Will Elites Impose Neo-Feudalism on Their Peoples?

The elites of the United States have gone rogue. As with the elites of the rest of the West, America’s elites seek to impose a kind of neo-feudalism on its people. The photo above is of a 2022 international gathering of western elites in Davos, Switzerland. They have gathered together to decide the best ways to rule their peoples in order to solve outstanding problems. In their mission statement, they say,

The Forum engages the foremost political, business, cultural and other leaders of society to shape global, regional and industry agendas.

World Economic Forum Mission Statement

The problem with such elites is they tend to overestimate their ability to solve society’s problems. It is only a short step from social concern for them to conclude they should be in control. Common people can not be expected to understand the subtleties of complicated systems.

One way of defining a country’s elite is as follows. An elite is “a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.” A second definition, completely consistent with the first, tells us it is “a group or class of people seen as having the greatest power and influence within a society, especially because of their wealth or privilege.” Almost by definition, our country’s elites control the management of society. Political, economic, academic, technocratic, and cultural elites all exert influence and control on the behavior of more common people. The elites would like us to become neo-feudal serfs.

Elites in a Democratic Republic

Any particular elite exists in an uneasy tension with the traditions and institutions of a democratic society. On the one hand, they have a cultural and often legal duty to respect those traditions and institutions. If they do not, the non-elitist citizens forming the electorate are likely to curb their power. The electorate might even remove them and put others in control.

On the other hand, members of a privileged caste usually believe strongly in their own capabilities. If an elite cannot solve or ameliorate a social problem under its purview, then perhaps democratic society has not given it enough power to attack the problem. Yet, any additional power given an elite to direct events necessarily takes that power away from private citizens, companies, and other democratic institutions. When that happens, society becomes somewhat more autocratic.

In the United States, this process of surrendering power to technocrats began in earnest approximately a century ago during the administration of progressive President Woodrow Wilson. President Wilson, a one-time professor of political science at Princeton, believed the average American citizen lacked the knowledge and temperament to govern himself, much less to influence the governing of the country. Instead, he believed the country should be governed by knowledgeable technocrats. Ever since then, progressives have been taking power and freedoms away from the people. Progressives have transferred those powers to the technocratic administrative state, aka the regulatory state.

These dirigiste beliefs about the intellectual limitations of average citizens and their inability to change find an echo in dirigistes’ devotion to critical theory and critical race theory. Most people, according to American progressives, are sheep whose notions are dictated by powerful elites. Progressive Democrats want to ensure those elites are progressive. Those members of the public who do not agree with them deserve to become neo-feudal serfs.

Temptations for Autocracy

The election of President Donald Trump was a great shock for the U.S. nobility. That one event appears to have greatly morphed American progressives’ ideas about democracy. In fact, the two years of 2016 and 2017 were a period of populist revolt against Western elites in both Europe and the U.S. Policies favored by Western elites — such as free trade, encouraged immigration, globalization, and multiculturalism — were eating away both middle class incomes and their way of life. Jobs were exported overseas to countries like China. In the United States, the middle classes were angry about their loss in income growth and economic security. Over the previous eight years in the United States, the Obama administration had throttled economic growth with its aggressive increase of economic regulations, including regulations from the Dodd-Frank Act, Obamacare, environmental regulations, and other regulations. In recent decades, the European Union and the Western European countries had suppressed their own economic growth in a similar welter of stifling economic regulations.

American elites like to think of themselves as looking after the interests of ordinary people. How could they react when those common people rebelled against them and elected a president like Donald Trump? Not only did Hillary Clinton lose to Trump, but Republicans won up and down the ballot, from state offices to the presidency, as well as holding on to both the Senate and the House of Representatives. After the 2016 elections, the GOP controlled 69 of 99 state legislative houses, the most in almost a century.

The American nobility reacted with a complex temper tantrum. Following Hillary Clinton, most Democratic politicians and other Democrats began to agree with her that Trump voters belong to a “basket of deplorables.” What elites in the Democratic Party, academia, and most news media saw in Trump’s 2016 election was an abandonment of what they considered social reality. In this, they were merely continuing the attitudes about ordinary people that progressives have held at least since the Woodrow Wilson Administration.

That these elites have been in favor of increasingly authoritarian government is very old news. What is new is the defection of many from the economic elites to the ranks of progressive authoritarians. Time Magazine reporter Molly Ball noted what she considered two odd things  after the 2020 elections. First, despite expectations, there were no riots in the streets after the election (at least not immediately). Second, and more telling, hundreds of major business leaders turned on Trump and his supporters. Ball asserts that after the election,

There was a conspiracy unfolding behind the scenes, one that both curtailed the protests and coordinated the resistance from CEOs. Both surprises were the result of an informal alliance between left-wing activists and business titans. The pact was formalized in a terse, little-noticed joint statement of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and AFL-CIO published on Election Day. Both sides would come to see it as a sort of implicit bargain – inspired by the summer’s massive, sometimes destructive racial-justice protests – in which the forces of labor came together with the forces of capital to keep the peace and oppose Trump’s assault on democracy. …

(It was) a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

Molly Ball, Times.com

Along with other progressives, Molly Bell thought it was Trump who was assaulting democracy. Yet what can we call a “conspiracy” to “influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information?” Democracy was a casualty in a war against any and all supporters of free-market capitalism. This included Trump supporters. During Trump’s entire administration, progressives and their media supporters claimed that Trump’s 2016 election was fraudulent and illegitimate. These phony claims were based on the now-debunked charges of Trump’s collusion with the Russian government. Yet, now, progressives and their allies consider any questions about statistically improbable 2020 election results to be tantamount to treason.

The defection of CEOs and corporations to the progressives is actually the culmination of many decades’ evolution. Over time, the managements of many companies have been seduced by the idea that government can give them special privileges and advantages. Rather than being guided by the marketplace in what they produced and how they allocated capital, corporations increasingly followed the suggestions, or dictates, of the government. The quid they received for this quo were special ad hoc tax breaks and reductions in regulation that were industry-specific. Economic success was determined for these companies not by meeting the demands of a free-market, but by doing what the government wanted. This kind of government-business partnership is known as crony capitalism. Despite its name, crony capitalism is the very opposite of real free-market capitalism. Instead, it is a form of fascism.

Recently, with Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and his release of internal Twitter documents to Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss, we have discovered how much the federal government has used social media to suppress ideas they do not like. This realization reinforces the impression made by the Biden Administration’s aborted creation of a “Disinformation Governance Board” under the Department of Homeland Security. Evidently, the elites who aspire to control the U.S. want to do it by telling us what to believe. If we do not agree to become feudal serfs, they will cancel us.

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