When the IRA activist and future union leader Michael Quill emigrated to New York in 1926, officials at Ellis Island asked for his views on American politics. “If there’s a government here,” the Kerryman nicknamed “Red Mike” is said to have replied, “then I’m against it”. Whether or not this quote is apocryphal, it perfectly captures the scepticism that some idealists have always felt towards representative democracy
Hugo Drochon’s erudite and challenging new book is a rather more intellectual analysis of the same phenomenon. “We live in the age of the revolt against the elites,” the Dubliner and associate professor of political theory at the University of Nottingham declares, noting how populism has swept so many countries in the decade since Brexit and Donald Trump’s first victory.
Sadly, the ancient Greek notion of citizens directly governing themselves remains as unrealistic as ever. Does that mean any group of privileged insiders can only be replaced by another, like the pigs from George Orwell’s Animal Farm?
In search of an answer, Drochon profiles three great Italian thinkers who wrestled with this dilemma before and during the Mussolini era. Gaetano Mosca showed why ruling minorities are usually better organised than the majorities they dominate. Vilfredo Pareto’s 80/20 Rule claimed that four-fifths of a nation’s wealth was destined to be controlled by a fifth of its people. Robert Michels coined the “iron law of oligarchy”, which asserts that even the most egalitarian campaigns end up concentrating power at the top.
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Drochon puts all these Machiavellian ideas into historical context and explains how they later influenced other political scientists on both sides of the Atlantic. Borrowing a little from each, he constructs a model of “dynamic democracy” where social progress is achieved by respectful alliances between grassroots activists and parliamentary parties. To take a couple of contrasting examples, the US civil rights movement succeeded because it made friends on Capitol Hill while the French gilets jaunes (yellow vests) stayed pure and fizzled out.
Intensively researched and soberly written, Elites and Democracy may be too academic for a general readership. It’s still a nuanced, heavyweight contribution to what feels like a never-ending debate. After all, as a Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band single once warned, No Matter Who You Vote for, the Government Always Gets In.
