naked capitalism

DownSouth says:

MyLessThanPrimeBeef said: “Just remember, you heard it first here – we need professional citizens.”

Not hardly. It was Louis Antoine Léon de Saint-Just, over two hundred years ago, who is credited with first verbalizing the “realism” you speak of–the despair of the people’s political capabilities.

And the US has never been a democracy. It’s always been a republic as distinguished from a democracy, where a small number of citizens assemble and administer the government in person. But representative government, according to the men of the revolution, was much more than a technical device for government among large populations: limitation to a small and chosen body of citizens was to serve as the great purifier of both interest and opinion, to guard “against the confusion of the multitude.” (The Federalist, number 51)

One result of this form of government was the evolvement of the party system. “[N]either the people in general nor the political scientists in particular have left much doubt that the parties, because of their monopoly of nominations, cannot be regarded as popular organs, but that they are, on the contrary, the very efficient instruments through which the power of the people is curtailed and controlled,” Hannah Arendt observes in On Revolution.

And, as she goes on to conclude, your pessimistic and rather cynical view derives from the fact that you “take for granted that there is not, and never has been, any alternative to the present system.”

The fruit of your pessimism is the current miserable state of political affairs in which we currently find ourselves, which Arendt predicted some 45 years ago:

[F]rom the very beginning, the party as an institution presupposed either that the citizen’s participation was not necessary and that the newly admitted strata of the population should be content with representation, or, finally, that all political questions in the welfare state are ultimately problems of administration, to be handled and decided by experts, in which case even the representatives of the people hardly possess an authentic area of action but are administrative officers, whose business, though in the public interest, is not essentially different from the business of private management.

This has resulted in a silent coup by the “scientist-kings” (Niebuhr) or “problem-solvers” (Arendt) like Robert McNamara et al or Greenspan/Geithner/Bernanke/Summers, and we all know how those movies ended.