democracies towards new pathways, but only if the demos can tolerate such change. Elites, if they remain static and unable to adapt to the times, will inevitably be replaced by those who have new answers with varying degrees of anger and disappointment. This iron rule of politics follows the oft-quoted saying that ‘all political careers end in failure’.

Perhaps ironically, the truth is that what we say, think, and do about elites is the most democratic thing possible. It is littered with danger, change, and the demand for the ‘little man’ to be taken seriously. Elitism, and accusations of it, can be used and abused by charlatans, demagogues, and chancers to get their own way in politics. Likewise, elitism can also be defended by wannabe technocrats who believe that ultimately they know best. Ultimately, elites and how we think about them remain a democratic game.