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So both lion regimes and fox regimes result in totalitarianism? Which is more totalitarian? Those two, or liberal democracy, or late soviet union?
I see, the apathetic kind of shit government. What I’ve noticed is the people want to get out of there.
It’s likely nonsense, that’s all. Freud wrote influential books around that time, too.
No true scotsman. Elites can never really lose, because if they’re beaten, you just mint new elites and call it circulation, say the old elites weren’t really elites, or imagine they could have fought harder. The circular logic of circulated elites theory.
Nicholas killed 15,000 in 1905, that was a bloodbath. Charles I fought two civil wars. I don’t think you can say he gave up a winning position because he was demotivated.
Of course. This is the destination of all power. Both concentration and the inevitable collapse that comes with it.
Democracies do tend to get there faster, however, because of the aforementioned effect. This has been observed on independently by enough people (Aristostle, Machiavelli, Jefferson, Lenin, etc) throughout enough eras that I think it's a relatively uncontroversial statement historically speaking. Of course modern liberal democracies tend to believe otherwise, but all regimes think themselves immortal and stabilizing. Let us grant ourselves some perspective.
I'm glad we can agree that despotism indeed doesn't necessarily involve mass politics.
And that's because...?
This would be circular logic if it was an argument to prove that only elites rule, this is just analysis that follows on from that proposition, mere implication.
If you want to discuss the axiomatic claim of elitism, we can certainly do that: I shall ask you to provide one (1) example of a government without an identifiable elite class.
Michels' core argument and the famous "iron law oligarchy" is that all human organization naturally create these out of structural necessity. So you shouldn't be able to find a single one given non trivial scales.
Given the scale of the October revolution as a whole (around 10M dead), and this being the upper bound of death toll estimates from Tsarist repression, this is ridiculously low. This is Russia we're talking about. There are battles that killed more people than this upper bound of all repression since Bloody Sunday. I don't see how that could honestly qualify.
Compare this to Stalin's purges (around 6M), an honest attempt to keep one's seat at any cost, and then let's talk of blood baths.
You'll notice that despite a troublesome interregnum, this did not mark the end of the British absolutism which would eek out three more decades. The end is typically set to the Glorious Revolution and James II's acceptation of the Bill of Rights and escape to France, which I believe fit the motif of renonciation pretty well.
I don’t dispute the claim that elites exist and have disproportionate power. I make the following claims:
A) The average, non-elite man, has some, non-zero amount of power
B) Ruling elites can lose power, and not only by “weakness of character, insufficient brutality”.
A is why liberal democracies, nazism, communism, care about and attempt to shape what he thinks. Russia or Belarus take a different knack, in that their propaganda seeks to keep the average man apathetic, but that model still recognizes his power.
Yeah, white elites fought and killed millions to hold on to their elite status, and lost.
So the guy who lost his head somehow won? Classic unbeatable elite move.
James II’s army disintegrated. They remembered the whooping his father had gotten in his civil wars and it wasn't going to get any easier with a catholic monarch. He tried again and was defeated at the battle of the boyne. This is not renonciation, it's capitulation of the weak.
I think your objection is more to the scope of the lens than to the content, that's the only way I can make sense of your arguments.
Elitism is by nature a class analysis, and postulates that power derives from coordination, not any individual's specific actions. In this it's opposed to Great Man and other individualistic theories of history.
You concede then that they are not totalitarians? Or are you going to attempt to stretch the definition of total to include absence?
I see no difference.
I mean James II is weak 'physically', his is the weaker party, militarily speaking. He did not give up out of "cowardice", he lost and would have kept losing, no matter how ruthless he got.
I don't think modern russia, belarus, or liberal democracies are totalitarian. Nazism, stalinism are. That is the mainstream view/usual definition of totalitarianism.
Here again, you speak of individuals, when that's not the level of analysis at play.
But when you talk of the weakness of Nicholas II and Louis XVI, you speak of individuals too.
Anyway, if you're not going to disagree with my claims, I'll interpret our differing views thus: You're kind of a disappointed idealist, and you see the flaws of liberal democracies (disproportionate elite influence, messy politics) as disqualifying for that form of government. I don't.
They are merely historical examples. For instance, Louis' weakness, though often attributed to his character (that he'd prefer locksmithing and so forth), doesn't have much to do with his actual political weakness, it's rather that of a system that compromised its legitimacy already for a while and ultimately wanted the same thing as its opponents, just without having to destroy itself to make that happen. We can speak here of the influence of physiocrats or his minister's desperate attempts to enact an agenda almost identical to that wanted by the bourgeois dictatorship that would follow.
It's a weird qualifier for someone who views ideology as a consequence and organizing force rather than a source of either power or legitimacy.
You're mistaken, it's not that i have a particularly ill view of liberal democracy, it's that I don't find it special in any way. I am thus free to criticize it without having to preface this with apologia. Much like I don't feel the need to assert my Marxist credentials when I criticize the soviet union, or my Monarchist sentiment when I do Absolutism. These are all flawed regimes run by flawed men.
Liberal democracy is a political system like any other, which favors a particular ruling elite that can organize to pull its levers to their benefit better than disorganized masses.
I simply don't buy into liberal propaganda about the superiority of their own political formula, for the same exact reason I don't buy into the natsoc propaganda about theirs, or the monarchist propaganda about theirs.
My concern is really how well things are run on the ground, and how much freedom that affords the individual to live their lives outside of politics. In this I have about as much respect for the UAE as I do Switzerland, and as much disrespect for Brazil as I do Algeria. The de jure structure of a political regime isn't nearly as important as Montesqieu thought to its ends. Because neither power nor society can be separated by law.
The pressure to enact those reforms did not come from the ruling elites. They gave in (when they were not convinced) because the opponents (bourgeois and sans-culottes) had more power; more power, in any case, than they (Third Estate) officially had.
Some ruling elites were no doubt convinced by enlightenment ideas. If the government brutally repressed the movement (as you think the king could have), those people would have fought with their resources on the other side, as 'class traitors', greatly increasing the rebellion's chances (thereby changing the calculus of a pre-emptive compromise). It seems to me that by conflating the ruling class together as if they were a single person, you see 'weakness of character', where there is division.
Sure. Theoretically, we’re not that far apart. I have an excellent friend who literally thinks we have solved the best system of government question for all time and western liberal democracy of these last 50 years is it. So naturally, he sees anti-democratic forces and discourse everywhere, even in what I view as good faith criticism. I have a far more pragmatic view, I don’t find e.g. a limited franchise, some monarchical powers, or the roman republic, to be obviously worse. As long as the government is not too oppressive, somewhat competent, and civil wars are avoided, it’s all good enough.
Practically, we probably disagree on the results, how well liberal democracies are governed. For example, if russia was a liberal democracy, I don’t think it would have launched such a war against Ukraine – a war the average russian is unlikely to benefit from, no matter the result. And the examples you cited, Oman belarus cuba morocco, seem worse-run than liberal democracies.
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