Dear Friends,
It seems to me, a common thread that runs through human history, is that factions start out as populist, then evolve to elitist, which drives the people to start another populist movement. The reason they evolve to become elitist is because “the people,” once they have gained power, are too numerous and distant from the levers to rule, so they hire agents to implement their populist agenda, the new elite. That agenda becomes perverted by the new elite to their own ends. At some point, the people realize the faction they started, to implement a populist agenda, is in fact implementing an elitist one instead. The masses either submit, vote the dirt bags out, else storm the castle with pitch forks and torches. Creating a new populist movement, then hiring some elite to implement their agenda…
Some examples of movements that started as populist that became elitist, are Lenin’s Bolsheviks, Hitler’s Nazis and Mao’s Red Guards. You can go as far back in history as you want. Rome’s People’s Tribunes, rather than balancing the elite, became the elite, seeking their own interests instead of the people’s, which led to Marius and Sulla’s fratricide. If I put baking soda in vinegar, I will observe a foaming, as the reaction produces carbon dioxide. Every time I do it, the same reaction occurs. By the scientific method then, because it is an empirically observable and reproducible event, we consider it empirical truth. Since every populist movement becomes elitist, without exception, we can conclude this is also an empirical truth. Arguing it may not in the future discredits chemistry as effectively.
Many populist ideas are actually elitist ones that were sold to the people as their own. Every Marxist revolution, for example, has been led by overly educated half witted Machiavellians, and soldiered by peasants. Nowhere there is a functional market system, have the malevolent brainiacs been able to gin up a revolution. They have, as in the case of Obama’s mentor, Bill Ayers, been able to detonate bombs, maiming and wounding low level elite, but that only alienated the people they were trying to recruit. In functional revolutions, the elite sold the idea of communism to illiterate peasants, like any good swindler. People raised in a capitalist culture, however, know better than to buy a pig in a poke. So the elite are replacing our capitalist culture with a socialist. To make that pig in a poke look appealing.
Since the problem is the “populist” elite, once in power, turn on the people who put them there, maybe we could put the elite under surveillance, like they do us now, the results posted on the internet in real time and recorded. Then the elite will know they are being watched. It certainly cannot be as expensive to monitor them as it is for them to monitor us. Nor would it be a greater intrusion into their lives, than them watching our daughters take a shower, through her cell phone camera. The national security argument is as hollow as it is a lie. If the elite followed our constitution no nation would dare attack us. With a camera, microphone and no way to turn them off in every office, conference room and hallway, it would be hard to be corrupt. They would try… but they would also be caught for it.
Surveillance is only effective if it comes with consequences. That the elite openly defy their own laws, even as they use those laws to go after their political enemies, shows the arbitrariness of enforcement. If surveillance is used to empower a single faction, rather than enforce the law and constitutional limits, it is a tool of tyranny. As when Pericles used the Ostracism against his political enemies, setting up the Athenian culture, ethos and system, to be destroyed by Alcibiades. Any elite exposed breaking the law, must be punished to the full extent of the law… just as the system would a poor person. Along with actual punishments for crimes there needs to be consequences for undermining the Constitution. Anything less continues to empower a pathological elite at the expense of humanity.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
