ELITES AND DEMOCRACY

A cogent argument that democracies are always ruled by a minority.

British political scientist Drochon takes a broad view of democracy and its central paradox: namely, that elites rule democracies, whether the well-educated technocrats of the French government or the populists governing such nations as the U.S. (Donald Trump is a member of the economic elite) and Italy (Georgia Meloni, though claiming outsider status, “has been a member of the Italian political class since 2006”). What keeps those elites from becoming entrenched and immovable is a process that Drochon calls “dynamic democracy,” a constant tension between those in power and those out of power: The putatively populist Trump was preceded by the more or less establishment Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Moreover, democracy is refreshed through social movements that interact with the elites through institutions: “Democracy is achieved when a social movement places enough pressure on the established elite that a faction of it joins with the rising elite to overthrow the old elite.” The takeaway is both that true democracy is a practical impossibility and that dynamic democracy is “forward-facing,” tending to progressivism. Drochon builds his argument on a synthesis of classical thinkers on elites and democracy, such as Gaetano Mosca, who idealized an “open elite” that admitted deserving members of the lower classes, and Vilfredo Pareto, to whom we owe the term “elite” in the first place and who observed that democracies displaced aristocracies, which “degenerate” and collapse under their own weight. Another theoretician whom the author enlists is C. Wright Mills, who held, presciently, that “the top of the American system of power is much more unified and much more power­ful, the bottom is much more fragmented, and in truth, impotent, than is generally supposed”—which explains, at least in part, why the in-power elites in Congress seem so uninterested in what the electorate actually wants.

A timely, provocative analysis of the nature of power in supposedly democratic polities.