Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics: Avoiding Calamity 3031523067, 9783031523069

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Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics Avoiding Calamity joh n h igl e y

Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics

John Higley

Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics Avoiding Calamity

John Higley Government and Sociology University of Texas Austin, TX, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-52306-9 ISBN 978-3-031-52307-6 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

In memory of G. Lowell Field (1911–1997), the scholar and friend from whom I learned so much, and my dear colleague for fifty years Mike Burton (1940–2023).

Preface

Despite signs of basic disorder, social fragmentation, and political deadlock in Western societies—most conspicuously in the United States— discussion of these and other ominous signs of calamity continues to accept assumptions of the Western liberal and radical tradition. This can be encapsulated as supposing that the generous course of action on the part of persons and groups is (in all normal circumstances) the one with the best probable outcome for all and that in some fashion (given high material productivity) desirable social situations for persons and groups can be multiplied continuously and indefinitely. In a broad perspective, this is a single tradition that has encompassed all Western social and political thought not obviously reactionary since the eighteenth century— from laissez-faire liberalism through the various forms of socialism to modern liberalism, neoliberalism, and even anarchism. Doctrines have differed mainly over courses of action and policy likely to lead more rapidly to a humane society. The Western idea of progress in its more extreme (and influential) form is a kind of hubris—a belief that Western societies can do anything that needs to be done. They cannot. Innate post-industrial difficulties, climate change, disease pandemics, a weakening of international order, and dire plights of many non-Western populations require that Western elites and other influential persons now make careful, painful, and responsible choices between unsavory alternatives. I fear for the persistence of

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political institutions and practices that have long distinguished AngloAmerican, Scandinavian, and Western societies such as France and Italy. That there is a progressive road along which Western societies can march unimpeded must be doubted. Because grounds for questioning the benign possibilities visualized by the Western liberal and radical tradition grow, it behooves us to consider whether it remains credible. My reflections focus on threats to the continued viability of Western institutions and processes for which it is not easy to conceive effective remedies consistent with the Western tradition. I discuss demographic, economic, social, political, and foreign policies as well as overly simplistic democratic assumptions and policies that need rethinking if calamity is to be avoided. I hope I will be proved wrong about the potential for calamity and the absence of ways to avoid it consistent with Western values. But refusing to consider this is intellectually indefensible. Austin, USA Summer 2023

John Higley

Contents

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1

Avoiding Calamity

2

Western Elites and Populists

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3

Representative Government’s Prospects

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Democracy as Rationalization and Panacea

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Anticipations of Parousia in Western Societies

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Intellectual Elites and Realities of Work

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Plutocracy and Demagogy in a Weak State

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8

The Democracy Ideal Reconsidered

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Epilogue

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References

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Index

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CHAPTER 1

Avoiding Calamity

In most Western societies bureaucratic and service workers now comprise between 70 and 80% of the workforce. This configuration is in important respects the terminus of socioeconomic development. It completes the conversion of workforces that consisted overwhelmingly of agricultural and artisan workers at development’s outset into workforces suffused with bureaucratic and service personnel. This does not mean that further advances in material and other living standards are unlikely, only that a further stage of socioeconomic development, involving new types of work and new workforce categories, probably does not lie beyond the current configuration. If that does constitute an end point in socioeconomic development, societies displaying it warrant being labeled “fully developed” (for economy of expression I will discard the adverb). The overriding question is whether developed Western societies can remain viable without the sense of progress and spread of hope that socioeconomic development engendered during modern history. There is a dawning suspicion that social and political programs traditionally pursued by Western liberals and radicals of all types, namely, steadily extending material well-being as well as, in some senses, political liberty and equality to ever larger proportions of their populations, may no longer be credible. The major precipitant of this suspicion is climate change. It may already be too late to save the planet from eventually becoming uninhabitable. In 2022 the UN Intergovernmental Panel on © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_1

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Climate Change warned that global warming beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius may be catastrophically unstoppable as soon as 2050. Data compiled by Berkeley Earth showed that in 2019 a tenth of the planet’s land surface had already warmed by 2 degrees and a fifth by 1.5 degrees since the midor late 1800s (Mooney and Muyskens 2019). In her book Nomad Century, Gaia Vince estimates that an increase of 3- or 4-degrees C. would force at least a billion people living near the equator to relocate or starve to death (2022, 16–19). A “mega drought” in the Colorado River Basin in the United States during 2022, another in northern Mexico, and similar droughts in Argentina, the Horn of Africa, and East Africa, along with disasters such as the “100-year” floods that engulfed Pakistan and Nigeria during 2022 plus devastating wildfires, such as Australia experienced in 2021 and Canada in 2023, threaten agriculture, forests, wildlife, and the supply of water and hydroelectric power for many millions of people. Opening the COP27 climate change summit held in Egypt in November 2022, UN Secretary General António Guterres warned that the world is on “a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” Others claim that the globe is on track to warm by a catastrophic 3 degrees C. or higher before this century ends (Wallace-Wells 2022). A further Intergovernmental Panel report, issued in March 2023, synthesized thousands of climate change studies and concluded that Earth will exceed an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees C. early in the 2030s unless nations immediately cut carbon emissions in half, which is quite unlikely. Climate change and its dire effects suggest that continued material progress in its familiar sense may soon be out of the question. If one presumes, moreover, that prosperous and politically influential inhabitants of developed countries are only normally selfish, it will clearly be impossible for less fortunate people in them as well as most people in developing countries to achieve the material living standards that prosperous and influential (but selfish) Westerners take for granted. That they will countenance giving non-Western countries trillions of dollars, euros, and pounds sterling to adapt to and mitigate climate change and compensate for the loss and damage already caused, primarily by Western societies’ pollution of the atmosphere, is almost certainly a fantasy. A second major precipitant of doubts about the credibility of traditional Western social and political programs is the probability of disease pandemics like the Covid-19 virus, which by the end of 2022 resulted

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in 1.1 million American deaths and six million hospitalizations, two hundred thousand British deaths and hospitalizations that greatly strained the capacity of the National Health Service, and, measured by excess deaths, an estimated 15 million deaths worldwide, not to mention gross economic disruptions. Although a variety of new vaccines eventually lowered the Covid-19 death and hospitalization counts, the virus continues to mutate. It is possible that the Covid-19 pandemic has been analogous to the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918–21, that is, an anomalous once-in-a-century phenomenon. Conversely, Andy Slavitt, a former senior White House adviser to the Biden administration for its Covid-19 response, has written that “As our climate changes, and as we increasingly encroach on the habitats of other species…more viruses that we’ve never seen before will emerge” (2021, 240). Long discussed obliquely in factual terms, a third precipitant of doubts about the credibility of familiar social and political programs points in the same direction. It also indicates that liberty and equality as programmatic goals have about run their course. This is the partial crippling of administrative institutions and processes in Western societies. As more and more people become free of occupational and social restraints common in history—low incomes, ignorance, little or no leisure, fatigue and poor health, resignation to one’s fate—public and private administrators and organizations face ever greater difficulties making decisions that are widely respected and accepted even after employing burdensome techniques of consultation with self-interested employees and their organizations. Decision-making becomes mired in endless bargaining processes and the need to placate diverse ethno-racial and gender identities. This challenges the body of technical opinion among management experts, with which psychologists and sociologists tend to concur, that “democratic” organization fully representative of diverse interests and identities is not merely more pleasant for participants but also more efficient. Widely held when material productivity and services briefly ran ahead of distributive demands, this body of opinion is mistaken. This does not deny that slimmed-down, hierarchically structured banks, hedge funds and other financial organizations, manufacturing and service corporations, fossil fuel producers, airlines, media, and many other economic entities continue to function effectively and profitably. With the use of robots and, increasingly, Artificial Intelligence, they do. Silicon Valley enterprises in the United States show it. But among consequences

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are a constant shedding of surplus personnel and the shrinkage of workforces, processes that will accelerate when reliance on robots and Artificial Intelligence is still more widespread. If these are innate difficulties in developed Western societies—the blockage of further liberalization and equalization in any programmatic sense by climate change; vulnerability to disease pandemics; and a partial crippling of bureaucracy—what can be recommended? Staunchly reaffirming long-accepted liberal and radical imperatives is likely to be futile and only bring calamity closer. A reversal of values, if it were possible in terms of the personal psychology of those raised in the Western tradition, must also be rejected. There is nothing to be gained by trying to make people less free and more unequal, although if the spread of basic disorder is not stemmed this grim course of action will become the only one open. Ideals of substantial personal liberty and equality must be retained and enforced where practicably possible. Yet they no longer offer a way forward because they provide no solutions to post-industrial difficulties and growing threats such as climate change. The ideals will have to be abandoned as goals guiding policy agendas and retained only as standards of caution and restraint.

Reform Versus Order Balancing needed reforms against necessary order is an old aspect of human experience. In wars, famines, and other emergencies political leaders could always appeal to communal or national goals with the assurance that most persons would find them more compelling than distributive claims lodged by self-interested individuals and groups. Those who doubted the reality of emergencies or felt less integrated into society saw appeals to common purpose as disguises for the selfish interests of those who fared best in the established distribution of perquisites. Such doubters were half right, but only half, because in the face of genuine emergencies there usually are few or no alternative ways of coping with them, and doubters themselves would act the same way if they were in positions of influence and privilege. Any appeal for order or unity in a society is always in essence an appeal on terms preferred by those in positions to make it. One novelty of developed Western societies is that balancing reform versus order is unfamiliar to large numbers of otherwise well-informed persons. During the past two centuries many persons and groups seriously

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preferred civil conflict, even civil war, over the social solidarity urged by those who happened to be well situated. Reform came to be preferred over order by virtue of the mistaken conviction that modern industry was producing enough to be parceled out comfortably to all. This underlaid the plausibility of Marxism and all other prescriptions for major social reform. The various productivity “miracles” that transpired after World War II preserved in even more simplistic form the belief that Western societies need not worry about the consequences of reform for order. However, believing that when domestic conditions seem unjust societies can afford substantial reforms and the disruptions that inevitably follow was always close to wishful thinking. In varying degree many held this belief during the period of Western military dominance over the non-Western world. It was perhaps momentarily if tenuously true, and it was in any case too tempting to be rejected based on historically remote experiences. With the emergence of threats to planetary survival by climate change, the world is falling back to where it always was apart from illusions fostered by Western military dominance. With a world population now at 8 billion and forecast by the United Nations to be 10 billion in 2058, there is not enough arable land, energy, or other resources to provide everyone what he or she is likely to consider sufficient. Worse, any large economic redistribution of what is now available in Western societies would drastically reduce the well-being of large fractions of their populations, and any large redistribution on a truly worldwide scale would produce drastic deprivations in Western populations. A combination of two circumstances poses an immediate problem that, if ignored, augers a gradual unraveling of civilized life. The first is the one just referred to, namely, that major economic redistributions to improve the lot of disadvantaged persons or improve the international allocation of well-being on grounds of compassion or justice will be judged unacceptably expensive by persons living and working with relative security and affluence in Western societies. The second is that technology and organization have reached such levels of productivity that, given climate change catastrophes now clearly visible, greed for material goods and services cannot increase or perhaps even sustain present levels of employment and prosperity. Both circumstances undermine prevailing assumptions about work. In the absence of more compelling social goals than are currently recognized, there is no need for more than relatively small portions of Western

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populations to perform tasks that are recognized as useful. Whether lured by altruism or driven by deprivation, many persons cannot be expected to seek work that does not seem to them useful or needed. This has become more evident in the wake of the Covid-19 experience of working remotely and somewhat casually at home, or not working at all. If largely idle persons would be quiet and make small demands, and if the necessary number of workers would work diligently despite idleness surrounding them, this would present no problem. But no experienced person has grounds for believing that such a form of work organization would be viable.

Policies to Avoid Calamity The foregoing considerations mean that interest-group politics in Western societies are bankrupt. No political force aiming to represent special interests and offer advantages greater than another force offers can prevent a gradual unraveling of Western societies. The only conceivable solution will come from policies focused on societal goals of climate, public health, and administrative effectiveness while expunging policies aimed at enhancing the well-being of specific groups. As in wartime, a general adherence to the goal of avoiding calamity will have some equalizing effects. But such effects should not be sought for their own sake. If public attention is focused on calamity avoidance, overt efforts to lessen inequalities will be distracting and inefficient. Avoidance policies will have to redefine work. Work will need to be seen as involving continuing responsibilities for alertness, intelligence, and self-discipline, as distinguished from routinized tasks such as plowing fields, stitching clothes, or driving commercial vehicles. Western populations will have to be organized and motivated to identify and combat local realities that hasten calamity. By inducing people to undertake useful, prudent, and responsible work rather than simple routinized tasks the multiplication of persons for whose labor there is no clear or pressing need can be slowed. Calamity avoidance policies must be worked out and proposed by political elites. These elites should be based in relatively centrist parties or coalitions. Doctrinaire left-wing elites and parties are likely to oppose programs that neglect shortcomings in social justice. Doctrinaire rightwing elites and parties are likely to oppose programs that do not favor plutocratic interests. Success in shifting policies to the goal of avoiding

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calamity will depend on creating centrist elite and party majorities or coalitions able to govern without the support of dogmatic egalitarians or laissez-faire conservatives. How and whether centrist elites and parties will be numerous and strong enough to build and execute the necessary policies remains to be seen. It is only possible here to consider some general policy lines. They must entail, first, sound grasps of climate dangers and interrelationships between populations and the land, resources, and activities on which Western societies depend for their existence. This will involve recognizing indicators that the gross material productivity of Western societies since World War II has helped bring the planet closer to habitability limits. In history this was not a problem except among isolated peoples of simple technology, such as Pueblo dwellers in the American Southwest. But in complex Western societies a body of firm knowledge that substitutes for suspicions and glimpses of impending calamity is essential. It will not by itself ensure avoidance, but knowledge rather than conjecture is necessary for adopting prudent and rational policies. Government agencies with trained and able staff capable of dealing with climate as well as public health issues requiring regulation must be allowed to grow in expertise and public respect so that climate and public health considerations will be treated as routinely as considerations relating to familiar areas of concern like employment, economic growth, ease of communications and travel are now treated. Yet calamity avoidance policies cannot depend solely on governmental bureaucracies; parallel bodies of expertise will have to be implanted in universities, corporations, trade unions, media, and non-governmental organizations. To be efficient, governmental bureaucracies and these other bodies should not be overly concerned with narrowly aesthetic issues. For example, even with firm knowledge of climate change dangers, remaining wildernesses may sometimes have to be despoiled to extract essential resources like lithium for batteries and cobalt for metal alloys or extirpate harmful plant and animal species, such as Burmese pythons rampaging through swamps in Florida. Demographic Policies Given modern standards of living, nearly all countries are overpopulated. This is difficult to believe because it was not true a few decades ago. There were of course warnings of possible starvation in parts of the world,

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the accuracy of which was attested by famines in a growing number of countries and world regions. Yet there was no suspicion that, given falling birthrates, most Western countries still had a population problem, and an unwillingness to consider that they do remains dominant. A population in a geographic area is sparse, dense, or excessive depending on the area’s resources, such as water, and the degree to which a population’s way of life imperils its life-support system through material extractions and effluvia. Historically, extractions of coal, iron ore, petroleum, and many other raw materials along with disposals of wastes increased so gradually that possible overpopulation was unnoticed. Fluctuating conditions of overpopulation in fertile areas of the non-Western world were cured brutally by temporary famines and epidemics. Populations in most Western societies have now become excessive by virtue of the enormous ways in which methods of industry, agriculture, transportation, and waste accumulation, accompanied by cyclones, floods, droughts, wildfires, and other disasters stemming from global warming threaten their life-support systems. In addition, technological advances result in steady increases in the number of persons for whose labor there is no longer a clear or pressing need. Most Western societies currently employ only about 60% of working-age adults, a proportion that is more likely to decrease than increase in decades ahead. In theory, overpopulation could be dealt with by going back to the technology of a hundred years ago or permitting families to have no more than one child. But as deliberately enforced public policy in Western countries either remedy would be so patently arbitrary and artificial as to be out of the question. Elites and governments will have to recognize that their countries are overpopulated—some more than others, of course—and address this by further reducing birthrates and, one must add, inhibiting mass immigrations as best they can. Birth rates in most Western countries have fallen below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per woman—the United States rate in 2021, partly manifesting effects of the Covid-19 pandemic, was 1.64. Yet immigrants and refugees from all over the world, who tend to have markedly higher birth rates, stream into Western countries and inflate their populations. As a consequence of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, by the end of May 2023 some 4 million Ukrainian refugees had temporary protected status in European Union countries. A UN Population Prospects report in 2022 forecast that by the middle of this century, the United States population will be roughly 410

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million instead of the current 332 million. Despite the aging of nativeborn populations, immigrants and refugees will keep the total European Union and European Free Trade Area population at approximately 441 million in 2050. Historically, cultural mores tended to channel sexual relations into families where it was most likely to eventuate in the birth and rearing of offspring. This reflected the concern that insufficient population numbers would render a society liable to lose its land or liberty to a more populous neighboring society. Recent changes in cultural mores point in the opposite direction: open tolerance of extra-marital sexual relations, homosexuality, pornography, access of women to preferred jobs, and legalization of abortion. On the other hand, demands for public daycare centers and other measures that make it less burdensome for women to have children, although appealing on humanitarian grounds, aggravate the problem of overpopulation. The sexual revolution in developed societies may contribute slightly to the reduction of birth rates, but a combination of reliable birth-control methods and open tolerance of sexual activity not directed toward procreation is unlikely to contribute seriously to alleviating overpopulation. A calamity avoidance policy will therefore have to involve additional incentives for population reduction. Publicizing the tension between large numbers of people on one hand and climate and resource limits on the other may have some effect in well-informed circles, but it is likely to be seen as leaving reproduction to the improvident, the unconcerned, and the uninformed. Policies that encourage procreation, such as “family policy” and reductions of tax liability according to the number of dependent children will have to be reconsidered and, compatible with humane considerations, abolished. It will be equally inconsistent with calamity avoidance to encourage marriage, as is done by tax laws in the United States, Hungary, Poland, and other Western countries. If such comparatively gentle persuasions are not effective, and before the historically normal callousness toward mass starvation of the less fortunate resumes, governments seriously concerned with excess population will have to consider resorting to mandatory caps on family size. Immigration to developed countries by millions of asylum seekers, refugees, and illegal migrants fleeing violence, political instability, joblessness, shortages of food and water and other dire effects of climate change and disease epidemics in developing countries must be kept limited if overpopulation in Western countries is to be dealt with. During 2022

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in the United States more than 2.4 million undocumented immigrants crossed its southwestern border, and more than 40,000 entered the United Kingdom. The UN refugee agency has estimated there are 100 million refugees and displaced persons worldwide, many of them intent on migrating to Western countries at any cost. Nationalist backlashes against large influxes of culturally and religiously alien immigrants fuel ugly harassments, confrontations, and anguished deportations. But large-scale immigration to Western countries will continue, heightening a sense of embattlement and demands to cordon them off, as Hungary has done with barbed wire, Australia has with the advantage of surrounding seas, and the United States has tried to do with a high border wall Although fully cordoning off Western countries is neither desirable nor feasible, how far to move in this direction and with what measures will be morally agonizing, deeply contentious political questions for elites and other influential persons. Economic Policies Threats to economic well-being increase in variety and intensity. Insidious inflation encourages organized demands for higher wages that, if granted, fuel further inflation. This is aggravated by increased prices charged by suppliers for resources, especially petroleum, natural gas, and rare earth ores. Environmentally necessary modifications of productive processes and services also involve increased prices, while substituting automation for human controls to make manufacturing and service processes more efficient creates unemployment. A reliance on nuclear generation of electricity is unavoidable but also expensive as regards constructing nuclear power plants and making nuclear waste disposal safe. Some technological innovations, such as large atmosphere-polluting airplanes, unrestricted air conditioning, and electrical space heating will have to be limited for climate reasons and because they serve no compelling needs. The success of women in obtaining preferred jobs turns an unknown but probably large number of men into dependents. This suggests that another aspect of calamity avoidance policy is finding ways in which acceptable dependency statuses beyond what currently exist can be constituted and financed. Pressures to allocate prized and permanent jobs to women and men presumed to most deserve them leads, along with health measures that extend the average length of life, to

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larger and larger numbers of persons in retirement status. In countries such as the United States and United Kingdom, this will require more generous pension systems, mainly under government responsibility. Means of financing them through social security arrangements will have to be found. Expanded social security payments and retirement pensions serve as important channels of economic redistribution and lessen the aggressiveness of various occupational categories and trade unions representing them. What effects expanding them will have on business firms is unclear. It is worth speculating that elite persons heading large business organizations will be motivated more by goals of organizational survival and assuring their continued influence on important policy developments than by rates of profit per se. With the effectiveness of historical economic controls on behavior markedly reduced, calamity avoidance will require direct social and political controls. In so far as entrepreneurs, corporations, and other persons and organizations must be restrained from making life worrisome or intolerable for others and meet a minimum of social responsibility with reasonable diligence, they must probably be compelled to do so. Penalties for forms of unacceptable conduct will be necessary to induce economic actors to conduct themselves rationally in ways not penalized. Penal Policies Penal policies will have to rest on franker and less euphemistic considerations than those fashionable in recent liberal and radical thought. The strong tendency to believe that regulating deviant behavior primarily involves altering causes rather than reasoning will have to be reappraised. Modern social thought tends to presume a total, if perhaps not fully knowable, determinacy in human behavior analogous to oldfashioned natural science, although little reliable explanation of social matters has been achieved under this presumption. The belief that deviant behavior is mainly “caused” rather than brought about through the reasoning processes of persons is a way of trying to be fair or just in contexts where justice, in the sense of strictly equal treatment of all, is impossible. In its contemporary form this belief underpins a widespread tendency to explain all, or nearly all, deviant and undesirable behavior as manifesting some mental “illness.” The concomitant belief is that penal procedures should be directed toward “therapy” and “reforming” persons

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convicted of crimes. They should be “cured” of anti-social tendencies and “reintegrated” into society. Abandoning or at least altering these beliefs will open the way to substantial modifications of penal practices, lightening penalties in some matters and increasing restraints on deviant conduct in others. In the face of rising violence in both urban and rural areas, readily available guns and explosives, and irrefutable evidence that prisons, far from being “reformatories” are in actuality “schools for crime,” professing to act on the theory that penal practices are “therapeutic” is senseless. Respectable people like to think there is something “wrong” with the criminally inclined. They resist thinking “There but for the grace of God go I.” It is easy to suppose that violence, deceit, or other forms of criminality are “caused” by the social circumstances in which criminals find themselves. Thus, empathetic reasoning holds, “We did it to him or her.” It is easy to suppose that the “wrong behavior” of criminals is analogous to a disease they “caught” through no great fault of their own, nor is it clearly the empathetic person’s fault. Accordingly, it is widely believed that a criminal’s further aggression can be prevented by incarcerating him or her or arranging for the supervision of a parole officer while seeking in some fashion to “cure” the criminal of anti-social proclivities. The mostly young people who commit crimes of violence or are reckless in ways likely to result in violence are disproportionately located in socially disorganized parts of Western cities and suburbs. Jail sentences clearly have no therapeutic effect on them. Their only effect is to hold the violent or reckless young person temporarily away from where his or her offenses were or will be committed, perhaps inducing the person to be more cautious when released from confinement or to spend enough of life in confinement or under close supervision until he or she has passed the age when rash and violent behavior is most likely to occur. From a penal policy perspective, criminal or dangerously reckless behavior is better seen as in smaller part manifesting impulsive reactions to situations that offer no great possibilities for rational actions, and in larger part as rational judgments that needs for ego satisfaction, a sense of effectiveness, or mere subsistence are best met by drug-dealing, robberies, homicides, rapes, etc. In other words, the criminal’s judgment is no less rational than the non-criminal’s and very likely the same as the non-criminal’s would be if he or she were in the same social circumstances as the criminal. Thus, criminal behavior takes a form that recent social thought has sought to avoid, namely, a real conflict of interest

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between the criminal and the non-criminal. The former wish to be persons dangerous to the latter for reasons that are valid for them. The latter wish to prevent the former from being a danger for reasons valid for them. This can be made somewhat less abstract by noting that in the cities and suburbs of Western countries there are many juveniles who fall into the habit of dangerous violence toward persons and property. For them serious therapy is usually required by law and their police records and court dispositions are kept secret. This suggests that there are large bodies of habitual juvenile criminals in metropolitan areas who are openly disruptive and threatening in schools and on streets about whom little or nothing is done to restrain or motivate them toward different conduct. Attempts are made to argue with them, find them work, and interest them in proper activities, but given the situations in which the juveniles find themselves it is not surprising that they cannot be talked into changing their habits. Mass school, supermarket, and drive-by shootings are deadly consequences. As regards juvenile delinquents and criminally inclined adults in economically poor population segments, a basic problem is the diffuse sense of guilt that affluence produces among better-off persons. Nothing immediate can be done to terminate the social disorganization, discouragement, and sense of impotence and failure in seriously disadvantaged portions of Western populations that lead some of the more vigorous and bold persons in them to opt for violent and rapacious conduct. A sense of guilt for permitting such conditions to exist discourages effective measures to restrain such conduct. Yet the increased insecurity that spreading, often random violence creates dries up reservoirs of empathy and concern in better-off population segments. The enormously increased purchase of guns by better-off persons in the United States and other Western countries in order to defend themselves manifests this drying up. The only way in which spreading violence and criminality can be curbed is a consistent policy of restraints directed against perpetrators and allowing both those who might copy them and those who fear them to know about the restraints. This does not mean that criminal justice penalties must be uniformly harsh and severe. In relatively humane, well-informed, and affluent Western societies compliance with restrictive measures may be encouraged with relative ease. Little discussion may be necessary to keep persons from following inclinations to act in criminal ways. Severity would, moreover, provoke principled, persistent, and often effective resistance by social workers, police officials, and attorneys

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involved in its application, not to mention resistance by those directly affected by it. Efforts to be more severe than strictly necessary would exhaust officials and ultimately prove counterproductive. Governance Policies I have already suggested that adopting and implementing calamity avoidance policies will depend on the strength of centrist political elites and parties. This assumes that there are substantial majorities in Western electorates willing to support these policies as against competing ones. The latter may be characterized as (1) efforts from the left and progressives to yield power to downtrodden and demoralized poor people, because existing society has proven itself morally bankrupt and a better society, of which the downtrodden are bearers, waits in the wings; (2) efforts from the right to protect upstanding people by, for instance, abolishing abortion, lowering income taxes, allowing the unlicensed carrying of guns, and compelling everyone to respect and practice social mores pertaining to such things as decency, work and its rightful rewards as well as national and religious symbols such as anthems sung and prayers recited at sporting and other congregate events. Opponents on the right can also be expected to portray calamity avoidance policies as unwarranted fiscal impositions on the hard-earned incomes of upstanding people for the benefit of parasitic people. To avoid calamity, policies will necessarily impose fiscal burdens on the well-off. Revenues for climate change protections, public health safeguards, and more effective government administration will have to be increased. Larger bodies of personnel responsible for law enforcement and monitoring criminals will be necessary. In many Western societies avoidance policies will involve significant public expenditures to improve hospitals, clinics, and other medical facilities while also subsidizing homeless people unable to pay for housing at commercial rates. In areas such as these, calamity avoidance policies will be somewhat redistributive. They will nevertheless differ from redistributive leftist policies in terms of aims and criteria. To avoid planetary suicide, the spread of deadly diseases, gross social disorganization, or possible collapses brought about by foreign incursions, calamity avoidance policies will have to create more viable societies out of existing social structures. This means improving conditions of life for many inhabitants without undertaking major economic redistributions on the dubious assumption that they

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improve society’s cohesion and functioning. Policies must embody the judgment that mere giving to the disadvantaged and excluded, however justifiable on purely charitable grounds, does not of itself integrate them into society. More likely, it leads the disadvantaged and excluded to demand further subventions as well as reparations for past injustices from authorities they perceive to be intimidated. Yet calamity avoidance policies must strive to integrate the discouraged and demoralized, although this will involve such persons changing themselves to meet requirements that any viable society imposes on its members. It is reckless and visionary to offer to turn society over to those who have been seriously disadvantaged or excluded. In this clear respect governance policies to avoid calamity can be distinguished from more sentimental policies of the left and more resentful policies of the right. They must entail a clear refusal to make any pledge about furthering the utopian aims of a general equalization or a thoroughly de-regulated economy. If successful, governance policies will incidentally correct a good many inequities; if they fail and calamity occurs, the unraveling of Western societies will lead eventually to drastically reduced well-being for most persons through chaotic declines in productivity and consequent demographic disaster. Foreign Policies I have sketched the main lines or principles of policies aimed at meeting and overcoming the social and political disorganization that eventually follows the attainment of full socioeconomic development aggravated by ominous climate and other trends. Yet, there is a rest of the world. To avoid calamity what foreign policies should Western countries pursue as regards the many non-Western countries comprising it? Relations between Western and non-Western countries (tendentiously labeled the Global North and the Global South) will be difficult at best. Bitter resentments in countries making up the “South” over climate changes for which they bear comparatively little responsibility, and reluctance by those in the “North” to finance adaptation to and mitigation of climate change as well as compensate for losses and damages stemming from it will poison relations. Until their own internal disorganization is effectively dealt with, there is little that Western countries can do constructively to assist non-Western countries with their problems or improve relations with them significantly. One can at most hope that

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the superior technology and productivity of Western countries—a superiority centered heavily on advanced armaments—remains sufficiently impressive to discourage serious encroachments on their vital interests by non-Western countries. In contrast to the situation during the decades that followed World War II, Western countries are no longer models for the rest of the world in other than an historical sense. They cannot be models again until curtailing their internal social disorganization restores respect for their competence. Until then, if it happens, Western countries should conduct only mutually useful economic exchanges of goods, services, and information with the rest of the world. They should exchange goods and services of their own for products of non-Western countries that they need. Because Western countries are universally regarded as rich but culpable for the bulk of climate change, it will be politically inexpedient to drive hard bargains in these exchanges. Only obvious strategic concerns can justify extensive political relations with, and large subventions of, some non-Western countries. Presumably, Western countries must maintain military footholds in such areas as the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, the South Pacific, and possibly the Sahel. But those footholds should be cautionary. Even if Western countries recover self-confidence by making their internal problems less precarious, military seizures of essential raw materials will have little to recommend themselves. The hope must be that if calamity avoidance policies sustain Western countries, honorable and non-predatory relations with other countries of the world may in time be established. The main thing will be that Western societies function effectively internally and thereby command global respect. Only this will enable them to again be examples and serious aides to countries outside the West.

Conclusions Relatively strong national states in most Western societies during the last century or so have allowed their citizens to forget that lasting social disorder is always a possibility. It was the normal condition in Western Europe from roughly 400 to 900 A.D. and in most areas to perhaps 1550. It is conceivable that vehement confrontational and polarized politics in various Western societies—notably the United States—will eventuate in long-term social disorder such as occurred during the Middle Ages and before. This would not only destroy high material productivity and

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the organizations that make it possible, but policies regarded as humane would no longer be pursued. For these reasons, there are limits beyond which internal social and political discontents cannot be permitted to extend. In the face of disruptive actions some curtailment of civil and political liberties may be the price of retaining any liberties at all. It is important to stress that repression of disruptive actions conducted in the rubric of “freedom”—assaulting government buildings; blocking roads and bridges; occupying parts of cities; threatening harm to political and other elite persons and their families; rioting to protest police actions; disseminating false and deliberately malicious information via mass and social media; and other quasi-insurrectionary actions—does not curtail important representations of interests or effective sociopolitical argumentation. Unless one believes naively that majorities will be forced to defer to disrupters even though the distribution of real power remains unchanged, the repression of quasi-insurrectionary disorders is a requirement for politics to be practiced in productive ways. Except as strategic considerations about world areas bordering Western countries dictate, their military forces should be withdrawn from less developed countries. Political warfare in the latter will have to be left to work itself out or to become endemic. As demonstrated by the United States’ imbroglios in Afghanistan and Iraq, Western countries have no option to intervene effectively in less developed ones. From a strictly selfish standpoint, local outcomes in almost all less developed countries make no difference to the well-being of Western countries. It is no business of theirs whether a regime in a less developed country is a right-wing dictatorship or a revolutionary tyranny. Even the plight of a moderate regime in a nearby developing country, such as Mexico, Turkey, or Ukraine, should be treated with prudent reserve. In all cases military interventions are likely to be futile, and, given the intensity of nationalist sentiments in less developed countries, they risk making matters worse. Relations between Western countries themselves are becoming more intimate as the internet, transnational television networks, and frequent travels foster detailed familiarity with each other’s cultural norms, government institutions, and political party competitions. Close personal relations across national boundaries, changed citizenships, and de facto amalgamations of countries such as Canada and the United States, the Nordic countries, Germany and Austria, Australia, and New Zealand proceed apace. Conditions of affluence and leisure as well as common social ills bring them closer together. They have a more uniform culture

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and civilizational identity than was ever available for uniting formally separate nations in the past. Moreover, Western countries will for a long time have a serious common problem of defense at all peripheries abutting less developed countries, including every major seaport and airport. While eschewing military interventions, Western countries will have to remain obviously and overwhelmingly strong at their borders. The Mediterranean, Caribbean, and Southwestern Pacific are sensitive border areas that can easily be plagued by hostile incidents. For military strength in the foreseeable future Western countries have no alternative to aligning themselves under United States leadership. For its part, the United States would eventually collapse from a sense of encirclement and doom were it to repudiate, as Donald Trump tried to do, the intimacy and de facto amalgamation of intra-Western relations. Serious environmental pollution arose three or four decades ago in the most prosperous Western countries—in the United States foremost— when population sizes and units of material discharged per capita as carbon emissions and wastes reached and rapidly began to exceed sustainable limits. Pollution now has a central place in the politics of all countries. This is because pollution and climate change constitute menaces that are unavoidable except through global measures to check both. Like the threat of military invasion, this common menace may tend to unify otherwise discordant countries. This is not to say that technical solutions exist to avoid environmental disaster on a global scale. They do not, but it is essential they be sought. Huge amounts of discharged wastes, carbon emissions, and other pollutants are good indicators of what is usually called “affluence.” Because they are related to the fundamental nature of contemporary Western societies, they will not yield to mere offsetting measures. They have a “tragedy of the commons” character: unrestricted access to affordable petrol, water, electricity, and foodstuffs ultimately despoils their availability for everyone. An immediate solution through either a drastic reduction of populations or standards of living is impossible. The first would clash directly with deeply held values; the second would distress so many still willing to do useful work and conform to social norms as to increase demoralization and criminality to uncontrollable proportions. There is no alternative to living with environmental poisoning and climate change while attempting to reduce population sizes and material aspects of high living standards gradually. Slowing climate change,

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reducing carbon emissions, and limiting waste disposals must be assigned the lasting significance that sea dikes and drainage systems had historically in Dutch society: all other policies must be built around them. The innate post-industrial difficulties of Western societies and threats to them canvassed in this essay will make maintenance of public order awkward. Beyond an absolute necessity to suppress quasi-insurrectionary disruptions of economic production and distribution, brutality must be avoided as far as possible in the application of calamity avoidance policies. The ethos of Western elites and circles around them is basically indulgent. Any but sporadic resorts to brutality, as in the suppression of riots, will be blocked by these elites and circles. They will prevent Western societies from adopting penal, occupational, educational, and other policies directly aimed at breaking the spirit of those they affect. Openly illiberal policies cannot be carried out by liberal “establishments” although, if lasting disorder takes root, dominant persons and groups will choose such means of rule as they like without being accountable to either bureaucratic power centers or public opinion. By no means pioneers in this regard, the ruthless dominance of Russia by Vladimir Putin, China by Xi Jinping, and Iran by Ali Khamenei exemplify what could happen. What must be done is to hold down tensions so that elites and other influential people can cope with the problems of social adjustment that calamity avoidance will entail. Main adjustments will include avoiding futile involvements in the internal problems of less developed countries; preserving a high enough level of civic order so that public and private organizations and persons who lead them can continue to function effectively; regularizing support of the many for whose labor there is no longer a clear or pressing need; creating useful work; discouraging procreation in order to reduce population sizes; containing inflation so that efforts of political and economic leaders are not wholly consumed in dealing with claims for increased compensations to offset rising prices. If elites pursue policies along these lines diligently, where will Western societies stand? Will measures such as those suggested here suffice to avoid a lapse into disorder bordering on barbarism? The future is an enigma, but fixing attention on calamity avoidance instead of imagining unapproachable utopias and satisfying a perverse moral sense by demanding they be pursued anyway will be crucial. Progress can be made if Western elites take satisfaction in what they are doing rather than cowering before the many who assail them and who seek to disrupt society for want of anything else with which to preoccupy themselves.

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References Mooney, Chris, and John Muyskens. 2019. “Dangerous Hot Zones are Spreading around the World.” Washington Post, September 11. Slavitt, Andy. 2021. Preventable. The Inside Story of How Leadership Failures, Politics, and Selfishness Doomed the U.S. Coronavirus Response. New York: St. Martin’s. Vince, Gaia. 2022. Nomad Century. How Climate Migration Will Reshape Our World. New York: Flatiron Books. Wallace-Wells, David. 2022. “The New World. Envisioning a Future After Climate Change.” New York Times Magazine, October 20, 2022, 24–61.

CHAPTER 2

Western Elites and Populists

Like the emergence of Marxist theory amid revolutionary upheavals in the nineteenth century, elite theory emerged at the start of the twentieth century in the face of looming crises that threatened European political orders. Like Marxist theory, elite theory contained prescriptions for a good society, one in which effective elites would produce individual dignity, mass welfare, and political stability. But unlike Marxist theory, elite theory eschewed economic determinism and any vision of a happy end point in human affairs. Rooted in comparative historical analysis, it depicted hierarchical organization and accompanying concentrations of power as inescapable, political change as heavily dependent on choices made by self-interested elites, and ideals always tempered by these realities. In modern Western societies, the power of elites is constrained by legal-constitutional rules and practices, yet elites usually have enough autonomy to interpret laws, modify rules, and alter responsibilities in ways that protect their interests. They generate the support of publics by employing the formidable persuasive powers of mass and social media, and by giving subventions to discontented groups. Most of the time elites rely on persuasion and subventions, but coercion is always a possibility if vital elite interests are threatened. Marxists and theorists of democracy attacked elite theory and offered more alluring prospects. Insisting that broad propertied classes, not tiny © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_2

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elites, rule modern societies, Marxists theorized that class conflict and struggle would lead inevitably to revolutionary destructions of those classes and open the way to egalitarian and stateless societies. Democracy enthusiasts decried the manipulative practices of elites and theorized a direct or mirror-like indirect rule by the demos. The failure of egalitarian and stateless societies or self-governing democracies to emerge revealed the utopian thrust of those theories while the persistence of hierarchical social organization and power concentrations accorded with elite theory. Nevertheless, utopian theories and debates about them shunted elite theory to the twentieth century’s intellectual sidelines. As Giorgio Volpe shows in a brilliant study of Italian elite theory (2021), texts by Mosca, Pareto, and Michels were misinterpreted; elite theory was accused of an authoritarian bent; and it was construed as venerating elites. Yet as Pareto demonstrated in withering attacks on elites in Italy’s “demagogic plutocracy” (1921), and as Weber showed with his biting critique of inept leadership groups in Wilhelmine Germany (1978, 1424–31), this is not the case. Elite theory holds that elites may be effective or ineffective, persuasive or coercive, delivering what citizens hope or betraying their hopes. Neither a defense nor a veneration of elites; elite theory simply recognizes their political centrality and tries to explain how and why they succeed or fail.

Elite Theory Elite theory tends to be shunned in academic and popular thought. This is mostly because many find it distasteful. Although research on empirical aspects of elites is voluminous (see, inter alia, Putnam 1976; Best and Higley 2018), the bulk of it is tied to democratic theory and the extent to which elites depart from its precepts. Unlike democratic theory, elite theory relates to what special groups of people do or do not do in the political world. It does not rest on the premise underlying monarchies and aristocracies that certain people ought to rule and ought to have control of what other people do. Elite theory deals, instead, with a practical matter, which is the degree to which what happens politically is determined to a considerable extent by individuals who hold top positions in powerful organizations and movements enabling them to affect political outcomes decisively. These persons may not be better than anyone else, but elite theory presumes it is their behavior, rather than the behavior of people in general, that in many respects shapes what happens in politics.

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Are elites an inevitable aspect of human organization? Strictly speaking, they are not. Small communities can operate in egalitarian ways. Although historical evidence shows they have rarely done so, under special circumstances and with luck when they form, small communities can function without elites. But in countries of a size normal in the modern world—a population of some hundreds of thousands or more—elites are inescapable and, one might add, essential. They are not only a consequence of population size; elites also stem from urbanization and at least incipient industrialization and bureaucratization. With these qualifications, one can say that modern societies of substantial size always have a small number of people in them much more able than anyone else to decide political matters. This assertion also requires qualification. Elite theory does not assume that persons who comprise elites—however we might define and identify them—suppress everyone else and make things happen according to their own desires and fancies. Elites depend upon support by various segments of populations and are not capable of determining the attitude patterns on the basis of which population segments give or withhold support. Elites do not have the power to do anything they please—to restore, for example, a medieval religious belief or restrict the incomes of people to subsistence levels. Neither, on the other hand, are they at liberty to make everyone truly equal, because attempting to do so would antagonize persons and groups better positioned to block equality than those pushing for it. Elites who imagine some “perfect” society and try to bring it about do not remain elites for very long; they lose support and others take over. Mostly, elite members try to sustain their individual power and influence as long as they can. In modern conditions, they are usually well along in life before attaining top positions in hierarchically structured organizations and movements. Typically, they do not attain such positions before fifty or so years of age and are unlikely to hold them for more than a decade or two. But so long as they manage to hang on to their positions, what happens politically depends, especially in details, on their initiatives. In societies where elites deliberately mitigate power struggles, the typical elite person usually comes out well after vacating his or her position. This is not the case where elites fight viciously for power and losers are victimized for defeats. Such elites are too precariously situated to observe rules that keep power struggles limited. A person in them cannot simply decide, “Well, I’ve had enough of this and I’m going to retire now” and expect

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to be called upon from time to time to influence what happens or at least be consulted about it. But in countries where elite battles are not winner-take-all, this is what the typical elite person can safely anticipate.

Western Elites Elites who deliberately mitigate power struggles can be thought of as mutually trusting. In Western democratic settings, mutual elite trust underlies a wide range of clashing political views and intense competitions for political office. But without adhering to some single policy or viewpoint, the bulk of elite persons agree about basic political institutions and game rules. Depending on local conventions about what is right and not right to say and do, they can be polite to each other or exceedingly impolite in ways that sound threatening. For example, elite discourse in Australia is a good deal more pugnacious than American or British elites have customarily engaged in, though the actual conduct of Australian elites belies their verbal pugnacity (Higley et al. 1976). The question is whether elites carry out threats they sometimes make; where there is underlying trust they normally do not. Political restraint is the practical manifestation of elite trust. Western elites pursue bargains and compromises, emphasize technical and procedural feasibilities instead of ultimate rights and wrongs, agree to disagree when decisions cannot or should not be reached, regularly endorse their society’s core values, and affirm fidelity to existing institutions rather than personalities. As Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt put it, elites adhere to norms of mutual tolerance and forbearance, accept one another as legitimate rivals, and exert institutional prerogatives with moderation (2018, 8). Over time, political restraint enables competing persons and factions to achieve diverging aims, and this inclines them to view the totality of outcomes as positive-sum and uphold institutions that process their bargains and compromises. Political restraint gives elites reasonable assurance that even after missteps, scandals, or defeats they will retain their lives, reputations, and a decent social status. To borrow Robert Dahl phrases in Polyarchy, a “well-developed system of mutual security” and a “system of mutual guarantees” are bedrock features of elites that keep institutions stable (1971, 36–38). Elite trust has undergirded the stable political institutions that people in Anglo-American and several European countries have long been familiar with, and it is an absolute requirement for stable democracy. One

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can look through the last three or four hundred years of world history and notice that in any country where there was a reasonable and sustained degree of representative government based on competing parties, and in which persons elected to political office routinely served out their terms peacefully, it is possible to find a circumstance in the country’s history that created considerable elite trust. Thereafter, and except when subnational regional conflicts proved irresolvable—as before 1860 in the United States—elites managed to contain major conflicts, and they did so over long periods of time. Persons and groups with grievances were either bought off or put in positions from which further contestation was useless. By performing one or the other operations or combinations of them on the major issues that arose, elite trust was perpetuated.

Origins of Elite Trust The creation of elite trust depends upon special and unlikely political circumstances. In Western history, local elites who were cautiously operating representative political institutions under home-rule arrangements in diverse colonies came to trust each other in the risky, sometimes violent, process of casting off the last vestiges of colonial rule. This was the origin of elite trust and stable political institutions in the United States, the British dominions of Australia, Canada, and New Zealand as well as the United Dutch Provinces when elites freed themselves from Spanish rule late in the sixteenth century. In a few already independent countries, circumstances that induced warring elite camps to make peace deliberately and substitute stable institutions for unstable ones unfolded in England’s Glorious Revolution of 1688–89, Sweden’s constitutional settlement in 1809, and after Switzerland’s brief civil war in 1847–48. During the half century following World War II, circumstances propitious for basic “elite settlements” like those that occurred in occupied Austria when socialist and anti-socialist elite camps agreed in 1946–47 to establish and adhere to a proporz system for policymaking in order to prevent deadly interwar conflicts from recurring; in post-Franco Spain when franquist and anti-franquist elite camps acceded to accommodations engineered by Adolpho Suarez during 1977– 78; somewhat more debatably in Poland and Hungary when leaders of state socialist and anti-socialist camps negotiated extensive roundtable agreements in 1989; and in Slovenia when a hundred state socialist

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and anti-socialist leaders negotiated a similar agreement upon becoming independent of Yugoslavia in 1990–91. Beyond the two foregoing origins of elite trust, a less explicit origin unfolded in the political circumstances of several Western countries when they reached relatively high levels of industrialization. In them, already partially trusting elites became more fully trusting by absorbing socialist and other dissident factions when electoral pressures led dissidents to tone down proposals for radical social change. Prior to World War II, elites in Denmark and Norway were the only elites to achieve substantial trust in this way. During the twentieth century’s second half, however, elites in Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Italy, Portugal, and West Germany, along with elites in the Czech Republic and Slovakia after 1993, underwent this process and stabilized political institutions that had previously been unstable or totalitarian. Although some other way to create elite trust and institutional stability might be devised through political ingenuity, none has so far eventuated. In modern Western history, the creation of elite trust and institutional stability made it possible, though it did not guarantee, that a voice in government would eventually be spread by suffrage expansions to large segments of populations. The expansions happened gradually and made it possible to speak of “democracy” without wondering if the term’s users were kidding themselves. As this history indicates, elites are compatible with something that most relatively well-off and secure people in Western countries regard as a satisfactory form of democracy. This is not, however, what “democracy” means theoretically, which is an arrangement in which all or most citizens have equal and decisive political influence. It is therefore important to take account of how stable democracies function and think about democracy in realistic terms. Elite theory embodies this realism, focusing not only on elections, but also on how such things as restricted elite recruitment and behind-the-scenes networks of acquaintance and friendship enable elites to perform essential political functions in democracies if they are going to be performed at all. Because elite theory highlights how elites may collaborate to muffle explosive issues that gain public attention, it is regarded by many, as noted at the outset, with distaste. Yet if one looks at the matter closely, it will be clear that this is how any stable democracy works. Nevertheless, factual questions such as what makes stable democracy possible and whether it can be transferred readily from one place to another persist. Elites in most

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countries are not now and have never been mutually trusting, Consequently, efforts to spread stable democracy around the world have been frustrated by the fact that the essential elite prerequisite is usually not present. Where elites are accustomed to bitter political conflict along the lines of “Grab what you can – never mind the other person,” introducing democratic suffrage and competing political parties soon leads to serious disturbances. Various elite persons fear what these aspects of democracy portend. They assume that other elite persons will employ them to take advantage of innocent voters and get the upper hand. People in propertied upper- and middle-classes fear expropriation by democratic regimes. When crises arise, therefore, seizures of executive power by the military or entrenched civilian groups controlling the military are likely, because no serious degree of democratic government has been implanted, and it could not be unless elites trust each other to deliberately mitigate power struggles so that most influential, often privileged, persons and groups feel safe. How likely is it that elite trust and stable democratic institutions will persist in Western societies in the face of potential calamity? Will it be easier or harder for elites to perform the function of continuous political pacification? Because work insecurity and migrations of culturally alien refugees, asylum-seekers, and economic migrants from outside the West loom large, one cannot be sanguine. Work insecurities at home and large migrations from non-Western countries are giving rise to much unhappiness, unrest, and distrust of constituted authority. Is it conceivable that exploitations of these circumstances by populists seeking power will erode, even destroy, the elite trust and restraint that are the bases of stable democratic institutions in Western societies?

Populists Explanations of contemporary populism tend to have a “bottom-up” character. For example, Ronald Inglehart and Pippa Norris (2019) explore alternative explanations emphasizing (1) increasing economic and income inequalities in Western populations that contribute to feelings of insecurity and vulnerability; or (2) cultural backlashes, mainly among older Westerners, who are “seeking a bulwark against long-term [postmaterialist] processes of value change” made even more disconcerting

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by rising numbers of culturally alien immigrants (2019, 11–14). Inglehart and Norris conclude, “The rise of populist parties reflects, above all, a reaction against a wide range of rapid cultural changes that seem to be eroding the basic values and customs of Western societies” (2019, 30). However, emphasizing rapid cultural changes does not explain why populists are a good deal more prominent in some Western democracies than in others experiencing the same value changes. “Bottom-up” explanations of populism like those offered by Inglehart and Norris need to be supplemented with “top-down” explanations. Specifically, more attention should be given to populists who act as pied pipers offering delusive enticements, making irresponsible promises, and exhibiting disdain for rule of law. The extent to which populist leaders act in this way differs from country to country, though all harp on a quartet of alleged evils: victimization of “the people”; villainous “elites”; a scourge of “others”; and malign external forces. Overall, work insecurity, demoralization produced by the disappearance of many kinds of jobs, and influxes of alien migrants are explosive issues populist leaders enflame. They harness patriotic sentiments and racial-religious identities and portray competitors as immoral and corrupt “elites” (Müller 2016, 3). They couch electoral contests in winner-take-all terms by promising to give “enemies of the people” no quarter. Their operational code is more nearly “politics as war” than “politics as bargaining.” Today’s populist leaders benefit from two immediate circumstances. The first is heightened work insecurity resulting most directly from the 2008–09 financial crisis and ensuing economic malaise. Double-digit rates of unemployment and underemployment prevailed in most Western countries for upwards of a decade after 2008–09 and still prevail in southern Europe, where, in 2018, a third of working-age persons 25 years and under were unemployed and the overall jobless rate was 11 percent (New York Times, 27 February 2018, B5). The second circumstance is the sudden arrival of culturally alien migrants fleeing violence and joblessness in non-Western countries and regions. During 2014–16, some 2.5 million refugees, asylum seekers, and economic migrants entered EU countries (plus Norway and Switzerland), and an additional 160,000 entered during 2017. In the United States, where 11 million illegal migrants already resided, 2.4 million were apprehended at or near the southwestern land border during 2022. Canada, buffered by the United States, has experienced comparatively little illegal immigration. Nevertheless, in June 2018 a populist leader, Doug Ford, was elected Premier of

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Ontario, the most important province, by playing on fears of crimes and terrorist acts perpetrated by illegal immigrants. Surrounded by forbidding seas, Australia and New Zealand experience only small numbers of illegal immigrants, and those Australia apprehended were for several years sent to harsh detention camps on remote Pacific islands. To win the American presidency in November 2016, Donald Trump exploited work insecurity and illegal immigration from Mexico. Claiming that large numbers of Mexican “criminals,” “rapists,” and “terrorists” were entering the country, he vowed to force Mexico to pay for a “beautiful wall” he would build along the 1,950-mile southwestern land border. Trump also promised to create millions of well-paying, secure jobs by giving corporations and business owners huge tax cuts, levying stiff tariffs on steel, aluminum, and other imports, withdrawing the United States from “unfair” multilateral accords, and rescinding environmental regulations claimed to inhibit job creation. Trump’s rise and presidency are well known and rehearsing them would be superfluous. Let it suffice to emphasize two aspects. First, Trump engages in a “pluto-populism” that diverts attention from gross income and wealth disparities in American society. His endlessly repeated promise to “Make America Great Again” is best seen as a subterfuge that leaves plutocracy unmentioned and untouched. Manifesting plutopopulism, Trump’s initial 15 cabinet appointees were estimated to be collectively worth at least $35 billion in personal wealth (New York Times 4 April 2017), and his refusal to release tax returns that would reveal his personal wealth and shed light on how he obtained it was another manifestation. Second, Trump is a quintessential pied piper who persuades millions of devoted followers (his fabled “MAGA base”) to believe they are victims of manipulations by nefarious elites. In classic piper mode, Trump shouted to a large audience at one political rally during 2018 “Ah, the elite, the elite! Did you ever see the elite? [loud boos] YOU are the elite.” In the United Kingdom during 2015 and the first half of 2016, the populist anti-EU and anti-immigrant Independence Party (UKIP), led by firebrand Nigel Farage, and a virulently England nationalist faction in the Conservative Party sought to persuade insecure workers in economically ravaged cities and towns that European Union membership was the root cause of their insecurity and a 10 percent fall in average real wages between 2007 and 2015. Arrivals of 1.5 million workers from Poland and other countries under the Union’s free labor movement provision

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were denounced, and a specter of millions of Muslims coming to Britain via the E.U. was bandied about. Populist leaders’ panacea was to “Take back control!” by exiting the E.U. Elites favoring continued membership forecast economic disaster if a “Brexit” occurred and characterized promises of a bountiful future outside the E.U. as fantasies and unscrupulous deceptions. After a June 2016 “Brexit” referendum went narrowly against Britain’s continued membership, fighting between pro- and antiBrexit elite camps was unremitting, elite relations became “febrile and unpredictable” (Menon 2017, 126), and adherence to the centuries-long practice of elite political restraint was difficult to discern. Because of strong trade unions, multi-party systems with wellestablished major parties, extensive welfare states, and shorter experiences of post-industrial conditions, work insecurity is not as fruitful an issue for populist leaders to exploit in countries on the continent. They instead feed primarily on hostilities toward culturally alien refugees, asylumseekers, and economic migrants, desires to have them deported, and fears of further migration waves. Assorted populist parties and movements are classified as authoritarian, anti-democratic, liberal, illiberal, nativist, nationalist, neo-fascist, and radical rightist (Pappas 2016; Marguilies 2018). As these labels suggest, populism on the continent is a conglomeration, and the political importance of populist leaders varies across the 27 E.U. countries plus Norway and Switzerland. Overall, work insecurity, demoralization produced by the disappearance of many kinds of jobs, and influxes of alien migrants are explosive issues populist leaders enflame. They harness patriotic sentiments and racial-religious identities while portraying competitors as immoral and corrupt “elites.” They couch electoral contests in winner-take-all terms and proclaim they alone can stave off economic and cultural decline.

Effects of Populist Leadership An important question is the effects populist leaders have on elite trust and restraint. There is little doubt they make cooperative management of volatile issues more difficult because they resist bargains and compromises. Trump is a good example. After three times agreeing in January 2018 to budget compromises offered by the Senate Democratic Leader to avoid a federal government shutdown, Trump suddenly reneged, prompting the Leader to liken negotiating with him to “negotiating with Jell-O.” In Britain, hardline Brexiteer leaders declared flatly that

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they would only accept a “no-deal” exit from the E.U., an uncompromising stance that deadlocked Parliament. Marine Le Pen in France, leaders of Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD) in Germany, and leaders of the Sweden Democrats are similarly obstructionist. Where, on the other hand, populist leaders participate in or informally support coalition governments, as have those leading Norway’s Progressive Party, Austria’s Freedom Party, Denmark’s People’s Party, and the Swiss People’s Party (whose leaders are required constitutionally to share executive power with leaders of other parties), obstructionism is diluted by the complexities and responsibilities of governing. In mid-2023 it remained to be seen if this will be the case in Italy where Giorgia Meloni, Prime Minister and Leader of The Brothers of Italy, headed a governing coalition of diverse parties. Populists throw wrenches into party systems. In the American political arena during 2016, Bernie Sanders’ “Feel the Bern!” primary election campaign against Hillary Clinton weakened her presidential candidacy and helped open the way to a previously unthinkable Donald Trump presidency. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron’s attempt to stem the rise of UKIP and placate anti-EU Tory MPs by holding the “Brexit” referendum deepened Conservative Party divisions, temporarily eviscerated the Liberal Party, helped radicalize the Labour Party, and led to Cameron’s downfall. In the Netherlands, Prime Minister Mark Rutte was forced by Geert Wilders and his Party of Freedom to move markedly rightward to eke out a small plurality of seats in 2017 parliamentary elections. In France, efforts to prevent Marine Le Pen from capturing the Eleysée Palace in the 2017 and 2022 presidential elections all but destroyed the pre-existing party system. In Germany’s September 2017 elections, AfD weakened the Social Democrats (SPD) and became the most extreme right-wing party ever to sit in the Bundestag, with footholds in all 16 state parliaments. This left Germany without an effective government for six months until the previous “grand coalition” government was resurrected. Populists thus corrode the workings of both parliamentary and presidential systems of government. The forms of direct democracy they ballyhoo are at odds with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in the former and the separation of co-equal executive and legislative powers in the latter. Although prominent populists like Donald Trump must be regarded as elite persons themselves, the contempt they voice for other elite persons and groups degrades political discourse. Even though Trump occupied the presidency he decried elites as responsible for the country’s ills. In

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return, many elites pilloried Trump and his administration as a mixture of malevolence and incompetence. In Britain, the Brexiteer elite camp reviled the anti-Brexit camp for failing to comprehend the dire threat posed by the E.U. to the country’s cherished sovereignty, while the anti-Brexit camp accused Brexiteers of pushing Britain toward economic disaster. In these and other Western countries, mutual contempt and mudslinging tend to metastasize into mutual elite distrust, with institutions long seen as politically neutral coming to be viewed as openly partisan.

An Important Caveat Democratic stability depends upon elites collaborating to keep distributive issues that rise to clear public consciousness from reaching acute degrees impelling power seizures. Yet elites and other participants in politics have an interest in managing and limiting conflicts only if they enjoy considerable safety and security in their own political and social statuses. When unsafe and insecure, elites and other political actors devote their thoughts and energies to suppressing or annihilating enemies. Thus, an important caveat about politics is that conflicts can be managed and contained by elites only when major threats to their status do not impend. The combination of effective political management and the absence of major status reversals in the modern histories of Anglo-American, Scandinavian, Dutch, and Swiss societies illustrate this caveat. At present, populism is the only major movement advocating drastic political and social change in Western societies. Populists regard themselves as located outside the bureaucratic structures of their societies, as bitter foes of those structures, and as performing a vital teaching or corrective function in matters of public sentiment and belief. They profess to believe that a society characterized by at least a rough equality in political life is possible. In these respects, populists are the residual bearers of utopian ideas that figured so prominently in Western political thought during modern history. Not only are contemporary populists plainly utopian, but they also stand in the way of the more realistic conception of politics exemplified by elite theory, namely, there is no universal standard to which politics could conform to be anything other than impositions of power that people either accept or resist according to judgments of what is expedient. Persons prepared to embrace this conception of politics must

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oppose populism, not because the ultimate condition of political equality it promises is undesirable in a moral sense, but because it is impossible. It is not the aims of populism that should be opposed; it is the unintended consequences that seeking the impossible will bring about. Populists weaken elite safety and security and thus endanger a key basis of democratic stability. In several Western countries, especially the United States, cable television, the internet, and social media facilitate political mischief of many kinds: dogmatically anti-elite media commentators; myriad tweets and e-mails assailing elites for supposed calumnies; threats of violence against elite persons and their families and a recourse to bodyguards and security details for protection. For Western societies taken together, two broad scenarios can be conceived. In a benign scenario, countering populists will motivate elites to undertake necessary reforms: less fragile financial systems; fairer taxation; higher quality public education; improved infrastructure; and altered political processes that now advantage populists. In a malign scenario, populists will redouble their assaults on institutions and actors they portray as trampling on “the people’s will”: government bureaucracies, independent media, and independent judiciaries. Like all utopians, they will continue to promise paradise on earth. If elite trust is sustained and reinvigorated through collaborations aimed at marginalizing populists, the benign scenario may prevail. If, on the other hand, elite trust is further undermined, autocracy and unstable institutions beckon.

References Best, Heinrich, and John Higley, eds. 2018. The Palgrave Handbook of Political Elites. London: Palgrave. Dahl, Robert A. 1971. Polyarchy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Higley, John, Desley Deacon, and Don Smart. 1979. Elites in Australia. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Inglehart, Ronald, and Pippa Norris. 2019. Cultural Backlash. Trump, Brexit, and Authoritarian Populism. New York: Cambridge. Levitsky, Steven, and Daniel Ziblatt. 2018. How Democracies Die. New York: Crown. Marguilies, B. 2018. “Nativists are Populists, Not Liberals.” Journal of Democracy 29 (1): 141–147. Menon, Arnaud. 2017. “Why the British Chose Brexit.” Foreign Affairs 96 (6): 122–126.

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Müller, J.-W. 2016. What is Populism? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Pappas, Takis. 2016. “The Specter Haunting Europe: Distinguishing Liberal Democracy’s Challengers.” Journal of Democracy 27 (4): 22–36. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1921/1984. The Transformation of Democracy. Vilfredo Pareto. Edited with an Introduction by Charles H. Powers, translated by Renata Girola. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books. Putnam, Robert D. 1976. The Comparative Study of Political Elites. New York: Prentice-Hall. Volpe, Giorgio. 2021. Italian Elitism and the Reshaping of Democracy in the United States. New York: Routledge. Weber, Max. 1978. Economy and Society. Berkeley CA: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 3

Representative Government’s Prospects

Around 1900 what we today call democracy and what was then usually called representative government looked as if it was the wave of the future. All of Europe except Russia and Turkey had elective representative bodies with competing political parties and significant male suffrage. Many countries had monarchical heads, but aside from Russia and Turkey the only important clear cases where monarchs could be said to rule in the executive sphere were Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Sweden, and in them monarchs were not in possession of general legislative power. Except in France, representative governments were not usually called “democratic,” but most were close to what are today called democracies. The democracy designation carries much ideal baggage, however. Strictly speaking, democratic government is based on competitive politics with comparatively unlimited freedoms of expression, organization, and suffrage. Ultimate decisions as to dominant political leadership are made through relatively free and fair voting in periodic and rather frequent elections. Yet if one looks back to the period around 1900, it is readily seen that in such matters as racial and ethnic discrimination and the denial of female suffrage practically no country complied with the democracy designation and many still do not. If one is to retain a serious historical perspective, governments in democratic countries should more precisely be thought of as representative, in which governing personnel are ultimately determined by votes of a numerous electorate with sufficient © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_3

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freedoms of expression and organization to permit real electoral contests among a substantial portion of their population. If this adjustment is made, representative government is a more meaningful empirical category than democratic government. Beyond Europe in 1900, representative government existed in the United States and in various formerly self-governing colonies of the British Empire that had been settled by Europeans. Governments were nominally representative in Latin America, although the normal real situation was a military dictatorship. There was not much else in the way of actual representative government in the world of 1900, and most of it was firmly and openly governed, or at least dominated, by European powers and the United States. Hence, one could have supposed that representative practices in the dominant countries at home might eventually spread to countries and territories under their power and control. Substantially all influential people at the time, other than in Germany, were basically liberal in political beliefs and, with various immediate reservations, they presumably favored the eventual worldwide extension of representative government. What is the situation more than a century later? The geographic reach of representative government with reasonably competitive elections is not greatly more than it was in 1900. If in 1900 one would have thought of Greece, Italy, Portugal, and Spain as essentially within the European range of representative government, during the twentieth century they experienced fascist or military dictatorships for substantial periods. In Latin America, representative government remains subject for the most part to military veto or rule by autocrats and demagogues. Representative government in Eastern Europe displays illiberal tendencies and considerable corruption. With one or two exceptions, representative elections are subject to much manipulation in the Balkans. The independent former republics of the Soviet Union are, except for the Baltic states and, precariously, Ukraine, governed by autocrats. Representative government is conspicuous by its absence in the Middle East and North Africa, apart from Israel and, with important qualifications, Morocco and Tunisia. In the 40 or so countries south or east of the Sahel attempts at representative government are subject to violent subnational ethnic clashes, as in Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, and Zimbabwe, or to recurrent military coups as in Burkina Faso, Chad, Guinea, Mali, and Sudan of late. The situation is not much better in South and Southeast Asia where representative government is illiberal in

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Bangladesh, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Nepal, Pakistan, the Philippines, and Singapore, and is prevented everywhere else by military or autocratic rule, as in Brunei, Cambodia, Laos, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, and Thailand. In East Asia, there is a representative government in Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and possibly Mongolia, but decidedly not in China, North Korea, and Vietnam. Examples of countries in which elites seem reasonably trusting internally are Mexico since the political settlement engineered by Plutarco Calles in 1928–1932; Costa Rica since its brief civil war in 1948; Uruguay since a basic accord between military and political party leaders was reached in 1984; and possibly the Dominican Republic despite recurring electoral crises. Examples in Africa are Ghana after Jerry Rawlins’s voluntary surrender of power in 2001; Tanzania, where tribal groups are too small to be seriously tempted into intransigent self-assertions, and perhaps South Africa since an elite accommodation was reached in 1994 in the immediate aftermath of apartheid. The present range of representative government is therefore confined mainly to West European countries, a few in Central Europe, the United States, and some of the English-speaking countries formed out of former British colonies settled by Europeans, such as Australia, Barbados, Canada, and New Zealand, plus small numbers of countries located in Latin America and the world’s other continents. This is clearly less than the area that might have been judged in 1900 as at least tending in a representative government direction. Why has what looked in 1900 like a spreading practice of representative government mostly failed to materialize? It must be recognized that believers in representative government in 1900 misconstrued how the spread of institutions and practices they enjoyed and approved of could be brought about. What was familiar to them somehow appeared to be natural and easy. Despite all the evidence of history, representative government came to seem simple and almost inevitable to the American or Briton or Dutchman who lived under such government in 1900. But this was not true at all.

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Bases of Representative Government Representative government is one of the most difficult forms of political behavior to start in a country. Deeply divided or insecure elite factions are unlikely for very long to allow each other equal opportunities to determine their country’s ways of life by voice and vote. Anyone who hits upon more certain means of ensuring that his or her personal and factional interests and views will prevail is likely to resort to them. Attempts at representative government normally fail because some elite persons or factions, whether in power or out, see a crisis and regard it as too dangerous, either for selfish or more public-spirited reasons, to leave the outcome to the free solicitation of popular support. Fearful of what will happen, they use momentary advantages to seize or extend control of a government—essentially the army and police—and proceed to repress and stifle whomever they regard as actual or potential opponents. Once this has occurred, any but the most high-minded and principled elite persons with political interests will assume that they had better seize and hold power if they get a chance, or someone else will. There is no possibility of instituting and maintaining meaningful representative politics unless one can count with fair certainty that power grabs of this sort will not occur or at least not succeed. Although countries in which representative practices, once firmly established, have proved long lasting, there is much reason to believe that these countries were more than usually fortunate in circumstances that greatly reduced the tensions normal in politics. This seems to depend on two related circumstances. One is a matter of elite attitudes. In certain special historical circumstances, elite persons—political, economic, cultural, etc.—may come to be less than usually mistrustful of one another. They do not expect raw power plays by rivals and consequently have little taste for such risky ventures themselves. The other circumstance is a somewhat analogous but less behaviorally definite condition affecting large populations. They are somewhat less fearful of foreign invasion and other unfortunate vicissitudes of life than is usually the case with masses of people. Consequently, they devote themselves to private needs and advantages and pay less constant and worried attention to exertions of political power. These circumstances mean that countries experiencing them are more easily governed and led than most countries, and that mutually trusting elites can maintain a low level of political tensions most of the time. Of

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the two circumstances, elite trust seems to be the most important. Mutually trusting elites have a great ability to practice and preserve a reasonably placid representative politics once it has been started. Still, there could be mass tensions, discords, or fears that such elites find unmanageable. At any rate, European countries where representative government has been most durable—Britain, the Scandinavian countries, the Low countries, Switzerland—were exceptionally favored by historical circumstances for periods of one to four centuries. What leaders of those countries overlooked in expecting the spread of representative government worldwide after about 1900 was the exceedingly favorable situation of their countries in ways that mollified their populations or at least large fractions of them. Technological, productive, and military strengths individually and as a cluster after about 1700 had relieved inhabitants of the normal fear of invasion and conquest by culturally alien powers. They understood that no such power could successfully attack them while they were fully able, here and there, and as suited them, to intrude forcibly into other countries and cultures. The two world wars of the twentieth century showed that European populations had plenty of reason to fear each other, yet they did not see each other as fundamentally foreign and alien. Common to all European populations were the residues of classical civilizations and, perhaps most importantly, a Christian tradition. Because of this, they were exceptionally free from the normal fear of most peoples in history that their identity and ways of life might be wiped out by foreign powers and bearers of cultures. Practically no other sizable populations historically ever enjoyed a similar absence of fear. A second advantage that made it relatively easy for some European countries to keep political tensions manageable, even while allowing high degrees of freedom for interest group expression, was closely related to the first. Their technological, military, and organizational superiority over the rest of the world tended to bring the world’s material resources into their hands and served, together with their own material productivity, to insure a steadily improving standard of living that was immensely higher than that of any other countries historical or contemporary. Where does this leave us as regards prospects for a spread of representative government in the twenty-first century? Even putting the environmental, public health, and other ominous trends discussed in this volume’s initial essay aside, the prospects are dubious. European and other principal Western countries—the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand—can no longer afford to assume, as they did in the

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decades after World War II, that non-Western countries as a group are going to adopt and maintain representative government largely through Western example and aid. The bulk of them will not. Most countries outside the West have little feeling of the assured security from dangerous foreign intruders that was so distinctive a feature of European and eventually other Western countries after 1700. Today, in fact, many non-Western countries view Western countries as potential invaders and intervenors, and this view, even if unjustified, is bound to persist for a long time. Because there is no real cultural unity among non-Western countries (other than what European colonial powers implanted in them), their inhabitants tend to be culturally suspicious and fearful of each other. It is obvious, moreover, that the material well-being of all but the most resource-rich countries among them will not rapidly achieve Western living standards, even if they withhold from Western countries resources that were earlier diverted by force and guile to meet the needs of the relatively small Western portion of the world’s population. Withholding resources can hardly provide an equivalent wellbeing for the swollen and still growing populations of most non-Western countries. Finally, in very few countries outside the West have historical or contemporary circumstances been such that elites have become internally trusting. In the absence of such circumstances, elites in most non-Western countries remain at each other’s throats.

Conclusions Because of these situations in by far the largest part of the world, political elites in Western countries operating representative governments will have to reconcile themselves and their populations to the prospect that most countries of Latin America, Africa, and Asia will be dictatorships, corrupt autocracies, or highly unstable pseudo-democracies far into the future. In a few cases during the breakup of colonial empires—India being the prime example—native elites attained internal trust in the process of gaining independence. Those elites therefore got the chance to manage political conflict and hold it within bounds compatible with representative government. This gave representative government a start, but its start may peter out if other circumstances make popular tensions too great to be managed with reasonably open and free electoral competitions. The consequences of Hindu nationalism for India’s elite unity and stable political institutions come to mind.

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In the not-distant future, such important countries as Brazil, Pakistan, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Indonesia as well as India itself—may be seen in retrospect as cases where reasonably consistent attempts at regulated and tempered political contest proved unavailing because of internal ethno-religious and sub-national regional divisions, fears of powerful outside interferences, uncontainable insurgencies, endemic corruption, the ravages of disease pandemics, or simply economic expectations that have run far ahead of feasible productivity increases. There may be a few, but only a few, non-Western countries in tomorrow’s world where representative government may thrive: Argentina, Barbados, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ghana, Mexico, Ukraine, Uruguay, and conceivably Malaysia, Singapore, Kenya, Senegal, Zambia, and South Africa. There it is nothing that Western countries can do about the general paucity of stable representative government. They are best advised to be glad of their own good fortunes (if they continue) and take the rest of the world pretty much as they find it politically. What about representative government’s prospects in Western countries themselves? Is representative government still secure where it has long prevailed? There is no assurance. Many problems Western countries face are new, and it is difficult to judge their seriousness and political consequences by historical comparisons and metrics. Populist nationalism and political polarization stoked by leaders like Donald Trump in the United States and by an array of far right-wing parties and movements in Europe are but one quandary. Yet representative government’s prospects in Western countries seem better overall than those in non-Western countries. Despite costly terrorist actions launched from outside and inside Western countries, and despite large influxes of culturally alien immigrants, technological proficiency and military strength may keep Western countries free from serious fears of invasion by people of drastically different cultures. It is unlikely that their attained level of material living will be grossly lowered even if more of the world’s resources are consumed by non-Western countries that produce them. However, the extent to which measures to avoid calamity will affect attained levels of Western material well-being and the practice of representative government is an open question.

CHAPTER 4

Democracy as Rationalization and Panacea

The major social changes that occurred in Western societies during the last four or five hundred years were never clearly envisaged in the ideological conflicts that developed. The spread of entrepreneurial behavior between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries was masked by deep concern, both elite and non-elite, with questions of religious belief and organization. Only when that concern eventually became frustrated and disillusioned was it translated into the secular doctrine of liberalism, which then formed the basis for all subsequent ideological developments. Liberalism could hardly have emerged in late seventeenth-century England and Holland had it not been for the incentives and opportunities released by the gradual changeover from feudal to capitalist forms of property. Those incentives and opportunities afforded distractions from processes of political graft and inherited privilege through which persons had previously advanced themselves. They made the liberal idea of sober selfgovernment by individualistic, well-off persons who would take turns operating loosely representative political institutions plausible. Equally important, the changeover to capitalism created the preconditions for another feature of social structure on which the liberal idea depended for its plausibility. This was the formation of internally trusting elites in both England and Holland. Had it not been for the contribution that capitalist practices made to the vagueness of class lines between the English and Dutch nobilities and bourgeoisies and to the increased absorption of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_4

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both classes in money making, this distinctive kind of elite might not have been formed. One can say that England and Holland “chose” to be liberal, but it is crucial to recognize that they did so amid conditions that permitted, encouraged, and facilitated the choice. Such conditions were largely absent in other European countries of the day and were completely absent in the rest of the world. Frenchmen could not simply have read John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government and then chosen to reproduce the English political system for themselves, even in abstract terms. Given relations between the French nobility, bourgeoisie, and peasantry as they existed in the eighteenth century and for a long time after, no such choice could be made. During the nineteenth century the great productive energies released by capitalism were spreading commercial trade throughout the world. As charted by Immanuel Wallerstein in a pathbreaking, if controversial quartet of books (1974, 1980, 1989, 2011), this brought virtually all states and territories into a “world-system” in which different areas of the world had markedly different positions of advantage and disadvantage. Yet the nineteenth century’s major ideological discussion and conflict centered on the refinement of liberalism as a political doctrine. Western progressive thought was preoccupied with basing all governments on the standard of broadly representative electoral processes—what people were beginning to call “democracy” but was more precisely “representative government” as explained in the preceding essay. There was no possibility that such government could have been chosen in most countries of the world, including most countries in Europe. This was because all such countries were deeply divided and recriminating at both elite and popular levels. In that situation, introducing reasonably widespread and fair voting and making electoral outcomes binding on the selection of governing personnel could only produce greater conflict and disorder. At most, it would be an experiment quite promptly terminated. Without elite persons and groups practicing restraint in their political competitions, and probably also without steady increases in economic well-being, the choice of a reasonably durable “democracy” simply could not be made. Britain, the United States, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland after 1848–49 had restrained elites or something very much like them. They were also experiencing rapid economic growth. Consequently, they could “choose” to become steadily more democratic, taking credit under

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the democratic ideological banner for not being like other countries. But China or Peru or Russia could not have made such a choice in any meaningful sense. Even the ability of other European nations to make that choice was limited by the absence of restrained elites in them. This meant that democratic reforms in France or Spain or in Germany after 1870 depended upon annual increases in overall prosperity, a fragile basis for political reform at best. Not surprisingly, the advance of democracy in such European countries was noticeably more limited and more frequently punctuated by serious political crises. During the hundred or so years after 1880, ideology tended to focus on a choice between alternative economic systems that was never adequately specified. By concentrating on how a change from capitalism to socialism might be brought about, socialists largely failed to specify the economic alternative they urged. Instead, they devoted most of their attention to the evils of capitalism and how those evils would eventually cause the desired transition to socialism. Concentrating on capitalism made the capitalist economy seem considerably more distinctive historically than it really was. It diverted attention from the extent to which the mere release of entrepreneurial efforts involved productivity increases that enabled the leading Western countries to create and dominate a world-system. It was that domination and the historically unprecedented productivity it fostered that was at stake in all major events during the hundred years after 1880: the recrudescence of Western colonial expansion in the 1880s and 1890s; the German takeover bids for hegemony in the world-system in World Wars I and II; the subsequent efforts of Western countries to stabilize international relations through de-colonization; the efforts by Soviet elites to further their own takeover bid by challenging publicly the morality of the world-system they sought to dominate. The Soviet Union’s enfeeblement during the 1980s and its implosion in 1991, the transition of its East European satellite countries to capitalism, and socialism’s accompanying loss of plausibility contributed to democracy’s strong ideological resurgence. It is today the ideological lodestar of virtually all contemporary Western political and social thought. This overlooks the difficulty that, quite apart from important questions about an apparently inexorable capitalist dynamic that heightens the concentration of great wealth and increases economic inequality, which Thomas Piketty has highlighted (2014), largely unrestrained capitalist production is too efficient in extracting whatever natural resources

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lie to hand and disposing of waste materials without regard for environmental consequences. There appears to be no basis for contemplating a total suppression of capitalism, but thinking about how to limit and modify it in ways that protect the environment and assuage discontents about how its benefits are parceled out now seems unavoidable.

Democracy as Rationalization As indicated, the main lines of Western political and social thought developed from liberal ideas that emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Repudiating the special claims made by privileged persons and families, liberal ideas ultimately invited a democratic extension. Although most early liberals were not consciously democrats, they had no firm convictions that would stand in the way of becoming such if fortune smiled on their societies, as it, by and large, did during the nineteenth century. Democracy was thus likely to emerge in Anglo-American, Scandinavian, and those continental European countries deeply influenced by the French Revolution. In them, it proved relatively easy to expand the suffrage incrementally without creating lethal challenges to propertied and other interests of dominant groups. Something like universal male suffrage was widespread by the end of the nineteenth century and, despite much cultural resistance, female suffrage was established almost everywhere by the end of World War II. Patriotic rhetoric spawned a sort of democratic doctrine, which differed somewhat from country to country. The nature of practical politics as basically an appeal for popular support in contested and periodic elections came to be taken for granted. The last open holdouts—those who preferred more restrictive ideas of republicanism, constitutional monarchy, and appointed legislative chambers able to veto popular measures—had mostly disappeared by the end of World War I. “Democracy’” was employed thereafter to designate the system of representative government that prevailed in Western societies. As a doctrine, democracy was a rationalization of political and social change that had, by and large, already been accomplished. The rationalization holds that societies invariably “choose” democracy when popular sentiment for it becomes sufficiently widespread. The main questions are how universal various political rights ought to be and what institutional practices should be adopted to make government by the demos truly effective. These questions are relevant to countries where respect

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for representative political practices already exists, but for the world they have little relevance. Even in the Western societies where it did emerge, democracy has always amounted to a set of moral preferences, or an ideal, that can never be realized. Strictly speaking, democracy has nothing to say about political systems not already substantially representative, except perhaps to exhort people in such systems to engage in what is usually the futile defiance of existing authority. It ignores such questions as what democrats should do in countries where oligarchic rule, commonly involving military domination, is customary and firmly established. It even serves to de-legitimize attempts by elites to approach democratic government by indirection and stealth on grounds that such elite maneuvers are undemocratic. Yet it was by the indirection and stealth of elites that representative institutions based on a relatively broad suffrage were for the most part established in Western countries that came to be called democracies. Similarly, where democratic practices and representative institutions are precluded or rendered ineffective by deep-seated racial, religious, or sub-national regional economic conflicts, as is the case in many non-Western countries today, democratic doctrine disapproves of whatever authoritarian measures are taken to govern such countries. The British political theorist John Gray has argued convincingly that as concept democracy embodies the Enlightenment view that progress, in the sense of ameliorative change in the human condition, is both normal and certain (2007, 41). However, this does not coincide, even roughly, with the political trajectories of most societies in the world today or during modern history.

Democracy as Panacea Conceiving of democracy as a solution for many of the world’s problems has been a widespread practice in Western (and other) countries during recent decades. Once elites in liberal Western countries hailed their victory in World War II as “the triumph of democracy” the democracy concept gained an utterly central place in the political discourse of those countries. In a towering book, Louis Menand recounts how, following that war and in the Cold War’s context, democracy was enshrined as the cardinal feature of Western countries comprising “the free world” (2021, 333–379). The West’s liberation of its colonies during the postwar decades was seen as betokening democracy’s global spread, apart from the

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bloc of communist countries.During the 1950s and 1960s many affluent, educated, and semi-leisured Westerners embraced democracy as a solution to ills they discerned at home and abroad. Their embrace underpinned policies and measures intended to improve the life chances of people from poorer backgrounds and were the rationale for many efforts at educational reforms such as pre-school learning programs and large increases in the number of university places for graduates of secondary schools. In the United States, the Civil Rights movement, which arose during the 1950s among African Americans in the south and their sympathizers in the north, rapidly received elite endorsement. The civil rights movement prevailed sufficiently to suggest the prospect of a large population segment that had been almost totally excluded from careers leading to middle-class statuses becoming an equal or even a privileged contender for those statuses. Women, as well as various additional minority groups suffering discrimination soon moved into the foreground and demanded democratic rectification of their situations. Because of the United States’ premier position in the West, the American movements and policies resulting from them came to be viewed as models for what should be done in other Western countries. The 1960s were a period during which utopian radicalism and a profession of sturdy moral principles, regardless of circumstances, were prevalent, especially among university students. Anticipations of Parousia in the form of a pure democracy were frenetic and widespread (see following essay). In addition to the major student-led uprising in France in May 1968, serious disturbances brought about by bodies of radical students occurred across the West. It was difficult to negotiate with student protesters because their egalitarian principles left them without stable organization and leadership. Moreover, the optimism of professed elite sentiment prevented clear-cut confrontations between adults and students or between extreme and less extreme positions. It was obvious that the educated and informed parts of Western publics, as well as their political leaders, wanted to believe that differences between them and protesting students were mainly matters of maturity and discretion. Most elites and informed adults sought to respect publicly the utopian goals proclaimed by student radicals. From an exposure to student radicalism and mass media reporting of it during the 1960s, one could hardly have concluded that the interests of people frequently differ and that people, if they can, pursue their own interests as they see them. This lack of realism among student radicals and

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the influence they exerted on public consciousness left most actual issues and prospects unaddressed. Once the radicals and students influenced by them finished their university educations and moved into government and academic positions and many jobs in the media and entertainment industries, it was inevitable that young scholars, civil servants, media personalities, entertainers, writers, and rising political leaders would hold more extreme views of desirable social reforms than had generally been present before the 1960s. Democracy thus came to be pursued with unalloyed enthusiasm by Western countries during the twentieth century’s final quarter. It was viewed as the remedy for nearly all that was wrong in the world. Autocratic and corrupt regimes, which were usually controlled overtly or covertly by military elites, were regarded as preventing or retarding economic and political development. They could be swept aside if the populations suffering under them opted for democracy and the freedoms and institutions that Western elites and educated publics sentimentally portrayed as principal reasons for the West’s historical triumphs. Democracy would liberate oppressed populations and in time lessen their hostility toward the West. From the 1980s until the Great Recession of 2008–2009, sharply conservative elite factions who supported the Reagan presidency and peopled the presidencies of George H.P. Bush and his son George W. Bush in the United States—echoed by conservative factions in the United Kingdom led by Margaret Thatcher and later by Tony Blair at the head of a “New Labour Party”—were vocal proponents of this view. That democracy in both their countries had historically been for the most part a post-hoc rationalization of representative practices gradually adopted by relatively secure political elites was ignored. That stable representative regimes in these and several other Western countries, whatever their limitations historically, had depended first and foremost on elites concluding that representative practices posed no lethal threat to their diverse, conflicting, and selfish interests was a proposition too heinous to entertain. Western leaders, pundits, scholars, and others agreed that the behaviors and configurations of elites in most developing countries were not propitious for democracy. Prevailingly, they advocated replacing those elites with persons, groups, and regimes more responsive to the supposed democratic sentiments of impoverished publics. A book by Larry Diamond, The Spirit of Democracy (2005) as well as The Journal

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of Democracy, which he and Mark Plattner founded and long edited, exemplified this view. Western think tanks such as Freedom House and government agencies dutifully kept track of freely competitive elections in developing countries. Western governments, private foundations, and non-governmental organizations allocated large sums to tutoring pro-democracy activists in developing countries in the principles and techniques of democratic governance. It is correct to say, nonetheless, that during the twentieth century’s final quarter and the present century’s first quarter few stable democracies resulted from these efforts. Evidence of rigged elections, controlled media, endemic corruption, frequent military takeovers, and numerous other practices at odds with democracy accumulates (e.g., Kurlantzick 2013; Gordon 2021). Prospects for the spread of democracy throughout the world, which were always more imaginary than real, are in general dim.

References Diamond, Larry. 2005. The Spirit of Democracy. New York: Macmillan. Gordon, Philip H. 2021. Losing the Long Game. The False Promise of Regime Change in the Middle East. New York: St Martin’s Publishing Group. Gray, John. 2007. Black Mass. Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Kurlantzick, Joshua. 2013. Democracy in Retreat. The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline of Representative Government. New Haven: Yale University Press. Menand, Louis. 2021. The Free World. Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar. Straus, Giroux. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Wallerstein, Immanuel. 1974. The Modern World-System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century New York: Academic Press. ———. 1980. The Modern World-System II. Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World-Economy, 1600–1750. New York: Academic Press. ———. 1989. The Modern World-System III. The Second Great Expansion of the Capitalist World-Economy, 1730–1840s. San Diego: Academic Press. ———. 2011. The Modern World-System IV. Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914. Berkeley: University of California Press.

CHAPTER 5

Anticipations of Parousia in Western Societies

In a seminal book, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1961.rev. ed. 1970, 1990), historian Norman Cohn showed that most intense social protest and radicalism in Western Europe from 1000 to 1550 involved anticipations of Parousia—of a sudden, essentially magical end to the world’s ills. From about 1550 to 1950, by contrast, social protest and radicalism in West European and Anglo-American societies were prevailingly rational and instrumental. The predominant belief was that a harmonious and just society could be created by judicious application of available material and intellectual resources. Calls for voluntaristic change that lack rational, instrumental considerations about how a good society can be brought about have characterized much social protest and radicalism since about 1950. That it can be willed without rational arguments and proposals has been widely believed. In this respect recent social protest and radicalism resemble, abstractly, premodern anticipations of Parousia. A strong tendency has been to view leaders of protest and radical movements as well as populist leaders as God-like beings representing legitimate authority against demonic forces. That social, economic, and political conditions are ripe for a basic transformation is widely believed; it remains only to bring about a breakthrough, after which even “gentiles” will recognize the Godhead. A moral emotionalism in the intellectual communities of Western societies has encouraged this recent form of social protest and radicalism. It © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_5

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can be hoped that receptivity to a more sober stance will occur. Yet there are few grounds for believing this will happen soon, because the necessary change of orientation from those of the past seventy or so years is too profound to be adopted rapidly. A question is how far Western elites and intellectuals must go to pour cold water on heated anticipations of Parousia.

“Consciousness III” Charles A. Reich’s best-selling book The Greening of America (1970) was a combination of acute description of some social trends during the 1960s and a childlike belief in a future society resembling a well-run nursery without adults providing necessary supplies, reassurances, manipulations, and protections. In 1969 the movie Easy Rider made this belief graphic. Differences between outlooks in the simple farming-artisan societies of the early nineteenth century (Consciousness I), industrial societies in which productive organization reached colossal proportions (Consciousness II), and post-industrial societies in which further progress along the familiar lines of modern history are blocked and give way to altruistic beliefs (Consciousness III) were drawn masterfully by Reich, even though components of his characterizations were already present in social science—for example, David Reisman’s The Lonely Crowd (1953); Paul Goodman’s polemic Growing Up Absurd (1960). There was, in any case, little sense of real history, even American history, in Reich’s book, and he said nothing about the great reaches of the West’s past. If he had, it would have been impossible for him to present normal aspects of human altruism with wide-eyed wonder when they occurred in the 1960s. Reich’s Consciousnesses I, II, and III never occurred in neat historical steps; they were all present throughout human history. Fairly independent small farmers, artisans, and others able to look after themselves without much social support exhibited Consciousness I historically. All who organized or saw to the maintenance of significant organization beyond simple family groups exhibited Consciousness II. Only persons who exhibited Consciousness II could function with any effectiveness in a political or organizational context. Wives, widows, nieces, nephews, and children who were well-provided dependents of reasonably powerful, influential, and respected persons frequently in all historical periods exhibited Consciousness III.

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Rarely, however, were those exhibiting Consciousness III numerous enough—as they became in the 1960s in affluent post-industrial contexts—to harbor illusions that they were normal persons who wanted no more than limited and protected exposures to real life and could make society over in their own image. When they lack such illusions bearers of Consciousness III are often happy, and they occasionally manage through backstage influence to mitigate the severities of life for some less fortunate persons. They also tend to maintain aesthetic standards. But when Consciousness III persons harbor illusions of normality, they become distraught. They boldly shelter and protect social revolutionaries, visionaries, and violent protestors whose actions they tend to excuse with gentle disapprobation. In this way they impede the order-keeping mechanisms of post-industrial societies. They contribute to periods of violent chaos in which “flower children” like themselves can no longer be produced. However, this was not conduct peculiar to the 1960s in Anglo-American and West European societies; it has occurred in other times and places where the local wealthy and their fortunate dependents were numerous, such as the Low Countries and Northern Italy in early modern times, and it remains a pronounced aspect of protest and radicalism at present in Western societies. What Reich said Consciousness III people would do to established organizations (schools, factories, bureaucracies, etc.), namely, break down all hierarchies and all chains of authority within them so that each participant need only act voluntarily, was not entirely fanciful. In the United States, United Kingdom, and France during the 1960s and in Italy, West Germany, the Low and Scandinavian countries during the 1970s and 1980s, it looked like Consciousness III holders might acquire the numbers and staying power to do this, albeit only through a failure to see that they themselves, more than anyone else, were peculiarly dependent upon the security and plenty that the hierarchical organization of others provided. If a breakdown of hierarchies happened, it would be silly to believe that food would continue to come into cities or medicines into hospitals or that other material goods would continue to be produced in quantities sufficient to meet a post-industrial population’s needs. Many people would starve just as they did at the end of Roman civilization and inception of the “Dark Ages” in Western Europe. There would, of course, be no police should it be deemed necessary to resist a breakdown; there would be only private guards and bandits. Survival would depend

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upon attaching oneself in feudal fashion to the person with most clout in a neighborhood and staying with him or her (if that person survived) through thick and thin. It was the prospect of a return to conditions abstractly resembling the Dark Ages and feudalism more than a totalitarian or autocratic regime that constituted the greatest danger from the dogmatic nihilism of those whose essential unworldliness Reich so unqualifiedly admired.

Mayhem Sympathy for university and other discontented youth purporting to manifest Consciousness III lessened when their anticipations of Parousia began to produce mayhem. In August 1969 in Hollywood acolytes of Charles Manson, a white supremacist who believed that igniting an apocalyptic race war would make him “Master of Black Americans,” murdered seven persons, one of them a movie star, in gruesome ways dramatized in the 2019 film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. In November 1978 more than 900 Americans belonging to a doomsday cult located in Guyana, known as Jonestown after its apocalyptic leader Jim Jones, perished in mass suicide and murder. In April 1993 near Waco, Texas attempts to arrest and disperse an apocalyptic religious cult resulted in 79 deaths, including that of the cult’s self-proclaimed prophet, David Koresh. Two years later, in March 1995, a Japanese doomsday cult, Aum Shrinrikyo (Supreme Truth), released Sarin gas in five Tokyo subway trains, killing 13 commuters, seriously injuring 54, and affecting nearly a thousand more. After assassinating several officials, the Japanese cult planned to release hydrogen cyanide into the subway ventilation system and kill thousands. Its guru, Shoko Asahara, and his coterie were arrested, tried, and eventually executed. Nihilism has colored recent anticipations of Parousia. In April 1995, two years after the Waco tragedy, Timothy McVeigh, a former US soldier angered by the Waco conflagration and a holder of extreme antigovernment views bombed the federal government building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 and wounding 680. Quickly apprehended, McVeigh was convicted of mass murder and executed in 2001. In April 1996, Martin Bryant, an unstable Australian influenced by the Oklahoma City bombing, killed 35 people and wounded 23 more at a historic colonial site in Port Arthur, Tasmania. In July 2011, a Norwegian nihilist, Anders Behring Breivik, who self-identified as a fascist and a pagan, and

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who believed that a combination of Islam and feminism would lead to Europe’s cultural extinction, killed 77 mostly young persons in Oslo and on a nearby island. On January 7, 2015 in Paris, two French Muslim brothers, Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, forced their way into offices of the French satirical weekly newspaper Charlie Hebdo. Armed with rifles and other weapons, they killed 12 people and injured 11. The gunmen identified themselves as belonging to the apocalyptic Islamist group al-Qaeda on the Arabian Peninsula, which took responsibility for the attack. In November 2015 nine jihadi gunmen attacked a football stadium and several restaurants in Paris, three of them entering the Bataclan concert venue where they killed 130 people and injured 352 before being cornered and killed. In Nice on Bastille Day 2016, a 19-ton truck driven by a Tunisian claiming to be an Islamic State loyalist mowed down 86 people and injured 458 before being shot and killed. Attacks on Christmas markets and other public venues in France, Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom, and elsewhere by gunmen and vehicle drivers professing loyalty to Islamic State have been numerous.

QAnon In November 2021 several hundred people lined a road leading to Dealy Plaza in Dallas, the site of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in November 1963. They were there to await the arrival of Kennedy’s son, John Jr, who had in fact died along with his wife in an airplane crash in 1999 but who, they believed, had faked his death, and would reappear to lead a revolt against cannibalistic, Satan-worshiping, pedophilic government, media, and financial elites. The Dallas gathering subscribed to QAnon conspiracy theories, adherents to tenets of which are estimated to number several million adult Americans. On January 6, 2021, several dozen members of the mob that stormed the U.S. Capitol wore QAnon shirts and waved QAnon flags. Hardly the first conspiratorial movement in America’s long political history, QAnon is probably the most widespread. Its progenitor is claimed to be Q, an anonymous high official or set of officials in the federal government assisting Donald Trump in a secret battle to shut down the ring of evil elites believed to have infiltrated the government (Muirhead and Rosenbloom 2019, 132–35; Rothschild 2021; Bloom and Moskalenko 2021). QAnon adherents profess to believe that a “Storm”

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in which the nefarious elites will be swept away is imminent, after which a peaceful society, unsullied by evil elites, will arise. Analyzed by Luke Mogelson in The Storm Is Here. An American Crucible (2022), QAnon is an evolving collection of conspiracy theories occupying the central place in a decentralized network of conspiracy-obsessed groups and private militias dedicated to the overthrow of elites, the “deep state,” and judicial and law enforcement officials standing in the way of a blissful society. There is a sprinkling of QAnon enthusiasts and conspiracy-minded groups in Europe, but it is mainly an American phenomenon. It exemplifies what Richard Hofstadter dubbed “the paranoid style in American politics” (1965). After the Donald Trump-instigated assault on the Capitol in Washington in January 2021, QAnon’s prominence receded somewhat. The assault persuaded many that QAnon was dangerous, and other concerns took center stage—the Covid-19 pandemic, accelerating climate change, price inflation, and Russian preparations to invade Ukraine. Political candidates tied to QAnon were labeled extremists and with few exceptions fared poorly in party primaries and state elections. Yet conspiracy theories that QAnon has helped spread remain rife. They embellish Donald Trump’s claim that unscrupulous elites “stole” the 2020 presidential election from him. Some opinion polls have found that approximately one of every six Americans embraces one or more core tenets of QAnon conspiracies, such as mistrusting election outcomes and believing that teachers prey upon students to alter their sexual identities (Thompson 2022). At a rally in Ohio in September 2022, Trump associated himself with QAnon and elicited the single-finger QAnon salute by many in his audience. Conspiratorial cults such as Oath Keepers and Proud Boys believe that the Parousia of an imaginary eighteenth-century America consisting of resolute, armed (and white) pioneers, and farmers will be restored.

Fleeting or Lasting? What is one to make of contemporary anticipations of Parousia? The angry outbursts of university students and other youth in the United States, United Kingdom, and France during the 1960s proved relatively short-lived. The civil rights and feminist movements, along with fears of being conscripted to fight in the Vietnam War, did much to explain the spread of outlooks typical of Consciousness III among students and other youth. The civil rights movement spawned the Black Panthers, the

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Nation of Islam, and other sects perceived as fearsome; feminists gained gradual entry to public sector jobs; and the Vietnam War ended for all intents and purposes late in 1972 after Lyndon Baines Johnson, the bête noir of enraged students, announced he would not stand for presidential re-election. Many protesters and radicals soon moved into reasonably well-paid, secure jobs and careers. Outlooks exemplifying Consciousness III subsided or at least moderated. Rather than accede to vehement student and strong trade union demands that he resign from the French presidency during May 1968, Charles de Gaulle flew secretly on 29 May to the headquarters in Baden, West Germany of General Jacques Massu, commander of French military forces stationed there. Assured by Massu that the military remained loyal to the president and the Fifth Republic, de Gaulle returned to the Elysée on 30 May and that afternoon announced and scheduled National Assembly elections for June 1968. In the elections’ second round the Gaullist party won 293 seats and a substantial parliamentary majority, something not previously achieved by a single party in the history of French democracy (Jackson 2018, 728–737). In Italy during the 1970s and early 1980s, the Brigades Rossi (Red Brigades) believed that a virtuous revolutionary state could be created by armed struggle. Its members carried out violent acts that killed several dozen prominent figures, including the abduction and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro. After Moro’s murder Italian investigators, helped by defecting Brigades members, broke up the group. Toward the same end in West Germany during the 1970s, 1980s, and into the 1990s nihilist groups of young revolutionaries—the Red Army Faction and allied “revolutionary cells”—carried out nearly 300 bombings and attacks that killed several dozen officials and business leaders along with their bodyguards and chauffeurs. In 1977 Faction members hijacked a Lufthansa airplane in flight and eventually murdered its pilot. West German police and intelligence agents infiltrated the Faction, arresting and imprisoning its principal surviving leaders, several of whom allegedly committed suicide in prison. There are reasons for doubting, however, that twenty-first-century anticipations of Parousia will be as transient. First, they have been developing and spreading for twenty years, abetted by the Financial Crisis in 2008–09 and its long aftermath. Second, the anticipations are held not by university students but by millions of insecure and poorly educated people trying to cope with declining needs for their labor. A large and

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growing number of these people are without reasonably assured incomes or occupational prospects. Eschatological hopes for salvation tend to color their outlooks. This may be a permanent post-industrial condition. Third, politicians who exploit anticipations of Parousia, such as Donald Trump, will pass from the scene, but they are likely to be replaced by other, possibly even more unscrupulous exploiters. Fourth, political elites have no solution because there probably is none. Repression in the form of elaborate and intrusive police surveillance and government control of internet platforms, may be the only course of action.

Marx’s Deflection In terms of this essay’s initial observations, there used to be a rational social radicalism compatible in epistemological and aesthetic style with the main rationalistic current of modern Western thought. It included but was by no means confined to democratic socialists, communists of the Third and Fourth Internationals, and many leftist splinter groupings. All those people thought they could give a good account of their positions by rational argument in appropriate situations. All based this confidence in part on what they regarded as analysis of objective social circumstances or “historical forces.” Marx was largely responsible for this temporary deflection of social protest and radicalism from its purely voluntaristic, apocalyptic, and vengeful forms in pre-modern Western societies. He did this by basically forgiving past exploiters on the ground that in unproductive pre-industrial societies only privileged strata could be the bearers of culture, while he purported to demonstrate that in a near industrial future (in Western lands at least) capitalist productivity would make possible a cultured life for all. In his analysis of the social and economic trends of his time Marx outlined the probability that forces pursuing equality (mainly industrial working classes) would shortly triumph and take advantage of high productivity to create social justice. That intellectual framework, elaborated and modified in all sorts of details, supported rational social protest and radicalism from the time Marx’s thought crystallized in The Communist Manifesto in 1848 until disillusionments with affluent post-industrial conditions set in after World War II. There has been little rational social radicalism since. Established socialist and communist movements in various European countries ceased to be radical in spirit. Protests by leisured youth on behalf of the

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less fortunate could find no encouragement in doctrines derived from Marxism. The affluent young were neither downtrodden nor disciplined by serious work obligations. The new poor were not engaged in essential productivity and tended to merge into a “dangerous class”—a Lumpenproletariat . Classical Marxism had no messages for these categories. Consequently, contemporary social protest and radicalism returned to an apocalyptic acting out of the “last days”—the futile form they took before industrialization got underway in Western societies.

References Bloom, Mia, and Sophia Moskalenko. 2021. Pastels and Pedophiles. Inside the Mind of QAnon. Stanford CA: Redwood. Cohn, Norman. 1961, rev. ed. 1970, 1990. The Pursuit of the Millennium. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goodman, Paul. 1960. Growing Up Absurd. New York: Random House. Hofstadter, Richard. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Knopf. Jackson, Julian. 2018. De Gaulle. Boston: Harvard University Press. Mogelson, Luke. 2022. The Storm Is Here. An American Crucible. New York: Penguin. Muirhead, Russell, and Nancy L. Rosenbloom. 2019. A Lot of People are Saying. The New Conspiracism and the Assault on Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reich, Charles A. 1970. The Greening of America. New York: Bantam. Riesman, David. 1953. The Lonely Crowd. Garden City NY: Anchor. Rothschild, Mike. The Storm is Upon Us. New York: Melville House. Thompson, Stuart A. 2022. “QAnon Candidates Wilt While Their Ideas Thrive.” New York Times, July 20, 2022.

CHAPTER 6

Intellectual Elites and Realities of Work

The prevailing Western conception of politics rests on the premise that the great differentiation of statuses and interests in complex societies are nevertheless compatible with adherence to a single ideal or goal—that what is good for one is somehow good for all. Nowhere is this more evident than in the widespread inclination of Western intellectuals to embrace a generalized notion of equality as the standard against which political actions should be judged. Most intellectuals assume that a society characterized by at least a rough equality of individual fortunes is possible, and that nearly all people will eventually agree about its worth. During the thirty years that followed World War II, intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic were, in effect, principled socialists, although they disagreed about the relevance and utility of Marxism and how, exactly, a socialist society would be attained. In his encyclopedic book, The Free World. Art and Thought in the Cold War (2021), Louis Menand details the beliefs of postwar intellectuals and artists in the United States and Western Europe. Drawing from the writings of Lionel Trilling, a highly influential American intellectual during the postwar decades, Menand summarizes those beliefs: “[T]here is a straight, or reasonably straight, road to health and happiness…The right economic system, the right political reforms, the right undergraduate curriculum, the right psychotherapy will do away with,

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or significantly mitigate, unfairness, snobbery, resentment, prejudice, neurosis, and tragedy” (2021, 169). The Vietnam War and frenzied anti-War protestors in the United States, neo-Marxists in Europe, and violence by left-wing terrorist groups shattered such comfortable beliefs. Leading intellectuals became liberals of one or another persuasion and, in concert with Ronald Reagan’s presidency, not a few became exponents of neoliberalism. Milton Friedman and several of his University of Chicago colleagues were prime examples. In The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2022), Gary Gerstle summarizes neoliberal tenets as “prizing free trade and the free movement of capital goods, and people, a celebration of government deregulation as an economic good, and a valorization of open borders and the consequent mixing of large numbers of diverse peoples” (2022, 5). Throughout the seven decades since World War II, the general position of intellectuals embraced the prevailing Western conception of politics and the belief in free equality as a goal. However, the typical intellectual’s own situation illustrated the misleading character of the premises on which these beliefs rested.

Equality, Privilege, and Work One must first acknowledge that in his or her own circumstances, the Western intellectual is quite right to aspire to conditions of life that approximate those suggested by both the socialist and neoliberal creeds. If a person is to train and work extensively in obscure and difficult intellectual distinctions and serve as teacher or corrector of public or technical thought, that person cannot at the same time submit (at least not fully) the results of such training and work to the judgments of public, administrative, or political opinion. The intellectual must in some sense be privileged, have “tenure,” and be allowed to make serious mistakes without being penalized. In the world of ideas in which the intellectual operates the competition for reputation and recognition—a competition made effective by the similarly privileged situations of other intellectuals—must suffice as social control. A system of more direct rewards and punishments, whether imposed by the public at large, by immediate superiors, or by those who are politically powerful, can only defeat the functioning of intellectuals by reducing them to sycophantic agreement with whatever public, administrative, or governmental opinions seem likely to be enforced. In this fundamental respect an intellectual’s

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work and circumstances are clearly congruent with the “free equality” that intellectuals want all to enjoy. But while the intellectual function is best performed by persons who are free and equal, it is idle to suppose that the spread of freedom and equality to all persons in a complex society could be similarly beneficial. Most occupations and work activities contain few inherent incentives for outstanding performance that are at all equivalents to the collegial recognition or public acclaim that inhere in intellectual (and artistic) success. Except for the idle rich, whose life situations closely resemble and can readily be confused with those of intellectuals, most people work not for its own sake but for a living. Those who manage to earn a good living often become devoted to their work if it sustains that living, but the incentive for them is less the work itself than its earnings. Persons in ordinary occupations who do not earn a comfortable living usually do not work effectively without the negative incentive of being sacked and deprived of their livelihood if their performance becomes too unsatisfactory. Of course, they will not work well without satisfactory compensation. By introducing more varied and sophisticated team structures and by improving communication with bosses, there have been many attempts to overcome the worst of the negative incentives on which the performance of comparatively ordinary work has customarily relied. But however effective these refinements may be, they are unlikely to dissuade most workers from the belief that, if a decent income is assured, there are always more pleasant activities to engage in than work. In a post-pandemic edition of his Men Without Work (2022) Nicholas Eberstadt painstakingly documents and analyzes a recent “flight from work” in which approximately 10 million working-age men have left the American workforce more or less voluntarily (2022, 67–75). The conditions of life and work to which intellectuals quite properly aspire for themselves could hardly be conceded to all without encouraging a disastrous neglect of work. This in no sense means that traditional civil liberties—freedom of speech, due process of law, etc.—cannot or should not be extended to all persons. On the contrary, in suitable circumstances—under well-established systems of representative government, for example—the extension of civil liberties to well-nigh everyone is both feasible and desirable. Under discussion are the privileges necessary to perform the role of intellectual effectively. As noted, to be effective, he or she needs to be free from serious threats of dismissal or demotion

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because of taking a controversial or mistaken position on public or technical matters. Possessing this privilege, the intellectual resembles a person of independent wealth. Indeed, the inclination of some independently wealthy persons to work and behave as intellectuals was one of the ways in which privileges of intellectuals were originally established.

Licensing Intellectuals Like independently wealthy persons intellectuals depart from contemporary assumptions about equality in another way. By accidents such as being born into the right family or by someone’s deliberate decision, those to whom the privileged role of intellectual is accorded are ordinarily chosen for life and are to some extent licensed to act capriciously or malevolently or lazily if they are so inclined. Although open competition based on universalistic criteria of educational attainment provides a measure of fairness in the licensing process, there is certainly no guarantee that those most suited to be intellectuals are the ones licensed, for there is no way of knowing in advance who the most suited are. Given the inability to determine who is and is not suited to be an intellectual and the possibility that a great many people might seek this role if they thought it safe and secure for loafing, the licensing of intellectuals customarily proceeds through educational and other institutions according to an arbitrary principle. This is to limit sharply the number of persons licensed in the hope that, because their numbers are not great, those chosen to be intellectuals will be inclined to compete in productive and useful ways. In recent decades, however, reforms making educational and other licensing processes fairer and more open have tended to undermine this principle. By greatly increasing the number of persons who seek to work and live as intellectuals, these reforms, which are part of the drive for fairness and equity in Western societies, reduce the chance of attaining notice other than by crude self-promotion. In this respect the reforms erode incentives and accountability among intellectuals and jeopardize effective performance of the intellectual function.

Work Realities It should be evident that this brief discussion of the ways in which requirements of effective “intellectual” work differ from requirements of “non-intellectual” work is hardly a cataloging of all problems of social

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organization. Yet it illustrates the pervasive conflict in modern societies between the commitment to equality as a goal and what the effective organization of most ordinary work requires. Unless one is willing to tolerate a large amount of perfunctory work efforts, the commitment to equality must frequently be sacrificed to the requirements of work organization. An excessive insistence on equality will just as surely prevent arrangements necessary for getting work done well and goods and services produced efficiently as will a dogmatic insistence on preserving past inequalities. Some intellectuals will still argue, however, that when coupled with continued improvements in work conditions the material plenty that modern technology delivers will somehow create a future in which all can work voluntarily and thereby have enough leisure to pursue the activities that are characteristic of intellectuals. This was always the goal of Marxist or so-called “scientific” socialism, and it continues to have adherents. For purposes of argument, at least, recent reductions of working time and increases in work incomes in Western societies can be said to begin to approach that ideal condition. For as Nicholas Eberstadt shows (202, 106–24) most employed persons no longer work very hard or very long by historical standards, and most have incomes sufficient to pursue a wide variety of individual interests during long weekends and lengthy paid vacations. The spread of these work conditions has presumably increased the enjoyment of life and reduced the alienation of many workers considerably. Yet, the by now large experience with the intermixing of work and leisure in no way supports the belief of many intellectuals that wholly voluntary work in the context of high living standards will meet all or nearly all needs of society. On the contrary, an important effect of widespread prosperity and shortened work hours has been to encourage the avoidance of many kinds of work as far as possible. Large parts of Western populations today regard truly hard manual or service work, even when it is well paid and accompanied by many fringe benefits, as too demeaning, boring, or draining to perform. Everywhere in the West the performance of such work requires large numbers of legal and illegal immigrants from less prosperous countries. Meanwhile, a considerable body of Westerners from relatively affluent and leisured middle- and working-class families depend upon public and private subsidies for their work activities and livelihoods. It is apparent, in other words, that when they get a taste of it most people are strongly attracted to leisure and that,

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unless it is exceptionally interesting or prestigious (and therefore in short supply) most work does not greatly satisfy human aspirations, no matter how equitably it is distributed and well remunerated. In sum, these reflections about the privileged situations of intellectuals, the apparent effects of equality in their situations, and about some wider aspects of work organization suggest the impossibility of attaining a principled socialist, neoliberal, or any other ideal condition. At the bottom, the functioning of Western societies depends vitally upon the provision of unequal chances for individuals to do the things to which all, or at any rate most, may aspire. Given this fundamental unfairness, it is illusory to assume that all or nearly all persons could adhere to a single ideal like the free equality that intellectuals enjoy, and it is a mistake to conceive of Western politics as a means for achieving that condition.

References Eberstadt, Nicolas. 2022. Men Without Work. The Post-Pandemic Edition. Conshohocken PA: Templeton Press. Gerstle, Gary. 2022. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Menand, Louis. 2021. The Free World. Art and Thought in the Cold War. New York: Farrar. Straus, Giroux.

CHAPTER 7

Plutocracy and Demagogy in a Weak State

In his mammoth Treatise on General Sociology (1916/1935) and a brief essay titled “The Plutocratic Cycle” in a collection of final essays titled The Transformation of Democracy (1921/1984), Vilfredo Pareto (1848– 1923) contended that “democracies” (he always punctuated the term) are in reality “demagogic plutocracies” in which the wealthy rule with representative trappings. Plutocracies, he argued, take two basic forms: “demagogic” and “military.” Each is a phase in plutocratic cycles. During a demagogic phase, the wealthy maintain a democratic façade and employ demagogy to shape public opinion and electoral outcomes to obtain favorable policies. Government power tends to be decentralized and weak, which enables “speculator” business interests to optimize high-risk forms of rent-seeking without much government oversight However, this eventually stymies economic productivity, because it encourages wealthy individuals and groups to vie with each other in non-productive and counterproductive ways. Plutocrats and governing elites become more concerned with consuming than creating wealth. Yet they are devious and cunning and able to maintain a hold on power for lengthy periods by manipulating sentiments of the masses. A demagogic phase persists until government is bankrupted, the economy unravels, and conservative inclinations of ordinary citizens are deeply offended. During an ensuing “military” phase (Pareto did not use “military” literally), the wealthy rule by coercion and force through repressive laws © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_7

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and actions that cripple opponents and rely heavily on police and the military to maintain order. Government power tends to be centralized and strong, the better to help “rentier” business interests reap profits from fixed income holdings, including stocks and bonds. But coercion and force spawn resistance, and as it grows pressures for more decentralized and less intrusive government spread. Governing elites eventually lose power, and another demagogic phase begins. For Pareto, political history was little more than a record of plutocratic cycles. Viewed through Pareto’s broad lens, the United States has since the Civil War been a demagogic plutocracy. The democracy that Alexis de Tocqueville observed in thinly populated and isolated settler societies during his nine-month visit in 1831 had only tiny and declining local aristocracies (2000). A fundamental, if apocalyptic, question about the United States at present is whether ominous climate, economic, financial, public health, and other trends signal the end of its lengthy demagogic plutocratic phase and the onset of a “military” plutocratic phase. Threats to plutocratic wealth and power are becoming so great that rentier business interests, in league with rising populist leaders and movements, may before long impose what amount to “military” measures in attempts to hold power and keep threats at bay.

A Weak State In America’s political vocabulary there is no equivalent of France’s État, Germany’s Staat or Scandinavia’s Staten. Speaking of a State strikes Americans as silly and a bit subversive. When they refer to states, Americans have in mind the governments located in their state capitals. The entity in Washington D.C. is the distant federal government and presidential administration running it. There have been 46 presidential administrations since 1789, but except during the Civil War in the 1860s, just one federal government that has never been seen as constituting a State. It is true that Americans speak of the Welfare State, but they usually do so to disparage what they regard as a European and economically questionable arrangement. During the 1980s and 1990s it was fashionable among American sociologists to urge “bringing the state back in” to explain why neo-Marxist class analysis failed to yield much explanatory fruit (Evans et al. 1985). But the locution acquired little use outside sociology.

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Silence about a State jibes with the federal government’s fundamental weakness, except during major wars. It is a hodgepodge of normally underfunded departments and agencies operating amid a welter of jurisdictional conflicts and tensions between legislative, executive, and judicial branches. It is, moreover, the feeble apex of a sharply decentralized federal system comprising 50 states, 3,000 counties, and 20,000 municipalities plus a handful of territories that include Washington D.C., the federal capital itself. Each state, county, and municipality have significant autonomy and power and they routinely count far more in American lives than the federal government. Together with decentralized federalism and the constitutional separation of legislative, executive, and judicial branches in Washington and in all state governments, there is a dispersal of power unmatched in any other Western country. Controlling for population size and excluding the national security domain, the federal government is appreciably smaller than the national governments of all other O.E.C.D. countries, and it subsists on tax revenues that, as a proportion of GDP, are smaller than in any major O.E.C.D. country, save Japan. Headed by a president popularly elected (albeit via an antique Electoral College) every four years and barred by constitutional amendment from serving more than eight years in office, the federal executive branch is dependent on the legislative branch for funding, approval of judicial and senior departmental and agency appointments, ratifications of treaties and covenants, plus a president can be impeached by the House and tried by the Senate for “high crimes and misdemeanors.” In formal constitutional terms, the bicameral Congress is more powerful than parliaments and legislatures in comparable countries, but it is much more undemocratic. The 100 Senators are elected for staggered six-year terms on a grossly disproportional basis (Wyoming’s 600.000 residents are represented by two senators as are California’s nearly 40 million residents) so that half the United States population is represented by 18 Senators and the other half by 82. The Senate’s filibuster rule allows 41 Senators representing ten percent of the public to block legislation supported by Senators representing the other 90 percent (Holder and Koppleman 2022). The 435-member House of Representatives is elected biennially—a frequency not found in any other Western country—based on mostly gerrymandered one-party electoral districts. Consequently, upwards of 90 percent of Representatives are re-elected so long as they secure a plurality of votes in party primaries

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that usually have small numbers of voters. Political scientist Jacob Grumbach observes that the United States is a country in which minority rule is entrenched, dissent is curtailed, and participation in democratic institutions is limited (2022, 175). More bluntly, Louis Menand writes that “Strictly speaking, American government has never been a government “by the people.” It is and has always been an “undemocratic democracy” (2022, 65–68). Even when one party holds a majority of seats in both the Senate and the House, little can be accomplished, because the chambers have coequal powers. Reconciling bills that one chamber passes with bills passed by the other chamber is often extraordinarily difficult. Often a bill passed in one chamber dies in the other. Leaders of party caucuses in Congress are powerless to ensure their members will vote as they request, because there is no way to punish those who do not. Senators and Representatives spend more time in their states and districts than in Washington, so the two chambers seldom convene for more than two or three days a week when in session for what is normally half a year. When sporadically in Washington, members of Congress snipe at the executive branch to enhance their name recognition when not pleading with wealthy donors and organized interests for campaign funds with which to deter possible opponents at the next primary or general election. Headed by nine Supreme Court Justices, the federal judiciary consists of 13 appellate courts and 94 district courts, all members of which are nominated to serve for life by the President but require Senate consent to be appointed. They are empowered to strike down legislation and executive actions as unconstitutional. Because of this power and because the legislative and executive branches as well as federal and state governments are often at legal loggerheads, judicial appointments, especially to the Supreme Court, are regarded as pivotal politically. Consequently, Senate considerations of presidential nominees have a strong partisan coloration and tend to be lengthy inquisitions. A weak and strongly decentralized federal state is the result of these and numerous other arrangements. This was not necessarily intended by the elites—the Founding Fathers as Americans call them—who created the Republic. Their obsession was preventing British and European “tyranny” from rearing its head in the New World. They believed that a separation of legislative, executive, and judicial power with multiple checks and balances would safeguard against tyranny. However, inducing thirteen previously distinct British colonies with disparate histories, economic interests, and

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religious identities to unite as states in a new Republic involved compromises and concessions, especially a strong guarantee of state rights and a government-hobbling Bill of Rights, being added to the constitution between 1789 and 1791 to secure ratification by the putative states. Political necessities ensured a weak federal state. That federal state’s weakness has most recently been manifest, tragically, in chaotic responses to the Covid-19 pandemic. Lacking the power to impose a uniform national policy against the virus’s spread, the federal government left states and localities to devise and impose their own rules for combatting the virus while competing for Personal Protective Equipment, medical ventilators, and numerous other devices needed to treat infected patients. When anti-Covid vaccines became available after January 2021, the lack of a federal plan for distributing them and organizing vaccinations together with obstinate refusals by southern and rural states and municipalities to mandate vaccinations and wearing of masks led to 1.1 million deaths—roughly 20 percent of world deaths in a population comprising only four percent of the world population—by the end of 2022. Partly in consequence, during 2020 and 2021 the average life expectancy of Americans fell by nearly three years, the largest decline in a hundred years and a decline not registered by any other developed country (Rabin 2022). In the face of new and spreading Covid-19 variants, approximately one-third of the American population remained unvaccinated and unwilling to be vaccinated, by far the highest such proportion in a Western country (Our World in Data, August 2022). To Americans, these are familiar aspects of the institutional and political disarray in which their weak state functions, although they are perhaps less familiar, at least in details, to non-Americans. There are innumerable accounts of the American state’s design and functioning, and I will highlight just two aspects. The first is how the weak state combined with fortuitous natural and historical circumstances to foster an exceptionally large and opulent plutocracy. The second is how the federal state’s weakness has enabled plutocrats and the elite persons and groups they largely fund and control to employ rampant demagogy to protect and advance plutocratic interests. Consistent with Pareto’s concept of demagogic plutocracy, the weak American state has been integral to the growth of plutocracy sustained by demagogy.

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Plutocracy During the two centuries that followed the Republic’s formation America benefited enormously from abundant free and rich land, a generally temperate climate, ample supplies of water, timber, minerals, and fossil fuels as well as waves of cheap immigrant labor and new technologies with which to absorb and exploit those resources. In economist Tyler Cowen’s phrase, American society harvested the “low-hanging fruit” of a vast and largely virgin continent at low costs with outsized profits (2011). Although it is today the world’s third most populous country, after India and China, the United States continues to benefit from low population density (43/sq. km compared with 110/sq. km in France, for example). The congeries of separated and checkmated powers at each level of government and the division of powers between levels made harvesting the continent’s low-hanging fruit a mostly private affair, little controlled or interfered with by governments. Wealth and political power flowed to large agricultural, business, financial, and land-owning interests that ruled the roost during most of the country’s independent history. A demagogic democracy can be said to have begun with the achievement of universal male suffrage following the Civil War, although male suffrage had important antecedents during the presidencies of Andrew Jackson and his pre-Civil War successors. Spurred by gross profiteering during the Civil War, the Gilded Age and Robber Barons of the late nineteenth century illustrated how industrialization and the plundering of bountiful resources, untrammeled by a strong state, created enormously wealthy plutocrats and governing elites (Burch 1981). New manufacturing, transportation, and communication technologies pioneered by innovative entrepreneurs expanded the plutocracy’s size and wealth during decades prior to World War I. In 1910, before a puny federal income tax was authorized by constitutional amendment in 1913, the richest 1% of Americans received 18% of all income (Noah 2012, 10). Huge profits stemming from America’s limited participation in the war fueled the Roaring Twenties, which was a decade of plutocratic ostentation and political dominance in America while European countries licked deep wounds from the war and its aftermath. The shares of total income captured by the richest 1% of Americans during the Roaring Twenties increased to 24% in 1926 and 26% in 1928 (Ibid., 15). By motivating reforms that extended the weak federal government’s regulatory reach, the Great Depression and Roosevelt New Deal briefly

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dented plutocratic wealth. Almost immediately, however, World War II and the destruction it wrought in countries capable of competing economically with the United States catapulted American plutocrats to global preeminence amid booming postwar consumption at home and outsized profits made by multinational corporations abroad. The illusion that a war-ravaged and still substantially agricultural Soviet Union constituted a lethal threat to the United States was propagated assiduously by Joseph McCarthy, Richard Nixon, and many other spreaders of paranoia (Hofstadter 1965). They rationalized a “weaponized Keynesianism” that further swelled plutocratic coffers with taxpayer monies funneled into a military-industrial complex. Twenty years later, stagflation resulting from deficit funding of the Vietnam War and increased oil prices triggered by the war between Egypt and Israel in October 1973 rattled plutocratic nerves. But under the banner of neoliberalism during and after the 1980s the federal and numerous state governments reduced taxes on the wealthy and rescinded regulations of business and finance (Gerstle 2022). This ensured the plutocracy’s further expansion and enrichment. G. William Domhoff (2022, 30–33) summarizes data compiled and analyzed by Emanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman (2020) showing that in 2018 the top 1% of American individuals or families owned 38% of all privately held wealth, which was an increase of 10% since 1989. In 2013 the top 1% owned over 40% of all financial wealth (stocks, bonds, real estate, and other liquid assets) while the bottom 80% owned only 5%. Half of the top 1% had a net worth of between $1.3 million and $1.7 million while those with a net worth of $24 million or more were in the top 0.01%. “Since 1980,” writes Thomas Piketty, “income inequality has exploded in the United States. The upper decile’s share increased from 30–35 percent of national income in the 1970s to 45–50 percent in the 2000.” He observes that “if change continues at the same pace, the upper decile will be raking in 60 percent of national income by 2030” (2014, 294). How large is the plutocracy? If it is defined as consisting of the most successful 5% of all those in the professions and managerial positions who are 25 or older, it encompasses about 2.4 million adults (Murray 2012, 20). If the affluent teenage children and young adults belonging to those persons’ households are included, the plutocracy numbers perhaps 3.5 million Americans, or about 1% of the total population. Yet to anyone who travels around the United States this number seems implausibly small. Opulence and wealth are observably more widespread. Using data

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from the 2000 census, Charles Murray ranked postal zip code areas on an index combining average levels of education and income in zip codes nationwide. The five percentile of zip codes ranking highest on his index—which Murray dubbed “Super Zips”—numbered 882 in 2000. In them, the mean percentage of adults with college degrees and median family incomes of $141,400 in 2000 was 63%. Their aggregate population was 9.4 million people aged 25 or older (2012, 78), about four times more than the 2.4 million making up the most successful 5% of people working in the professions and managerial positions. If teenage children and young adults tied to those 9.3 million people are included, one might speak of a plutocracy consisting of roughly 12 million people or between 3 and 4% of the total American population. Its size, wealth, and political weight are formidable. It might be objected that since World War II, but most dramatically since the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon in 2001, the United States has in fact been a strong “national security state,” in which the constitutional separation of powers is skewed sharply toward the executive branch, and plutocracy is hostage to national security needs. After 9/11, for example, the federal government spent $2 trillion on national security and created more than a thousand government organizations, units of which were located at some 17,000 sites around the country. Inside and outside the federal government, 854,000 persons held Top Secret clearances; the Department of Homeland Security, formed in the wake of 9/11, contained 88,000 employees; there were 16 intelligence agencies with publicly unknown budgets and numbers of employees overseen by a newly created Office of the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) which itself had 1,700 people working in its headquarters (Priest and Arkin 2011, 99–100). In Fiscal Year 2022 nearly $800 billion was spent by the federal government on defense, and the expenditures comprised approximately 40% of the federal budget, which in dollars equaled the defense budgets of all other countries combined. It can be said, in short, that in the domain of national security America has a strong state. This national security state is, however, quite thoroughly privatized and tied to plutocratic interests. Priest and Arkin (2011) showed that ten years after the 9/11 attacks in 2001 nearly 2,000 privately-owned companies and corporations worked on Top Secret contracts, although 90% of the work was done by 110 giant companies and corporations such as General Dynamics, Lockheed-Martin, and Raytheon, which reaped billions in

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profits from contracts for weapons, intelligence, and cyber mechanisms. In addition to the 84,000 persons holding Top Secret clearances, there were 265,000 private contractors and employees, of which 1,200 contractors worked in or immediately adjacent to DNI headquarters in Liberty Crossing, Virginia. The lengthy U.S. military and aid interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq were bonanzas for private companies (e.g., Packer 2006). In step with C. Wright Mills’ study of how converging interests and frequent rotations of corporate, executive government, and military leaders constituted a “power elite” in postwar America (1956), there is a door through which top military and intelligence officers, Pentagon officials and many senior civil servants pass into lucrative private sector jobs as lobbyists, business executives, and media commentators, all focused on national security. The national security state is a mainstay of the plutocracy, which is invested in its maintenance. In sum, there can be little doubt about the existence of a large and fabulously wealthy plutocracy, even if its exact size, wealth, and political power can be debated. I now want to highlight how self-interested political, business, and other elites tied to the plutocracy employ demagogy to deflect and muffle attacks on it and block legislative and regulatory government actions harmful to its interests.

Demagogy Throughout the history of the United States as an independent country, its principal elite groups have displayed ragged but nonetheless important amounts of unity and consensus. Key position-holders have typically had privileged family backgrounds, exclusive educations, and the advantages of inherited wealth (Baltzell 1964; Burch 1980; Domhoff 1990). They have moved with relative ease and frequency between organizations and institutions in diverse societal sectors via formal and informal networks of influence underpinned by family ties, friendships forged in prestigious private schools and universities, private social clubs, and occupational careers that have more often started at or near the top of organizational hierarchies than in the proverbial “mail room” (Domhoff 2020). Given the sheer size of the United States and its complex ethnic, racial, religious, and regional makeup, massive intakes of immigrants, public corruption, private thievery, disputed foreign entanglements, and its weak state, elite restraint has ebbed and flowed. Yet the main elite groups have

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adhered to an operational code of restrained partisanship. Except immediately before and during the Civil War, elite restraint has been the most important reason for the country’s long record of political stability. Until Donald Trump’s machinations after his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, no irregular seizure of executive power by force has occurred, was seriously attempted, or widely expected. For elites restrained partisanship means refraining from unqualified public denunciations of each other. It means maintaining an intra-elite discourse that is overall civil and respectful. Accusations of overt lying are usually avoided, and opponents are typically depicted as confused, poorly informed, misled, naïve, and so on. Disembodied institutions— Congress, the White House, executive branch departments and agencies, the courts, and the states—are targets of elite criticism, but individuals operating them are generally spared harsh invective or investigation. The restrained elite discourse has been visible in annual State of the Union addresses by presidents to Congress, in courteous and deferential legislative debates, and in media punditry that casts doubt on leaders’ sagacity or freedom from ideological bias but only occasionally alleges base motives. Of course, the gloves sometimes come off, but when they do the prevalent reaction is to portray bare-knuckled aggressors as irresponsible. Elites seldom label each other demagogues, because to do so would violate restrained partisanship. Nevertheless, except during genuine national emergencies such as the attacks on Pearl Harbor and the Twin Towers, elites are consumed by jurisdictional battles. Presidents, cabinet secretaries, and agency heads vie with congressional party leaders and committee chairpersons to produce anemic policies and laws. An example is the patchwork Affordable Care Act, dubbed “Obamacare” by its many opponents. Before it became law in 2010, an armada of well-funded lobbyists descended on Congress to protect the interests of insurance companies, health associations, hospitals, doctors, and a galaxy of other interests threatened by reform of the highly profitable private healthcare system. The same dynamic is readily observable in other policy areas. For example, a large and sophisticated “income defense industry” ensures that the highest income earners, especially the top tenth of the top 1 percent pay little or no income tax (Winters 2011, 213–253). Elites supported by private corporations and wealthy shareholders who profit greatly from the production of military equipment as well as hundreds of communities dependent on largess from

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nearby military bases stoke fears of imminent economic disaster and losing confrontations with foreign enemies should this applecart be upset. Since the introduction of universal male suffrage after the Civil War, there has been plenty of demagogy. It is employed conspicuously in praise of plutocracy, although never, of course, using the term. Plutocrats are commonly said by elites to exemplify the American Dream that anyone can get rich if they work hard enough, that upward social mobility is limitless (when, in fact, it is now more limited in the United States than in nearly all other O.E.C.D. countries), that everyone starts from the same place in life, and so on. “Captains of industry,” “Wizards of finance,” “Dynamic CEO’s” and similar labels for plutocrats are uttered daily. Their (tax deductible) donations to charities and public foundations are lauded; the media treat notable plutocrats like rock stars; their pronouncements on economic and political matters are paid worshipful attention; their inherited wealth and other advantages are seldom mentioned; they are Job Creators, not bosses. Demagogy reached its modern apogee in the political rise and presidency of Donald J. Trump. A deeply ignorant man and flamboyant plutocrat, Trump’s campaign for the presidency was laced with lies, falsehoods, and gross exaggerations. His demagoguery as president has been cataloged extensively (e.g., Wolff 2018, 2021; Rucker and Leonnig 2020; Woodward and Costa 2021). After refusing to accept defeat by Joseph Biden, Jr. in the 2020 election and insisting he had won in a “landslide,” Trump called on ardent supporters to converge on Washington on January 6, 2021, to “Stop the Steal!” As the chief Washington correspondent for The New York Times, put it, the resulting convulsion “capped 1,448 days of Twitter storms, provocations, race-baiting, busted norms, shock-jock governance and truth-bending” by Trump (Baker 2021). During the first year of his presidency, Trump advocated and signed into law a $2 trillion tax reduction, which was pushed through Congress by Republicans without a public hearing or single Democratic vote. Eighty-three percent of the reduction went to the top 10% of income earners. Claiming that the preceding Obama administration had eviscerated the military and defense, Trump and his administration increased the defense budget by more than 20% and the national debt by $7.8 trillion during four years in power. Conversely, in 2020, the last year of Trump’s presidency, failure to contain the spread of Covid-19 contributed to a 3.5% decline in annual GDP, the largest decline since 1946 when the United States demobilized after World War II and helped lay the

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ground for the 1.1 million Covid deaths and sharply declining average life expectancy noted above. Plutocracy and demagogy in a weak state are central aspects of the United States. Politicians parade before voters as populist nationalists and prevail in elections through deceptions, tricks, and blizzards of dishonest attack ads paid for by wealthy plutocrats. All in all, as Pareto observed of his native Italy and its weak state before Mussolini’s fascists took over, demagogic plutocracy persisted.

A “Military” Plutocracy? Except in exceedingly rare, sweeping revolutions, as in France between 1789–94 and Russia between 1917–21, shifts from demagogic to “military” plutocracies are gradual. They involve accumulating, ever more serious crises. With Italy in mind, Pareto added an appendix to the final set of essays he published in 1920, three years before his death (published collectively in 1921). He wrote, “For several years we have been noticing a series of social changes which have been intensified because of the war [World War I]. But will the overall pattern of change begin to subside, or will it generally accelerate, with occasional starts and stops, along its present course? … Either a new cycle will begin shortly, or a catastrophe will occur forcing future change” (1921, 63). Pareto’s uncertainty was soon resolved. Capitalizing on horrendous losses suffered by Italy in World War I and on fears sparked by workingclass uprisings in northern cities during 1919–21, Benito Mussolini and his Fascists marched on Rome and gained control of the government in 1922. Universal male suffrage had been introduced in 1919, and in the 1924 elections a Fascist-led bloc emerged with two-thirds of the vote. After the Socialist Party leader, Giacomo Matteotti, denounced the elections as rife with intimidation and fraud, he was assassinated by six Fascist squadistri, probably with Mussolini’s approval. Socialist, Communist, and other elite groups opposing Mussolini then boycotted parliament, which enabled Mussolini to begin a systematic suppression of rival elite persons and groups (Paxton 2004, 124–25). After escaping a fourth attempted assassination in 1926, Mussolini insisted on the political conformity and centralized government that Pareto had viewed as hallmarks of a “military” plutocracy. Speaking at a rally in Pennsylvania on August 25, 2022, and outside Independence Hall in Philadelphia two days later, President Joe Biden

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labeled Make America Great Again (MAGA) supporters a “semi-fascist” threat to democracy, The MAGA movement and its leader, Donald Trump, has several fascist features, to wit, an unqualified belief in America’s past greatness; a sense of white America’s decline and replacement by unpatriotic ethno-racial minorities; Trump’s claim of victimization by liberal media and “deep state” bureaucrats; and the superiority of the MAGA leader’s political instincts over equivocating politicians like Biden. There are, however, reasons to doubt a further Trump and MAGA triumph. MAGA has little group coherence; its supporters are a mélange of disgruntled rural residents, white southerners, a few business leaders, a small number of ultra-conservative intellectuals, and ambitious Republican politicians. Trump’s distaste for the details of government was displayed fully when he had been in the White House. Ensconced in his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida after 2020 and fixated on how and why Biden defeated him by eight million votes, Trump was besieged by federal and state investigations for concealing “hush payments” to women with whom he had liaisons, tax fraud, obstructions of justice, and even espionage. On Inauguration Day in January 2025, moreover, he would be 79 years of age. The unlikelihood of a triumph by Trump and his MAGA followers does not mean, however, that America’s demagogic plutocracy is immune from fascism or some other manifestation of a “military” plutocracy. The decentralized and weak American state and its convoluted representative trappings may not withstand the severe water and food shortages, droughts and floods, and waves of migrants fleeing starvation that accelerating climate change is certain to bring. The “military” phase of Pareto’s plutocratic cycle, involving a centralized and strong state that primarily uses coercion and force rather than deception and manipulation to govern, may begin. As if to betoken this, in July 2023 aides to Trump made known plans, should he again reside in the White House, to increase presidential authority over every part of the federal government that has previously been independent of White House control. “What we are trying to do is identify the pockets of independence and seize them,” said one of Trump’s top lieutenants (Swan et al. 2023).

References Baker, Peter. 2021. “The Violent End of the Trump Era: A Mob and the Breach of Democracy.” New York Times, January 7, A1.

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Baltzell, Edward Digby. 1964. Philadelphia Gentlemen. The Making of a National Upper Class. New York: Collier. Burch, Philip H. 1980. Elites in American History, 3 volumes. New York: Holmes & Meier. Cowen, Tyler. 2011. The Great Stagnation. New York: Dutton. Domhoff, G. William. 1990. The Power Elite and the State. How Policy is Made in America. Hawthorne NY: Aldine de Gruyter. Domhoff, G. William. 2020. The Corporate Rich and the Power Elite in the Twentieth Century. New York: Routledge. Evans, Peter B., Deitrich Rueschemeyer, and Theda Skocpol, eds. 1985. Bringing the State Back In. New York: Cambridge University Press. Gerstle, Gary. 2022. The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. America and the World in the Free Market Era. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grumbach, Jacob M. 2022. Laboratories Against Democracy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hofstadter, Richard. 1965. The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays. New York: Knopf. Holder, Eric, and Sam Koppleman. 2022. Our Unfinished March. New York: Random House. Menand, Louis. 2022. “Drawing Lines: Our Undemocratic Democracy.” The New Yorker, August 22, 65–68. Mills, C. Wright. 1956. The Power Elite. New York: Oxford University Press. Murray, Charles. 2012. Coming Apart. The State of White America,1960–2010. New York: Crown Forum. Noah, Timothy. 2012. The Great Divergence. New York: Bloomsbury Press. Packer, George. 2006. The Assassin’s Gate. America in Iraq. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Pareto, Vilfredo. 1916/1935. Treatise on General Sociology. Edited by Arthur Livingston and published as The Mind and Society. Translated by Andrew Bongiorno and Arthur Livingston New York: Dover. Pareto, Vilfredo.1921/1984. The Transformation of Democracy. Vilfredo Pareto. Edited with an Introduction by Charles H. Powers, translated by Renata Girola. New Brunswick NJ: Transaction Books. Paxton, Robert O. 2004. The Anatomy of Fascism. New York: Knopf. Piketty, Thomas. 2014. Capital in the Twenty-First Century. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Priest, Dana, and William M. Arkin. 2011. Top Secret America. The Rise of the New American Security State. New York: Little, Brown. Rabin, Roni Caryn. 2022. “Life Expectancy for Americans Sharply Drops.” New York Times, August 31. Rucker, Philip, and Carol Leonnig. 2020. A Very Stable Genius. Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America. New York: Random House.

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Saez, Emmanuel, and Gabriel Zuman. 2020. “The Rise of Income and Wealth Inequality in America: Evidence from Distributional Macroeconomic Accounts.” Journal of Economic Perspectives 30: 3–26. Swan, Jonathan, Charlie Savage, and Maggie Haberman. 2023. “Trump and Allies Seeking Vast Increase of His Power.” New York Times, July 17, 1. Winters, Jeffrey. 2011. Oligarchy. New York: Cambridge University Press. Wolff, Michael. 2018. Fire and Fury. Inside the Trump White House. New York: Henry Holt. ———. 2021. Landslide. The Final Days of the Trump Presidency. New York: Henry Holt. Woodward, Bob, and Robert Costa. 2021. Peril. New York: Simon & Schuster.

CHAPTER 8

The Democracy Ideal Reconsidered

As any avid reader of history should know, politics are usually harsh, conflict-ridden, and predatory. Special interests normally get their way in power until they are supplanted by better-situated or shrewder forces. Ideals have little place. Lately in Western societies, however, things have not been so bad. With increased productivity and knowledge of the physical world—especially how Earth’s location in the solar system alone makes life possible—population majorities have been substantially disarmed by material affluence. Predacious and fierce political behavior has declined sufficiently so that political ideals have an influence on people’s lives. Despite pockets of poverty and discrimination, ideals are enforced to a significant extent. Practically everyone in the more influential circles of Western societies believes in democracy as ideal and political standard. For these generally well-off persons, democracy serves to justify the fairness of their advantaged positions, it serves as a guarantee they will not be too harshly judged for their greater success, and it is a comfortable set of rules under which politics can be played without the usual severe penalties for losers. Even among influential circles in less developed and affluent societies no one derogates the democracy ideal and standard, because to do so seems tantamount to admitting that international inequality is inevitable, and because so long as all profess democracy there is some chance of obtaining advantages and subventions from Western countries. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6_8

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Unquestionably, professing the democracy ideal has brought many advantages to the score or so Western societies that have attained a high level of socioeconomic development. Yet one of the major difficulties facing them today arises from their widespread tendency to mistake the democracy ideal for political reality. Ideal democracy, in the sense of equal influence for all, is never closely approached in even the best established, most representative political systems of the West because it simply cannot be attained in complex societies. In most non-Western political systems, the democracy ideal is not remotely approached. Transparently strategic professions of it do not conceal political practices that bear no resemblance to the deference to electoral outcomes and rules of procedural fairness that pass for democracy in prosperous Western societies. The democracy ideal gives rise to a palpably wrong factual conception of politics because it denies that politics arise out of real conflicts that cannot be reconciled by communication and consultation—by “conversations” in current vernacular. This avoids the historically obvious fact that when they are successful political rulers impose their own conceptions of justice even though these are never fully convincing to most people they rule. Yet some degree of social order, even if inevitably partial, is a necessity. By imposing their own conceptions of justice, political rulers create partial order. There is no conceivable way to establish political equality for all except by making persons wholly equal in their possessions, social status, and lack of freedom. To attempt or even pretend to enforce such equality necessarily involves a bureaucratic tyranny, as in China and Russia. As years go by, a tyranny becomes desperately resented by sensitive and broadly educated citizens. Because true political equality can never be achieved in complex societies, every regime allows much inequality in practice. Who is favored in such inequality is ultimately a matter of circumstance: persons who have been at the right place at the right time come out better than others. Given high material productivity and affluence in Western societies, the effects of rulers’ inherently self-interested actions may be restrained by appealing to the democracy ideal. But without high productivity and affluence anything passing even roughly for democratic restraint on the worst abuses of power is exceedingly difficult or impossible to attain. Unfortunately, much of the world lacks any foreseeable prospect of attaining the productivity and affluence required to make the democracy ideal partly enforceable.

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In this situation how should social scientists, policymakers, and others think about the democracy ideal so they can derive as much as professing it can accomplish politically and still be thinking and talking about politics in the real world? This question has prompted me to advance a theory of elites and non-elites in politics. It contradicts the explicitly or implicitly democratic assumptions that have long dominated thinking in Western societies about politics. It sees the serious business of politics as involving adjustments of claims and potential conflicts of interest. Methods used are sometimes distributive, giving aggrieved groups some of what they desire, and sometimes repressive, using force or the threat of it to discourage such groups from exerting demands violently. My theory contends that distributive or repressive operations are carried out by elites who are in no sense neutral and who seek advantages for themselves, their families, and their associates. These elites are not, however, free to take whatever actions and measures they like. Instead, they are dependent on the political orientations of non-elites and non-elite support for measures they take in governing a society. Yet despite their dependence on non-elite sentiments and support elite persons normally have enough leeway to buy off or repress potential conflicts. This alone enables a country to continue to exist and allow a considerable portion of its elites to pass their statuses on to relatives and friends. The theory is not concerned with the politics of nonliterate tribes, thin settlements of literate peoples in resource-rich wildernesses, or even states comprised of largely self-sufficient peasant populations spread over wide territories and dominated by leisured aristocrats. It places all such political entities, which are characterized by the absence of bureaucratic organization, in the socioeconomic category of undeveloped or severely under-developed. The theory is concerned solely with the politics of countries having clear divisions of labor that are regulated and operated to a large extent through bureaucratic processes relating to defense, policing, taxcollecting, and the training and selection of various types of specialized personnel. It distinguishes the extent of bureaucratic processes in these countries, classifying those with limited bureaucratization as preindustrial, those with moderate bureaucratization as industrial, and those with extensive bureaucratization as post-industrial. In all pre-industrial, industrial, and post-industrial countries, there are elites consisting of persons whose activity in strategic bureaucratic

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positions assures their personal influence on decisions that affect the wellbeing of many other people. When policy questions become concrete and complex, the number of non-elite citizens seriously concerned with policy outcomes diminishes, and the influence of public opinion on policies becomes less authoritative. This is illustrated by the regularly lower participation rates of voters in normal citizen initiatives, referendums, and direct party primary elections compared with participation rates in elections where only broad and general partisan endorsements are solicited. This is true even when policies concern such common goals as national defense and environmental survival. Elites propose, question, evade, modify, and sometimes clearly declare public policies that always contain arbitrary advantages for some people and disadvantages for others. They do this subject to possible non-elite vetoes or resistance, although in practice the non-elite limitation is usually vague and general. My theory distinguishes four basic configurations of elite trust or distrust that can be shown to have existed during modern history and at present. It describes how each elite configuration interrelates with variations in the political orientations of non-elites as countries undergo socioeconomic development and how in rare but propitious circumstances elite configurations have sometimes been transformed into another configuration. Governance ultimately involves limiting or reducing the conscious sense of conflict among different parts of the population. This is for the simple reason that increases in conscious conflicts of interest make a country less and less easy to govern, and beyond some threshold they make its continued existence impossible. My theory’s fundamental contention is that elite action and functioning are so basic in modern societies that the structure and behavior of elites constitute the most fundamental distinction between political systems. The extent to which elites do or do not trust and cooperate with each other is what normally determines political stability or instability. It is logically and factually prior to all constitutional and institutional arrangements and to the existence of any practical and durable degree of democratic politics.

Epilogue

Born in 1938, the post-Depression, post-World War II generation to which I belong experienced strong economic growth and relative political tranquility in the leading Anglo-American and West European countries during what French economists dub Les Trente Glorieuses —the thirty years of steady economic expansion from 1945 to 1975. However, the world presented Western countries with a severe anomaly. Free institutions—competitive elections, tolerance of dissenting views, systematic respect for personal liberties plus high economic productivity—were confined to the relatively few technologically advanced and prosperous Western countries. How to transfer the advantages of free institutions and productive techniques to less prosperous countries, especially those being created by the rapid dissolution of colonial empires, was a major academic and policy question addressed by Gabriel Almond and James Coleman (1960), Walt W. Rostow (1960), and many other scholars. G. Lowell Field, my doctoral mentor at the University of Connecticut during the 1960s, devoted himself to this question and developed a theory relating to its political aspects that, he showed, was supported by a wealth of evidence from the previous four centuries (Field 1967). Employing an abstruse, unfamiliar terminology, his theory rigorously adopted the hypothetico-deductive method in philosophy of science. It demanded of readers that they learn a new vocabulary and be enlightened via an unfamiliar explicative process. Not surprisingly, the theory received little attention. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6

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In working with Field’s theory as a graduate student, I found myself adopting a more pessimistic view of the political world than I previously held. Field showed, convincingly in my view, that the kind of political instability manifested in frequent coups d’état, open military rule, and scant respect for established constitutional forms—often thinly disguised by dynastic continuities—was the usual, persistent, and normal form of politics in reasonably large states, including most Western states, during modern history. Attempts to institute stable democratic government in states with this background were doomed to fail; at the first crisis an open seizure of power would occur. Field showed, in other words, that instituting democracy does not by itself create stable political institutions; rather, stable institutions depend for their existence upon stability that has otherwise and already been achieved. Asking how stable institutions came about in the few Western polities where they prevailed, Field and I concluded during the early 1970s that they arose from a condition in which national elites became much more “unified” (in the sense of mutually trusting) than was usual in history. Such elites could and would normally manage politics to preserve their own unity and interests by preventing divisive issues from reaching acute degrees triggering overt seizures of power and breaches of accepted norms for exercising authority. If this was true, then there was no use working directly to institute democratic government where institutions were fundamentally unstable. Somehow or other a unified national elite would have to be established first. We thus assessed the spread of democratic government to more than a few non-Western countries as unlikely. Western countries in which such government existed would have to live in a world largely comprised of countries practicing forms of elite politics quite different from their own. In 1973 we published a monograph, Elites and Non-Elites: The Possibilities and Their Side Effects, that conceptualized and explored the basic historical and contemporary patterns of national elite unity and disunity and characteristics of regimes associated with each pattern. The monograph also presented a scheme for comprehending the political orientations and actions of mass populations (non-elites) during socioeconomic development: pre-industrial populations comprised almost entirely of agricultural and artisan workers wanting mainly to be left alone; industrial populations divided more or less evenly between agricultural-artisan, alienated manual industrial, and managerial bureaucratic and service workers; postindustrial (“developed”) populations in which bureaucratic and service workers

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and their managerial political orientation are overwhelmingly dominant. Our monograph was published as the penultimate number in a relatively obscure series that was terminated a few months later. Consequently, it had few readers. An updated and considerably revised version appears in my recent book, Elites, Non-Elites, and Political Realism (2021, 1–38). Despite our pessimistic assessment of political possibilities worldwide, Field and I did not in the early 1970s foresee difficulties of a fundamental character facing Western countries internally. We suspected that the affluent post-industrial condition was sufficiently novel to require revisions of customary cultural norms and even social philosophy, but we did not doubt that this could be accomplished satisfactorily in a generation or so and that, in the meantime, politics in the leading Western countries would continue to be managed successfully by unified national elites. We took it for granted that where such elites existed their ability to contain whatever political problems might arise (except for international warfare) would persist. We thought the affluent post-industrial condition involved no deep social and economic problems that clever elite persons heading a society’s most important organizations could not manage effectively and beneficially. Later in the 1970s, however, Field and I concluded that structural difficulties in post-industrial Western societies threatened troubles that mere skill in political manipulation by mutually trusting elites might not be able to contain or resolve. They involved failures to provide reliably for the useful employment of persons who could not (like the very young and very old) be incontestably treated as freely entitled to community support. The failures had three dimensions: (1) Youth growing up in what is essentially cultivated and indulged leisure without any realistic prospect of being able to continue in such leisure as adults; (2) Almost all available employment becoming sophisticated, if not seriously technical, so that substantial bodies of the “culturally deprived” (immigrants, rural dwellers, rural-to-urban migrants, population segments systematically discriminated against) cannot secure anything other than precarious and poorly paid employment and thus become effectively idle and dependent upon community support; (3) Among the large mass of generally educated persons who succeed in finding reasonably satisfactory places in occupational and community life the desire to be consulted and involved in decision-making so as not to feel “governed” by others is so strong that managerial functions performed by elites can be executed only with much difficulty.

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To provide a realistic and constructive way of thinking about these and other post-industrial aspects of Western societies, Field and I published a manifesto titled Elitism (1980). It sought to place the structural difficulties that worried us in the context of elite theory, social science paradigms, and the history of Western civilization while suggesting general lines along which the difficulties could be usefully addressed. Lowell suffered an aneurysm that required amputation of half of one leg. His health deteriorated during the 1980s, and he passed away in 1997 at the age of 85. His deteriorating health and eventual death ended a collaboration that warrants recording, because it may be of some use to those interested in the recent history of social science.

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Index

A Abortion, 9 Affordable Care Act, 76 Afghanistan, 17 Almond, Gabriel, 87 Al-Qaeda, 55 Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD), 31 Anglo-American, viii Angola, 36 Arabian Peninsula, 55 Argentina, 41 Artificial Intelligence, 3 Asahara, Shoko, 54 Aum Shrinrikyo (Supreme Truth), 54 Australia, 10 Austria, 17 Austria’s Freedom Party, 31 B Balkans, 36 Baltic states, 36 Bangladesh, 37 Barbados, 37 Belgium, 26

Biden, Joseph, Jr., 77 Biden, President Joe, 78 Black Panthers, 56 Blair, Tony, 49 Brazil, 41 Breivik, Anders Behring, 54 Brexit, 30 Brexiteer leaders, 30 Brigades Rossi (Red Brigades), 57 Britain, 39 British Empire, 36 Brothers of Italy, The, 31 Brunei, 37 Bryant, Martin, 54 Bureaucracy, 4 Bureaucratic and service workers, 1 Bureaucratic processes, 85 Burkina Faso, 36 Bush, George H.P., 49 Bush, George W., 49 C Calamity avoidance policies, 6 Calles, Plutarco, 37

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Higley, Western Elites and Societies in Twenty-First Century Politics, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-52307-6

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INDEX

Cambodia, 37 Cameron, David, 31 Canada, 17 Capitalism, 43 Centrist elite and party majorities, 7 Centrist elites and parties, 7 Chad, 36 Chile, 41 China, 19 Civil Rights movement, 48 Climate change, 1 Clinton, Hillary, 31 Cohn, Norman, 51 Cold War, 47 Coleman, James, 87 Communist Manifesto, The, 58 Consciousness III, 52 COP27 climate change summit, 2 Costa Rica, 37 Covid-19 pandemic, 2, 71 Cowen, Tyler, 72 Czech Republic, 26

D Dahl, Robert, 24 de Gaulle, Charles, 57 Demagogy, 75 Democracy, 26 as ideal and political standard, 83 enthusiasts, 22 Democratic Republic of the Congo, 36 Democratic stability, 33 Democratic suffrage, 27 Democratic theory, 22 Demographic policies, 7 Denmark, 26 Denmark’s People’s Party, 31 Department of Homeland Security, 74 Dependency statuses, 10 Diamond, Larry, 49

Director of National Intelligence (DNI), 74 Domhoff, G. William, 73 Dominican Republic, 37 Dutch society, 19

E Eastern Europe, 36 Eberstadt, Nicholas, 63 Economic policies, 10 Economic redistribution, 5 Elite attitudes, 38 Elite safety and security, 33 Elite theory, 21 Elite trust, origins of, 25 Elite unity/disunity, 40, 88 Elitism, 90 England, 44 England’s Glorious Revolution, 25 Environmental pollution, 18 Ethiopia, 36 Ethos of Western elites, 19 European Free Trade Area, 9 European Union, 8

F Farage, Nigel, 29 Fascists, 78 Female suffrage, 35 Field, G. Lowell, 87 Finland, 26 Ford, Doug, 28 Foreign policies, 15 France, viii Freedom House, 50 Friedman, Milton, 62

G Germany, 17, 35 Gerstle, Gary, 62

INDEX

Ghana, 37 Goodman, Paul, 52 Governance, 86 Governance policies, 14 Gray, John, 47 Great Recession of 2008–2009, 49 Greece, 26 Grumbach, Jacob, 70 Guinea, 36 Guterres, António, 2 Guyana, 54

H Hindu nationalism, 40 Hofstadter, Richard, 56 Holland, 44 Hungary, 9

I Independence Party, 29 India, 37 Indonesia, 37 Inglehart, Ronald, 27 Interest-group politics, 6 Iran, 19 Iraq, 17 Israel, 36 Italy, viii

J John Jr, 55 Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 57 Jonestown, 54 Juvenile delinquents, 13

K Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 55 Kenya, 36, 41 Khamenei, Ali, 19

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Koresh, David, 54 L Laos, 37 Latin America, 36 Le Pen, Marine, 31 Levitsky, Steven, 24 Liberalism, 43 Licensing intellectuals, 64 Locke, John, 44 Low countries, 39 Lumpenproletariat , 59 M Make America Great Again (MAGA), 79 Malaysia, 37 Male suffrage, 46 Mali, 36 Marxism, 5 Marxist theory, 21 Marx, Karl, deflection of, 58 Mass immigrations, 8 Massu, Jacques, 57 Matteotti, Giacomo, 78 McCarthy, Joseph, 73 McVeigh, Timothy, 54 Meloni, Giorgia, 31 Menand, Louis, 47 Mexico, 17 Military plutocracy, 78 Mills, C. Wright, 75 Mogelson, Luke, 56 Mongolia, 37 Moro, Aldo, 57 Morocco, 36 Mozambique, 36 Murray, Charles, 74 Mussolini, Benito, 78 Mutual elite trust, 24 Myanmar, 37

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INDEX

N National states, 16 Nation of Islam, 57 Neoliberalism, 62 Neo-Marxists, 62 Nepal, 37 New Zealand, 17 Nigeria, 36 Nihilism, 54 Nixon, Richard, 73 Non-elites, 85 Non-Western countries, 15 Nordic countries, 17 Norris, Pippa, 27 North Korea, 37 Norway, 26 Norway’s Progressive Party, 31 O Oath Keepers, 56 Overpopulation, 8 P Pakistan, 37 Pareto, Vilfredo, 22, 67 Parousia, 51 Party of Freedom, 31 Penal policies, 11 Penal practices, 12 Peru, 45 Philippines, 37 Piketty, Thomas, 45 Plattner, Mark, 50 Plutocracy, 72 Plutocratic cycle, 79 Pluto-populism, 29 Poland, 9 Political elites, 6 Political polarization, 41 Political restraint, 24 Politics as bargaining, 28

Politics as war, 28 Population reduction, 9 Populist nationalism, 41 Populists, 27 Port Arthur, Tasmania, 54 Portugal, 26 Post-industrial Western societies, structural difficulties in, 89 Proud Boys, 56 Putin, Vladimir, 19

Q QAnon, 55

R Red Army Faction, 57 Reich, Charles A., 52 Reisman, David, 52 Representative government, 35 Rostow, Walt W., 87 Russia, 19 Rutte, Mark, 31

S Saez, Emanuel, 73 Saïd and Chérif Kouachi, 55 Sanders, Bernie, 31 Scandinavian, viii Senegal, 41 Sexual revolution, 9 Silicon Valley, 3 Singapore, 37 Slavitt, Andy, 3 Slovakia, 26 Slovenia, 25 Social and political controls, 11 Social Democrats (SPD), 31 Social disorder, 16 Socialism, 45 Social order, 84

INDEX

Social protest and radicalism, 51 South Africa, 37 South Korea, 37 Soviet elites, 45 Soviet Union, 36 Spain, 25 Sri Lanka, 37 Stable democracy, 24 Stable political institutions, 40 Sudan, 36 Sweden, 35 Sweden’s constitutional settlement, 25 Swiss People’s Party, 31 Switzerland’s brief civil war, 25 T Taiwan, 37 Tanzania, 37 Thailand, 37 Thatcher, Margaret, 49 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 68 Trilling, Lionel, 61 Trump, Donald, 18 Tunisia, 36 Turkey, 17 U Ukraine, 8 Undemocratic democracy, 70 Unemployment, 10 Unified national elites, 89 UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2 United Dutch Provinces, 25 United Kingdom, 10 United States, vii UN Population Prospects, 8 Uruguay, 37

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V Vietnam, 37 Vince, Gaia, 2 Volpe, Giorgio, 22

W Waco, Texas, 54 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 44 Weber, Max, 22 Western conception of politics, 61 Western countries, 15 Western idea of progress, vii Western institutions and processes, viii Western intellectuals, 61 Western liberal and radical tradition, vii Western military dominance, 5 West European societies, 53 West Germany, 26 Wilders, Geert, 31 Work, 5 Work realities, 64 World-system, 44

X Xi Jinping, 19

Y Yugoslavia, 26

Z Zambia, 41 Ziblatt, Daniel, 24 Zimbabwe, 36 Zucman, Gabriel, 73