When you see the same family names in so many places (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton) the oligarchic tendencies are pretty obvious. It's fucking crazy that 2 Bushes have been president, and Jeb Bush is a governor, and might one day be president. This would never happen in a healthy democracy.
I was just thinking that from 1988 to 2008 (20 years), a Bush or Clinton was president the entire time. From 1980 to 2013, a Bush or Clinton was either President, Vice President, or Secretary of State the entire time. If Hillary or Jeb Bush wins in 2016 and serves two terms, then from 1980 to 2024, the only years that a Bush or Clinton will not have been in one of the three executive offices of the United States is 2013-2016. Let that sink in: for 40 out 44 years, members of the same two families will have occupied the top 3 offices in government, and for 28 years, they will have been President.
Man. I thought we got rid of hereditary monarchies in 1776, but that's a helluva lot longer than most kings served.
There was an Adams or a Jefferson serving as either President or Vice President of the country, as well, for the first twenty years of our nationhood. And then after an eight year break, the son of the first President Adams became Secretary of State. And then President himself. An Adams or Jefferson was President, VP, or Secretary of State for the first 36 out of 44 years the US existed!
I'm not sure what the above proves. Neither then nor now is what's going on anything like a hereditary monarchy. For one thing, Hillary Clinton is not the heir of Bill Clinton. And in both cases other people have been in the mix holding power. Washington during Adam's Vice Presidency. Obama during Hillary Clinton's Secretaryship of State. Which kind of kills the "mono" part of a "monarchy" -- if there are a bunch of different people from a bunch of different families running around with power. (Is "polyarchy" a word?)
So don't get too freaked.
(Also, plenty of first world democracies have hereditary monarchs. The United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Canada, Japan, etc. The existence of a hereditary monarchy isn't necessarily anti-democratic.)
This is nothing new. John Adams was the 2nd President and his son was the 6th President. William Harrison was the 9th president and his grandson Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were distance cousins. Just reading that Franklin's wife was closer in relation to Theodore than Franklin. Include John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Surely there would have been a greater dynasty if John wasn't assassinated.
While your point is entirely valid, it's worth remembering that while the various Bushes are related genetically, Hillary Rodham is related to Bill Clinton only by marriage, therefore it's not a hereditary link.
Secretary of State isn't one of the top three offices in the Federal Government.
Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate are both higher, and plainly more important.
It can also easily be argued that the Chief Justice and Fed Chair (granted the Fed occupies an unusual quasi-government role, it's fully within the control of the US Government) positions are far more important, influential, and powerful as far as the Federal Government is concerned, compared to the Secretary of State.
> Secretary of State isn't one of the top three offices in the Federal Government.
> Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate are both higher, and plainly more important.
There's an easy measure by which Secretary of State is third; they succeed after the vice president. Why are the two you listed "plainly" more important than Secretary of State?
Although it's been switched around a few times, since 1947 the order has been Vice President, Speaker of the House, President pro tempore of the Senate, then Secretary of State and the rest of the cabinet.
There are not "three" executive offices of the US and the secretary of state certainly isn't one of the three. It's the highest rank cabinet position, but definitely not in the same category as president/vice president.
Kings often have shortish reigns, but you're comparing the performance of multiple families to the reign of an individual king. 50 years is nothing compared to the time a set of multiple royal families can hold a throne.
What makes you think that this wouldn't happen in a healthy democracy? You see dynasties in many other areas (business and sports, for example), so why is it surprising to see it in politics?
Well in business, you can give your kid the company, and if any employees protest you just tell them "this is not a democracy" so that's not the best comparison.
Also, the company belongs to the owner, so he naturally can do anything he wants with it in terms of leadership,etc. I'd say that's the most important distinction rather than "this is not a democracy".
Does this happen much in sport? I see it a lot in music, acting and business, because nepotism is so easily perpetrated there, just as in politics. Sports I can't think of any familial dynasties. Might just be because I don't really like sports but when have there been 2 players who were the pinnacle of their sport? In fact, even in music we see manufactured dynasties but rarely organic dynasties (eg. Julian Lennon was nowhere near as popular as John Lennon but he nonetheless got a hit record). It all just suggests that these are orchestrated, oligarchical results, rather than the result of healthy democracy.
The point of this "iron rule" is that those dynasties are not surprising at all. What makes a system less bad than others is damage mitigation. The power of Bush or a Clinton isn't quite the same as that of a Bourbon or a Romanov and, even more important, the modern day versions collapse in refreshingly unspectacular ways if they do.
One of the big arguments made against Hillary Clinton in 08 (by Obama) was the argument against dynasty.
Of course half the democratic operatives worked for one or the other on the campaign... and aides and fundraisers are a key part of the oligarchic elite.
Did you read the part in the wiki article about student unions?
>>Every year between one quarter and one half of the membership turns over, and Gregory argues this creates a situation where elected student leaders become dependent on student union staff for institutional memory and guidance.
Although Obama was president, Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, who is very close to him personally was Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA while Bill Clinton's wife was Secretary of State. All top positions in the Department of Defense, CIA, and Department of State are connected to this very small group. It's amazing that Obama is president and Bill Clinton's closest allies are in top positions. Long after the Clintons are gone their influence will remain in the 'institutional memory'.
Legislators transitioning in and out regularly would just move the power from their hands into their staffers' hands.. aka people who are hired and fired without any public recognition or even knowing who they are.
Not necessarily. In U.S. politics the most important persons are always figure heads. Their prominence hides democratic and not so democratic mechanisms behind decision making or electing these figure heads.
The more troubling thing about the U.S. is, that the public demands qualities from their leaders which bear no meaningful predictive power on their leadership skills. At best, these politicians are a "costly signal" for the competency and reliability of the party behind that leader, whose members or employees are duing the actual work of governance.
> In U.S. politics the most important persons are always figure heads. Their prominence hides democratic and not so democratic mechanisms behind decision making or electing these figure heads.
Interesting, watching US politics from the outside it seems like Obama (OK, the executive branch) has a hell of a lot of power. Personally I agree with a lot of his recent "legacy forging" executive orders, but they sure don't feel very democratic.
If Jeb Bush became president, I would expect a very Bush-like reign. War with Iran, for example.
I'm not so sure about the Jeb Bush presidency. He seems like much more of a policy wonk than his brother. I'm not I know enough to compare him with his father.
Just to make things clear, this Gandhi family is not related at all to Mahatma Gandhi.
At India's Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister. His daughter, Indira, married Ferozeshah Ghandy [1], who was born into a Parsi family.
Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv Gandhi married an Italian woman, who is now known as Sonia Gandhi [2]
Sonia Gandhi's son Rahul Gandhi is now a Member of Parliament.
Why not? Was is the definition of a healthy democracy? How do you judge a democracy as healthy or unhealthy?
It's quite common for children to follow in their parents footsteps. Parents of any field can train their children in that field providing significant advantage over other children. Would it not stand to reason that children of politicians are best positioned to be politicians themselves?
>It's quite common for children to follow in their parents footsteps.
Sure, but there are arguably 300 million people in America who "would like to be president" I imagine. It's every child's dream, isn't it? To grow up to be president one day?
There are millions of people who want to play professional basketball, too. And many more "professional basketball player" positions available as there are POTUS. But even still, after the ~3,000 professional basketball players that the NBA has seen pass through it's doors, only 78 of them have become "second generation" professional basketball players. [0]
The odds of both sons of a former POTUS becoming (or even having a strong chance of becoming, in Jeb's case) president are just out of this world when compared to other disciplines.
I wonder what the rate for lawyers is. I have cousins that are fourth generation lawyer. How many lawyers had a parent or grandparent as a lawyer? I bet it's a lot.
Are people complaining that the new Canadian PM is a child of a former PM? Maybe politicians are better if they were around politicians as children. Not just more likely to win. But actually better leaders. I don't know. I'm not saying they are. But I'm not saying they aren't either.
The endpoint of his thought process was to join Mussolini.
"Michels stated that the official goal of representative
democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible,
that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing
the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule,
that he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.[1] Later
Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's
Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next
legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became
popular once more in post-war America with the
publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics
of the International Typographical Union (1956) and
during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism."
From the article... 'Darcy K. Leach summarized them briefly as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."' -- how does this not also apply to corporations?
This is a super pertinent question when a company grows over some threshold size
The only successful model I'm aware of, for dealing with that when it comes to huge scale corporations, is the Berkshire Hathaway model. Delegation to great operators across major, highly independent units. Even then, inside of the large units you inevitably get a replication of the problem with increasing scale.
It's clearly one of the reasons Google did what they did. At 60,000 employees they were beginning to drown in the bureaucracy of it all.
I don't think free-market advocates would say that it doesn't apply to corporations/companies. I wouldn't either, as an anarcho-capitalist, say so.
The difference is that in a corporation it doesn't matter if the individuals in power get corrupted. If you work on the assumption that bad behavior by the company/corporation is pushed-back in the free-market, then the corrupt actions have to serve the customers/clients, otherwise other companies are given an advantage.
Of course, that singular assumption is a huge sticking-point for a lot of pro/vs discussions when it comes to free-market principles.
My burning man camp, http://thephage.org/, recognized the underlying oligarchy in our own organization and decided to make it open and explicit by identify leaders through proxy voting (https://github.com/ThePhage/phage-proxy) on a few different axes: who each individual thought was best at conflict resolution, who we would each go to for life advice, etc.
The end result was remarkably high-confidence, transparent, and harmonious. I expect proxy voting will have a far more significant role in the future.
What people may wish for and what needs to be done seem, to me, to be completely different things.
Take Germans and their nuclear power plants. Despite the plants in Japan failing because of conjunction of shoddy construction, earthquake and tsunami, of which only 1 could even be a case in Germany - Germans closed their nuke plants in response.
I don't see how wise decisions would result from aggregation. We've not been shaped by evolution to be rational or realistic, but to have an inflated opinion of self and of our chances - because that was advantageous.
I really doubt that is the case when it comes to running countries.
I think that direct democracy enabled by online voting and blockchain technology will eventually supersede the current representative system of democracy. I can understand that pre-internet it was necessary to have a representative democracy as it would not be possible to have all citizens vote in-person or by mail on all issues, but with the internet a direct democracy seems viable even at a large scale.
While there would be security and privacy issues to overcome with a digital direct democracy, at least it would not be as susceptible to corporate capture as our current representative systems of democracy.
Serious question: given the track record of direct democracy in California, what reason do we have for expecting that direct democracy would work for a country as large as the United States?
And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?
> And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?
All of those seem tied to the Executive branch, whereas direct democracy would replace the Legislative (Congress in the US, Parliament in other countries). The current Executive follows the laws that Congress passes, direct democracy wouldn't change that.
I think part of the key is to have the direct democracy be digital/online. With needing to motivate people to go to the polls (like in California) advertising and money seems to play a large role.
I think a direct democracy will still need a president and congress to handle many aspects of governance, like military action, state secrets, etc. My hope would be though that a direct digital democracy would take some of the decisions away from congress and put those decisions in the hands of the people. But certain aspects of government, particularly the military and judicial system will always have to be centralized.
Or that it doesn't play a role in normal representative democracy. I find plenty times, a lot of pro-democracy individuals forget that people are influenced by others, especially by people in authority positions or skilled orators.
Well, California has medical marijuana, so I guess the proposition system works sometimes. But I do think the proposition system is corrupted by the need to raise large amounts of money to advertise.
I would argue that the big problem that the California proposition system caused was property taxes. Prop 13; and that is pure self-interest; homeowners voting themselves a tax cut. Because homeowners vote in state elections dramatically more often than people who don't own property, this law will remain on the books until we can get people who don't own to vote at a higher rate than people who do own. (Which will be difficult, considering that the majority of people live in a home owned by themselves or their family, and homeowners vote much more often than non-owners.)
Isn't California the most economically successful state in the US? Also the most progressive. However terrible the idea is, it isn't doing much harm to California compared to other states. You might not agree with the results of some individual propositions, but maybe overall it has a positive effect?
The problem is not technological, it's definitional.
From the definition of "society", any society must make decisions that affect all of its members, otherwise they aren't a society, they're a collection of non-interacting individuals. From the definition of "decision", these decisions must be framed by an individual - we have yet to master mind-meld technologies. From the definition of "power", the people who make the decisions have the power.
Majority voting is a red-herring. The way that existing power structures operate today is to frame the terms of the decision: they define what the alternatives are. Take a look at who sponsors ballot initiatives in California: very often, you'll find that a process that's as close to direct democracy as you'll get in modern society was actually sponsored by a wealthy billionaire or corporation behind the scenes, and he has crafted both the legislation and the public messaging around the legislation to suit his interests. If the voting public is faced with two alternatives and option A enriches elite #1 at the expense of the public while option B enriches elite #2 at the expense of the public, you can't really say that the voters have power.
But that's what most people want. If they didn't want it, they wouldn't keep voting for the same two parties or not bothering to vote. Why not just accept that the majority likes it that way, even if you feel it gives bad results?
I guess I'm making the assumption that democracy has the goal of giving people what they want. Whereas perhaps a more noble goal would be giving people what will benefit them. People are notoriously irrational at deciding what will benefit them though, so who could possibly make those decisions?
> A majority of Americans, 60%, say a third major political party is needed because the Republican and Democratic parties "do such a poor job" of representing the American people. (September 25, 2015)
In a FPTP system you cannot really deduce what people wanted from the voting results, as the system very strongly encourages tactical voting. (and in this instance also because of Duverger's law)
I mean, I don't actually feel like direct democracy will work, as you will get uninformed, but popular decisions being made.
Take a look at the SF Housing crisis, I feel like a large part of the "lack of houses, but lots of companies" problem is the result of Proposition 13 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...).
This means that each municipality would much rather host a company that pays tax than have housing (which the city comparatively loses money on), which leads to the current problems. (At least in part)
I fear other propositions like that one, which sound great ("No more taxes!"), but have subtle, but large consequences would get passed by such a system more readily.
In the current representative system of democracy in the US, the plutocrats benefit by having an uninformed population and a democratic process that can be influenced by money (advertising). Your fears, in my opinion, actually stem from our current representative system.
And the population will be uninformed in a direct democracy and advertising can still influence opinion even without buying politicians.
Moreover, the population will be engaged with work and other activities, leaving little time for general education that will make them informed voters.
Agreed, we can begin by wholly replacing the House, electing minimally compensated emergency representatives in the event of infrastructure failure. Legislation may be voted upon and edited word-for-word, tracked by a git-like interface, each edit vetted and voted upon by the whole country.
Slightly pessimistic. Also, in 1911 knowledge about what works and doesn't work was a lot more limited. The safeguards modern democracies employ now are far superior. At the very least the control of information doesn't work as well as some people would like...
On the other hand there will always be a power differential between those who strive to political leadership (often sacrificing a lot on the way) and those who don't participate at all. And even in a completely equal power share, the power of an individual in a nation of millions is so small that it is easy to confuse it with zero.
1911 is about half way between the rise of modern democracy and present day, and the pace of development is faster in the beginning. Parliaments and political drama had been around much longer still.
The problem here is that you ultimately will get a class of advisors/administrators in the civil service or from third party lobbyists that will serve as a backbone of experience for these groups of people, and they will be needed simply because they lack the experience and knowledge required to make correct decisions.
That in itself will likely devolve into an oligarchic structure.
"Michels theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies."
How is sortition going to help? It should either also become an oligarchy, or simply be a dysfunctional government, or not actually have anything at all to do with this subject.
Also, the sortitioned would be even more suspect than elected persons to being bought or to otherwise grabbing whatever post-term benefit they can get. Without any perspective for personal reelection, reelection of their dear party or election of designated-successor aides, they would not have anything to loose by obvious bad behavior. Pure sortition could therefore easily create a lottery ticket mentality, where a grab-what-you-can mindset would be expected and the idea of a bad person in office would shift to an egoist who does not share the benefits by securing lucrative posts for all their extended family.
But smaller sortition "modules" could still be put in place to augment or protect other mechanisms of democracy. A jury to add that witchhunt-spirit to the supreme court might not be the wisest idea, but something like randomized eligibility for the passive vote, maybe only in one of multiple houses, could probably help weaken oligarchic grip without severe disadvantage in other aspects.
Would you say an average person who works an average job has a reasonable shot at getting into elected office in the United States Congress? If no, then that by definition is a form of oligarchy.
Though random samples and a large enough sample size, you can ensure that at least those in elected (sortitioned?) positions are not members of the oligarchy. Additionally, since sortition is much more efficient in selecting candidates, it's possible to replace some formerly unelected bureaucrats with sortitioned ones. Even if it's not perfect, it's still an improvement.
I don't think the 'average person' who works an 'average job' has any qualifications for acting as a member of congress. Taking into consideration that they can't even select competent members of congress, I find it hard to imagine that they would be one.
If you assume the oligarchy is some fraction f of the population, and you select n representatives, then you expect only nf instead of n representatives of the oligarchy. And since f << 1, the oligarchy can not gain control of the legislative body.
As for dysfunctional, depends what kind of people you want in the legislation. If you believe that the kind of people who want to gain power should not be in office, then running for office is a contra indicator for should be in office and you have to use random selection.
Power is held by the person who makes the decision, not who holds the title.
In practice, it's likely that a class of elite advisors will rise up whose only function is to provide guidance to the newly-appointed "official" representatives. They may not hold official office, but if they make all the decisions in practice, wouldn't you say they have the power?
