Political Formula Refresher

Yesterday I reviewed three articles that essentially critiqued the current organization of our ruling class in “The Current Political Formula is Failing.” So I decided it is time to rehearse my ideas on ruling classes, if for no other reason than Sun Tzu’s meme that if you know youself and your enemy then you will win in a hundred battles.

I believe in the notion developed by Gaetano Mosca in The Ruling Class that he calls the “political formula.” You can read my analysis of The Ruling Class in “Mosca’s Ruling Class Made Simple.” As I say:

Ruling classes always invent a moral or legal basis for their power. Mosca calls this a political formula. The ruler might be a king that rules as God's Anointed, or he might be a US president that rules by the will of the people. There is always a "political formula."

Of course, before there can be a political formula there is the basic Concept of the Political that politics is the distinction between friend and enemy. And “there is no politics without an enemy.” Thus almost everthing a ruling class does is framed as a fight against the enemy. It could be the enemy of democracy, or malefactors of great wealth.

Thus, the point of the political formula is to demonstrate to the ruled that the ruling class is the best choice to fight the enemies of the people.

Now the political formula of our own ruling class is two-fold. One is to justify its power on competence; the other is a moral justification for its power:

1. The ruling class is the most educated and evolved group in society and so can wisely administer the state and fight its enemies in the light of science and reason.

2. The ruling class is the “ally” of the oppressed peoples in their fight against the white oppressors.

Note that Item 1 is the justification for the rulers to be best ones to fight the enemy, whether Nazis, Commies, enemies of democracy, COVID, or climate change.

It was the Progressive movement flourishing at the turn of the 20th century that advanced the notion of the administrative state. In part this was just political, an attempt to end the corruption of the “spoils system” that would staff the federal bureaucracy with the supporters of the newly elected president. But the larger view was to create a government more in tune with the cultural values of the rising educated class. Here is the conventional wisdom about the Progressive Era from Wikipedia:

Multiple overlapping movements pursued social, political, and economic reforms by advocating changes in governance, scientific methods, and professionalism; regulating business; protecting the natural environment; and seeking to improve urban living and working conditions.

Item 2 generalizes the left’s domestic program since the 19th century as the good guys fighting the bad guys. It started with the rulers fighting for the workers against the capitalists. Then it added the fight for emancipation for women against the patriarchy. Then it was civil rights for blacks against the Southern white racists. Then it became a fight for gay rights against the homophobes, and now trans rights against the transphobes. Thoughtfully, our lefty friends have invented the notion of “Allyism”, that the rulers are the Allies of the Oppressed Peoples in their fight against the White Oppressors. You can see that it covers all of its domestic wars over the last century and more.

Beyond the political formula, Mosca has this to say about ruling classes:

What makes or breaks a ruling class? Mosca believes that it is the "intermediate strata" in the ruling class that make or break it. Moreover the success of heads of state often depends on their success in "timely reforms of the ruling class."

Thus, for Mosca, the real achievement of heads of state is "their success in transforming ruling classes by improving the methods by which they were recruited and by perfecting their organization."

We can see that, at present, our ruling class does not have a good “intermediate stratum” doing the heavy lifting for the rulers. And I think we can say that nominating people like Joe Biden and Kamala Harris does not amount to “timely reforms of the ruling class.

A ruling class worth its salt would know that its administrative state model clearly requires reform: witness California, where the administrative and regulatory apparatus seems to be organized to prevent the management of forest fires, and indeed throw sand in the gears of almost all economic action.

A ruling class worth its salt would never create a DEI program to recruit new entrants into the “intermediate strata,” at least not after the receipts showed that DEI hires reduce ruling-class effectivness.

A visitor from Mars would probably suspect that our current ruling class is being run by a secret cabal of its enemies.