I thought I was a genius

a few weeks ago, when I realized that regardless how they are formally constituted, whether as direct democracies, absolute dictatorships, or something in between, all governments tend toward oligarchy.

Two prongs drive this process, one from the bottom and one from the top. I'll illustrate it with reference to our dear old Fourth Republic, but the principles are universal.

At bottom, the great mass of people are ignorant. The average US voter has little understanding of the issues of the day and falls back on decision making shortcuts. As Cialdini demonstrates, those shortcuts are exploited by opinion leaders, such as those in charge of brand management for the Donkey and Elephant parties; community leaders; people on tv or the internet; the organs of the information ministry; etc. Call your congressman, pull the lever, click-whirr. The opinion leaders are part of our oligarchy.

Universal suffrage is not required for an opinion leader to form the great mass of people into a weapon; simple ochlocracy, which seethes below the surface when a reasonably large number of people are gathered, will suffice. See 1, 2, 3.

At top, the formal ruling class is insular. Our politicians live and work in a drained swamp probably hundreds or thousands of miles from where my US readers. As such, they are surrounded by a phalanx of bodymen and grooms of the stool. Politicians and their sycophants send their children to the same school; they take the same subway line to and from work; they are in bed together, sometimes quite literally. Our politicians only emerge every 2, 4, or 6 years to kiss enough babies and eat in enough diners to give the opinion leaders referenced above enough raw material to work with. The rest of the time, whoever controls the flow of information into Washington controls the ruling class.

Further, the formal ruling class is as ill-informed as the great mass of the people. See 1, 2 (scroll down to "Stupak"), 3, 4 (scroll down to "Mars").

So I'm a genius for seeing this inexorable tend toward oligarchy, right? Except German sociologist Robert Michels came up with it in 1911.

Extrapolation & Speculation

Sorry for not getting back to you sooner. Work, worldbuilding for my next sf novel, "an undertaking of great advantage, but no one to know what it is" (unless I phone you), and the quiet pleasures of domestic life have occupied my energies the last two months. Plus, it two weeks after Hurricane Ike for our electricity to be restored.

My previous post and the intervening election remind me of some "how to write sf" book I read in high school or college. (I remember the tan metal shelves and fluorescent lights of the second or third floor of Fondren Library). The author raised a distinction between extrapolation and speculation. My previous post is an extrapolation; so too is the negative correlation between number of uses of the word "recession" by the New York Times and the incumbent party's share of the popular vote. Extrapolation is cautious, sober, linear; speculation is a wild-assed guess, piling all your chips on the black swan.

"President Obama" is pure speculation. Five years ago, no one would have extrapolated the election of the first black US president in 2008: the prominent black political figures of the day either didn't want the job (Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice), had tried for it and failed miserably (Jesse Jackson), or had maxed out their positions under the Peter Principle (Charles Rangel, Sheila Jackson-Lee, etc). It would have required a pure leap of faith to predict the first black US president would be (a) half-Kenyan, (b) a then-Illinois state senator, and (c) the beneficiary of a sex scandal involving the actress who played Seven of Nine in order to gain the Governor/Senator/Vice President status held by every non-incumbent major party presidential candidate since about 1952.

Was it John Gardner in The Art of Fiction who pointed out, "Of course truth is stranger than fiction; fiction has to make sense"?

What will the next four years bring? Let me extrapolate:

Obama will be a Jimmy Carter with more melanin:-- and I say that knowing Jimmy Carter had a handful of sound policies, such as airline deregulation and allowing the Federal Reserve under Volcker to implement austerity measures that broke the post-Nixon stagflation. However, Obama will enter popular memory, like Carter, as being indecisive, especially in foreign affairs.

Something I'm very interested in seeing during the Obama presidency is how the disillusionment will play out. Obama had to play the hope card to topple Hillary for the Dem nomination this year, but the chickens will come home to roost. Rebellions don't happen when the hopeless have no hope; they happen when the hopeful have those hopes dashed.

So now I'll speculate:

In 2011, a black man will try to assassinate Pres. Obama. ("Try" in the sense of being arrested with weapons in Obama's vicinity).

In 2012, a Republican candidate will gain his party's nomination by building a youth movement out of unemployed white liberal-arts graduates between the ages of 22-26.