The New Aristocracy
Quietly and almost unobserved, a new aristocracy has been
evolving for the past two centuries. This evolution has
reached the stage where this elite, like the mediaeval
nobility, have sympathy for their own class anywhere and
contempt and unconcern for the mass of people everywhere.
Their power is increasing by bounds. They seek to extend it
ever more across national boundaries. Their loyalty is to
their class not their country.
Who are the members of this new nobility? They fall into two
groups. The dominant group is drawn from the upper reaches of
ruling elites of the ostensibly democratic states of the
West. The subordinate group is formed by the super rich in
the Second and Third worlds. The latter are to a degree the
clients of the western elites.
This new elite is profoundly dangerous, for after a century
and a half of the nation state standing dominant in the West,
political fashion is hot footing it towards the
supranational. This is of fundamental importance because
the weak have only ever exercised significant control
over the powerful where a coherent sense of community has
existed together with a sharply defined political authority.
Empires and federations containing diverse racial and
cultural identities are the enemy of popular control, because
their heterogeneity ensures that there is no single national
focus of popular dissent and provides ruling elites with
the opportunity to exercise power through a policy of divide
and rule. It is a sovereign fact that representative
government elected on a broad franchise only occurred after
the rise of the nation state.
In Britain we see the consequences of supranationalism most
obviously in the ever more public impotence of our
government in the face of Brussels. But that impotence is
just the tip of a very dirty political iceberg. Throughout
the West, such meaningful popular political control as has
been developed in the past two hundred years is being
steadily removed from electorates. Why is this happening?
The general answer is that ruling elites are immensely
durable. Individuals may fall from grace, but ruling elites
as a class mostly do not; rather they evolve. Thus in our
own time we see the rulers of the communist bloc
effortlessly transmuted into the controllers of supposed new
democracies.
Modern ostensible democracies are in fact elective
oligarchies, that is the mass of the people are offered the
chance to vote for representatives drawn from a very
restricted group of people. That restriction applies
regardless of the type of voting system or the strength of
party. In Britain with its strong party system and
constituency based representation, the elector is offered the
choice of two parties. In Germany the electorate may
effectively vote only for a coalition. In the USA the
enfranchised choose only from those able to command the
considerable amounts of money needed to conduct campaigns.
In every case a small elite controls elections by
controlling access to the media and the electoral process
and, most importantly, by controlling the selection of
candidates to stand under mainstream political banners. The
practical result is that those standing with any hope of
success are those with a big party label or, where party is
weak, the backing of political coalitions. The past two
centuries have seen the power of western elites mitigated,
but the elites have never lost control.
To understand exactly how successful elites have been in
retaining control let us take England as an example. The
historian, Lewis Namier, calculated that eighteenth century
England was controlled by roughly 200 families. I suspect
that even today the figure is no more than 1000 families.
Consider who actually makes the decisions and engages in
the executive actions which dramatically affect our lives.
There is the PM who is effectively a monarch whilst in
power. There is the cabinet. There are a couple of dozen
senior civil servants. A few dozen men control our media.
There are the leaders of the armed forces and senior
policemen. There are perhaps two hundred nationally
significant businessmen. There are the very rich. And that
is it.
The elites have been able to retain control for two reasons.
The first is the fact that money, political power, the
experience of exercising authority, superior education
and social status go a long way to preserving the position
of elites as a class under most circumstances. The exceptions
- which are only partial because of the ability of elites to
move themselves and their capital abroad - are instances such
as the treatment of the aristocracy and bourgeoise in Soviet
Russia and the French aristocracy after the revolution.
The second reason is the corruption of democratic aspirations
from within. Early in this century, the German sociologist
Robert Michels described a social phenomenon which he named
the Iron Law of Oligarchy. Michels saw that institutions
ostensibly dedicated to furthering the interests of the
masses, such as trade unions and political parties with
democratic aims, rapidly degenerated into self-serving
oligarchies. This occurred because the elected leaders and
officers of the institutions were invariably driven by
self-interest to develop ends which were antagonistic towards
the interests of the grassroot members, while the
bureaucratisation of the institution rendered grassroot
members increasingly powerless to prevent the betrayal of the
institution's ostensible ends. The extent of the betrayal
in each instance is debatable: the fact that it has
invariably occurred is not. A classic example of Michels'
law in our own time is "New Labour".
The world weary cynic might ask does it matter? After all, he
will argue, the western elites have not actively oppressed
the masses for the past half century. The answer to that is
that western elites have been constrained during that period
by a unique set of circumstances which no longer obtain and
are unlikely to be repeated. These circumstances include the
democratic climate created by the last world war, a
comparative scarcity of labour, the widespread availability
of low skill employment and the legal and moral legacy of the
previous century, namely a mass of legislation designed to
protect the working man and a political climate favourable to
the idea of social obligation towards the less fortunate or
competent members of society.
Already the portents of a harsher ruling elite ideology are
there. The Welfare State is increasingly presented by
politicians of supposedly widely different political colours
as a grotesque liability rather than a boon. Employees in
Britain have less legal protection now than they enjoyed in
the early years of this century. The poor are treated as an
embarrassment rather than an indictment of the society which
fails them. Those in power have lost their social conscience.
The old platitudes may be chanted about the need to protect
the weak, but that is all they are, platitudes.
What has caused this change of ruling elite mentality? To
understand that, one must delve into the political sociology
of the past two centuries. With the advent of broad electoral
franchises, traditional elites had to adapt if they were to
retain political power. Over time the old elite mutated.
Formal social rank became largely unimportant. Wealth became
God. Plutocracy replaced the old aristocracy. But if the
elite evolved it remained an elite. It thwarted democracy
by controlling entry into the elite and by manipulating the
mass media.
With a mutation of elite personnel came a changed ideology.
The 19th century saw both the development of a politically
expressed social conscience and imperial expansion. The
former event resulted in increasing state involvement to
assist the poor. The responsibilities of empires, both
formally acknowledged (European) and unacknowledged
(American) produced western ruling elites accustomed to
thinking internationally and paternally. The growth of
international trade and movement after the advent of the
steamship strengthened the internationalist tendency.
The result was that western ruling elites developed a
paternalism which first embraced their masses and eventually
evolved into a concern for the whole of Mankind. After two
world wars, political power and leadership in the West
passed from Europe to America. The USA transformed the
paternalistic ideals of the late imperial period into a
global paternalism mediated through the UN and its agencies.
This global paternalism was a dangerous game to play under
any circumstances, because the ideals and political systems
of the West were simply impractical in most of the world.
However, for forty odd years the system creaked along without
causing mortal damage largely because the West engaged in
political not economic action. Then in the 1980s came the
exponents of laizez faire and international free trade. Both
policies thoroughly undermined the idea of society in the
form of the state being ultimately responsible for its
citizens' welfare, a social lender of the last resort. When
the parties ostensibly committed to social welfare adopted
out of desperation the policies of free trade and laizez
faire, the consequence was that western electorates were
left with no meaningful choice.
By the 1990 the old dramatic political lines between right
and left were largely gone. An intense community of
interest and ideas had developed within the western elite as
a whole, a uniformity best illustrated in Britain by our
elite's public responses to the two greatest political
issues of the day, namely our membership of the EU and the
consequences of mass immigration. There is not a single MP
who is willing to publicly oppose our membership of the EU.
There is not a single newspaper which has as its editorial
policy our withdrawal from the EU. Broadcasters and
journalists overwhelmingly support not only our membership
but wish us to enter EMU. As for mass immigration and its
consequences, we have the salutary fact that no politician
has seriously addressed the question since Enoch Powell in
the 1970 election.
The new aristocracy know in their heart of hearts that the
policies generated by their ideology are impractical. But
they dare not say it because of the fear of the
consequences. So just as the benighted ideologues of the
Soviet Empire kept to the dictates of Marxist-Leninism right
to the end, so the new nobility blindly follow their secular
religious beliefs of "anti racism", "nondiscrimination",
"free trade", "free markets", "globalisation" and such forth
regardless of the damage being done. The result of this
irresponsibility is likely to be international economic
dislocation on a massive scale.
The outlook for most people in the West is bleak. The new
aristocracy, through their wealth and control of
institutions such as the police and the armed forces, will
be able to protect themselves from the economic and political
blizzards ahead. When shove comes to push they will not give
a damn about the fate of those unable to fend for themselves.
Rather they will oppress the masses to preserve their own
status. The masses, robbed of any meaningful political
control, will be powerless.
Unless the power of the new aristocracy is controlled, the
past two centuries may be viewed in retrospect as an anomaly
in human history, the sole brief period when a mixture of
technological and political circumstances permitted
meaningful control of the powerful by the weak. How is their
power to be restricted? Space dictates that that is a subject
for another time.
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