- For some strange reason, there are people who balk at any mention of the
idea of an elite group in our democracies, which shows how well the
brainwashing has worked. Quite simply, someone is a member of the elite
if they have more political influence than an ordinary voter. For instance,
at the most trivial level, those to whom television programmes turn
repeatedly for opinion on current affairs are members of the elite. You
will notice that this group includes anyone but representatives of the
single biggest class in Western democracies: the white working class. If
you still think this concept of an elite is bogus, search the politics section
of any newspaper website for the word “elite” and you will find that in
the last few years this has become a common term. Before the concept
became vogue in recent years there were many books in politics which
attempted to wake the public up to the power of elite groups, for example
Christopher Lasch, The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of
Democracy, New York,1995; Rodney Atkinson, Europeʼs Full Circle:
Corporate Elites and the New Fascism, Compuprint, 1996; Peter Oborne,
The Triumph of the Political Class, London, 2007. In the late nineteenth
century and early twentieth-century there were many academics who
demonstrated how the elite manipulated democracy in their interest.
Probably the most famous was anarchist and academic Roberto Michels,
in his 1915 study Political Parties. Most of those who studied this book
were on the Left, but by the 1960s these Leftists had mostly fallen silent
on the power of the elite, perhaps an indication that they saw their political
agenda was holding sway among the elites across Western democracies.
With European peoples turning against the European Union (the
deceptive, anti-democratic, elitist project par excellence), journalists
appear to have been left with no choice but to discuss how the electorate
are turning against the elite. ↵
dana p.
(Dana P.)
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