The Populist Delusion

Imperium Press was founded in 2018 to supply students and laymen with works in the history of rightist thought. If these works are available at all in modern editions, they are rarely ever available in editions that place them where they belong: outside the liberal weltanschauung. Imperium Press’ mission is to provide right thinkers with authoritative editions of the works that make up their own canon. These editions include introductions and commentary which place these canonical works squarely within the context of tradition, reaction, and counter-Enlightenment thought—the only context in which they can be properly understood.

Contents

Introduction

The Rulers and the Ruled

The Circulation of Elites

The Iron Law of Oligarchy and Organisational

Structure

Sovereignty,

Friends and Enemies

The High-Low Middle

Mechanism

Managerial Elites

Elites and Ideology

The Therapeutic State

Conclusion

Bibliography

Chapter I

Introduction

This is a book about the realities of power and how it functions, stripped of all ideological baggage. It has at its core a thesis, which absolutely contradicts the democratic or populist delusion, that the people are or ever could be sovereign. An organised minority always rules over the majority. Perhaps as a testament to that fact, a recent empirical study showed that public opinion has a near-zero impact on law-making in the USA across 1,779 policy issues.¹ In fact, my thesis goes further than that to suggest that all social change at all times and in all places has been top-down and driven by elites rather than ‘the people’. Those movements which have the appearance of being organic and bottom-up protests—for example, the 1960s Civil Rights movement in the USA or the Russian Revolutions of 1917—were, in fact, tightly organised and funded by elites. Those attempts to drive change from the ‘bottom-up’, which is to say, in the absence of elite organisation—we might think of the events of 6th January 2020 in Washington DC or the recent Yellow Vest movement in France—will amount to little more than an inchoate rabble. This principle holds true regardless of the size of the political unit, be that a small company of twenty people, a large organization of thousands of people, a nation of millions, or even the entire world. It holds true not only in terms of hard political power—the ability to capture and hold office—but also in two other crucial respects. First, there is the question of logistical power—simply the ability to execute orders—for it is possible to capture office without achieving the ability to execute, as Donald Trump showed. Second, there is the question of the ‘soft power’ of discourse, of information flow, and of opinion formation.

In addition to democratic delusions, there are also four liberal delusions that will be subject to significant attack by the thinkers who we will be considering. Let us call these the ‘Four Myths of Liberalism’:

Myth of the stateless society: that state and society were or could ever be separate.

Myth of the neutral state: that state and politics were or could ever be separate.

Myth of the free market: that state and economy were or could ever be separate.

Myth of the separation of powers: that competing power centres can realistically endure without converging.

In the cold light of reality, these four myths turn out to be little more than wishful thinking.

Before continuing, it is worth emphasising what ‘top-down’ or ‘elite-driven’ change means. These phrases may suggest shadowy organisations that puppeteer unseen from the side lines, but that is not the sense in which they should be understood. Rather, the defining feature of ‘top-down’, as opposed to bottom-up, change is the fact of tight minority organization as against the disorganized masses. ‘Elite’ in this sense could be the elites in currently power or a set of ‘counter-elites’ who seek to supplant them. In the former case, we could cite examples such as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, various LGBT movements, Black Lives Matter or Greta Thunberg and Extinction Rebellion. In these cases, the current power structure uses its considerable influence and resources – whether through legal means using the formal structure of the state and its apparatuses (education, state-backed media, etc) or through non-government organizations (NGOs) and corporate lobby groups – to manufacture consent and give the appearance of popular support for elite projects.² In the latter case, however, the efforts of counter-elites will only find success in a revolution. As outlined in Chapter 7, revolutions only occur when the current ruling class loses its ability and resolve to maintain power, which will produce widespread popular discontent, and when a counter-elite is ready to seize the initiative to fill the vacuum. ‘Rebellions happen; revolutions are made’.³ The superior and tight organization of the counter-elite group determines largely why it is that group as opposed to any other that will now take the reins of power. Historical studies on revolutionary figures as diametrically opposed as Vladimir Lenin and Adolf Hitler have noted tight organizational ability and iron discipline as the defining characteristics of their respective vanguards. Lenin had ‘a profound mistrust of the revolutionary potential of the masses, who he believed, without the leadership of an elite party vanguard, would inevitably become diverted by the bread-and-butter issues of Economism.’⁴ Likewise, Arthur Bryant described Hitler’s NSDAP as ‘a fighting movement of flawless discipline, and animated by the same unquestioning devotion to its faith and leaders as the old Prussian Guard.’ Bryant goes on, ‘It must place him among the great organisers of mankind that he was able to establish it so quickly.’⁵ Aside from this iron discipline in organization, Lenin and Hitler also had in common an utter contempt for democracy, which was seen as a time-wasting impediment to effective decision-making, and a total disdain for the polite and respectable ‘bourgeois’ society of the status quo they each sought to supplant. The important point for this study, however, is that neither the rise of the Bolsheviks nor the rise of the Nazis was a popular uprising but rather the result of the determined organized efforts of counter-elites. Likewise, the movements of Civil Rights, LGBT rights, Black Lives Matter and Extinction Rebellion were not popular uprisings either, but the result of the determined organized efforts of the elites currently in power or, if you prefer, the ruling class.

This book will start by introducing the core tenets of the elite theorists, Gaetano Mosca (Chapter 2), Vilfredo Pareto (Chapter 3) and Robert Michels (Chapter 4). These thinkers give us the indispensable tools and vocabulary with which to analyse politics and power. It will then add crucial insights from two other important political theorists, Carl Schmitt (Chapter 5) and Bertrand de Jouvenel (Chapter 6), to think more about how power and law function in practice and about how political change—‘the circulation of elites’—can come about. Three chapters will follow on the ‘managerial class’—the vital second stratum of the elites or ruling class identified by the elite theories—and the special treatment given to this topic by James Burnham (Chapter 7), Samuel T. Francis (Chapter 8) and Paul Gottfried (Chapter 9). Chapter 10 forms a brief conclusion applying some of these lessons to the current political moment.

It is worth mentioning here that this book is interested primarily in the fundamental concepts rooted in these works and not, for example, the lives and contexts of the authors or how their work has been received by scholars over the decades. I will do my best to draw on the vast body of secondary literature, but purely for the purposes of better illustrating the core ideas rather than critiquing them except where necessary. There are two key reasons for this, one practical and the other pedagogical. The former is simply because of space, one could easily write a whole book on each of the chapter topics. The latter, however, is to avoid confusion. Many of the thinkers we are discussing were severely critical of, or even outright hostile to, both socialism and liberal democracy, while many of the scholars who have worked on them have been either socialists or defenders of liberal democracy. Thus, their purposes for taking on these thinkers were usually in the service of defending their ideology, whether by re-interpreting or trying to co-opt the thinker for it or trying to find ways to disprove the thinker to ‘save’ it. This is not to say that any of the scholars in question were dishonest, or that their work was ‘bad’, or even that their arguments were incorrect, but rather to recognise that they were working in conditions in which they felt the need to pay lip service to the official doctrines—the ‘political formulas’—of the status quo. I feel no such obligation. Besides, as John Higley has pointed out, the march of history continues utterly in defiance of democrats and social radicals:

Many democrats and social radicals have rejected the early elite theorists’ ‘futility thesis’.⁶ They have sought to demonstrate that particular elites are not those with superior endowments or organizational capacities, but merely persons who are socially advantaged in power competitions. Adherents of this view have argued that the existence of elites can be terminated either by removing the social advantages that some people enjoy or by abolishing the power concentrations that spur competitions among them—remedies that often go hand-in-hand. There are no historical instances, however, where these remedies have been successfully applied in a large population for any significant length of time.⁷

This book seeks to advance a value-free analysis which is not in the service of any ideology. If power in human societies functions according to certain immutable laws, these laws are not suddenly suspended in the liberal, socialist, or fascist society. Granted, history never occurs in a vacuum: complexities and contingencies always play a part in its seismic events. But this does not mean that we cannot discern identifiable patterns as to the nature of power and politics which cut across the specifics of time and place and of governmental system.

Nonetheless, we should mention at the outset the most generic complaint made by scholars who have sought to critique the thinkers I am covering in this book. James Burnham, who is one of them, dubbed these thinkers ‘the Machiavellians’. This does not mean that they were all disciples of Niccolò Machiavelli, but rather that they conducted their work in his spirit: to see the world as it is and not how it ought to be. In other words, their watchword was realism. They each had a pretence to the neutral objectivity of science. Since it is virtually impossible when dealing with a topic such as politics to eliminate the biases and preferences of the author entirely, this has been fertile ground for their critics. If they could as James H. Meisel put it ‘demonstrate the hidden moral bias’,⁸ these claims to objectivity vanish. For example, Gaetano Mosca was a kind of liberal, as was Bertrand de Jouvenel. Vilfredo Pareto was read by and influenced Benito Mussolini and voiced some support for fascism before he died. Robert Michels joined the Italian fascist party after being a socialist and a syndicalist earlier in his life. Carl Schmitt joined the German National Socialist Party. James Burnham was a Trotskyist who later became a founder for the American conservative magazine, National Review, and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Ronald Reagan, a Republican. Where the personal sympathies of the author leak into their otherwise ‘value-free’ work, it does admittedly become a potential issue. For example, C. A. Bond points out in his book Nemesis, some instances where de Jouvenel’s otherwise exemplary work lapses into the assumptions of liberal individualism.⁹ Ettore A. Albertoni shows where liberal ethical assumptions creep into the work of Mosca, especially when he posits juridical defence as a positive ethical category in an otherwise amoral analysis.¹⁰ Karl Manheim criticised Vilfredo Pareto for making a ‘myth’ out of the idea of the man of action and said his elevation of this idea was arbitrary.¹¹ George Orwell complained that James Burnham too readily wrote off the prospects of making incremental and marginal increases in the standard of living for those worst off in society because of his personal antipathy to socialism.¹² All these criticisms amount to is that our authors were only human: real men living in real conditions with all the raging political debates that go on in any era. None of these criticisms significantly attack the core of the central arguments made by these thinkers. Thus, I have presented what is most essential in their various theses while stripping out what I see as the more ephemeral elements. In other words, it does not matter that Mosca favoured juridical defence or separation of powers while Pareto favoured a strong ‘man of action’ or Machiavellian lion. It does not matter that Samuel T.