Video Fact Check Results

You said that we always end up being ruled by the elite of some kind. Can you explain this law, this idea? So this comes from a Italian political philosopher from about a hundred years ago named Robert, I'm gonna mangle the, let you pronounce the Italian, Michels, or Michaels, and then it was, I learned about it through a famous book on politics, probably the best book on politics written in the 20th century called The Machiavellians by this guy James Burnham, who has had a big impact on me. But in The Machiavellians, he resurrects what he calls this sort of Italian realist school of political philosophy from the 10s and 20s. And these were people, to be clear, this was not like a Mussolini thing. These were people who were trying to understand the actual mechanics of how politics actually works. So to get to the actual sort of mechanical substance of like how the political machine operates. And this guy, Michels, had this concept he ended up with called the iron law of oligarchy. And so what the iron law of oligarchy, take a step back to say what he meant by oligarchy because it has multiple meanings. So basically in classic political theory, there's basically three forms of government at core. There's democracy, which is rule of the many. There's oligarchy, which is rule of the few. And there's monarchy, which is rule of the one. And you can just use that as a general framework of any government you're gonna be under is gonna be one of those, just a mechanical observation without even saying which one's good or bad, just a structural observation. And so the question that Michels asked was like, is there such a thing as democracy? Like, is there actually such a thing as democracy? Is there ever actually like direct, direct government? And what he did was he mounted this sort of incredible historical exploration of whether democracies had ever existed in the world. And the answer basically is almost never. And we could talk about that. But the other thing he did was he sought out the most democratic private organization in the world that he could find at that point, which he concluded was some basically communist German autoworkers union that was like wholly devoted to the workers of the world uniting, back when that was like the hot thing. And he went in there and he's like, okay, this is the organization out of all organizations on planet earth that must be operating as a direct democracy. And he went in there and he's like, oh, nope, there's a leadership class. You know, there's like six guys at the top and they control everything. And they lead the rest of the membership along, you know, by the nose, which is of course the story of every union. The story of every union is always the story of, you know, there's a Jimmy Hoffa in there, you know, kind of running the thing. You know, we just saw that with the dock workers union, right? Like, you know, there's a guy and he's in charge. And by the way, the number two is his son, right? That's not like, you know, an accident, right? So the iron law of oligarchy basically says, democracy is fake. There's always a ruling class. There's always a ruling elite structurally. And he said, the reason for that is because the masses can't organize, right? What's the fundamental problem? Whether the mass is 25,000 people in a union or 250 million people in a country, the masses can't organize. The majority cannot organize. Only a minority can organize. And to be effective in politics, you must organize. And therefore every political structure in human history has been some form of a small organized elite ruling a large and dispersed majority. Every single one. The Greeks and the Florentines had brief experiments in direct democracy and they were total disasters. In Florence, I forget the name of it. It was called like the workers revolt or something like that. There was like a two year period where they basically experimented with direct democracy during the Renaissance and it was a complete disaster. And they never tried it again. In the state of California, we have our own experiment on this, which is the proposition system, which is an overlay on top of the legislature. And anybody who looks at it for two seconds concludes it's been a complete disaster. It's just a catastrophe. And it's caused enormous damage to the state. And so basically the presumption that we are in a democracy is just sort of by definition fake. Now, good news for the US, it turns out the founders understood this. And so of course they didn't give us a direct democracy. They gave us a representative democracy, right? And so they built the oligarchy into the system in the form of Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch. But so anyway, so as a consequence, democracy is always and everywhere fake. There is always a ruling elite. And basically the lesson of the Machiavellians is you can deny that if you want, but you're fooling yourself. The way to actually think about how to make a system work and maintain any sort of shred of freedom is to actually understand that that is actually what's happening. And lucky for us, the founders saw this and figured out a way to, given that there's going to be a ruling elite, how to create a balance of power among that elite so it doesn't get out of hand. And it was very clever, right? And some of this was based on earlier experiments. Some of this, by the way, these were very, very smart people, right? And so they knew tremendous amounts of Greek and Roman history. They knew the Renaissance history, the Federalist Papers. They argued this at great length. You can read it all. They ran one of the best seminars in world history trying to figure this out. And they went through all this. And yeah, and so they thought through it very carefully, but just to give you an example, which continues to be a hot topic. So, you know, one way they did it is through the three branches of government, right? Executive, legislative, and judicial, sort of balance of powers. But the other way they did it was they sort of echoing what had been done earlier, I think in the UK Parliament, they created the two different bodies of the legislature, right? And so the, you know, the House and the Senate. And as you know, the House is a portion on the basis of population and the Senate is not, right? The small states have just as many senators as the big states. And then they made the deliberate decision to have the House get reelected every two years to make it very responsive to the will of the people. And they made the decision to have the Senate get reelected every six years so that it had more buffer from the passions of the moment. But what's interesting is they didn't choose one or the other, right? They did them both. And then to get legislation passed, you have to get through both of them. And so they built in like a second layer of checks and balances. And then there's a thousand observations we could make about like how well the system is working today and like how much does it live up to the ideal and how much are we actually complying with the constitution? And there's lots of open questions there, but this system has survived for coming on 250 years with a country that has been spectacularly successful that I don't think at least, I don't think any of us would trade the system for any other one. And so it's, yeah, one of the great all-time achievements. Yeah, it's incredible. And we should say they were all pretty young relative to our current set of leaders. Many in their 20s at the time. And like super geniuses, this is one of those things where it's just like, all right, something happened where there was a group of people where nobody ever tested their IQs, but like these are Einsteins of politics. Yeah, an amazing thing. But anyway, I just, I go through all that, which is they were very keen students of the actual mechanical practice of democracy, not fixated on what was desirable. They were incredibly focused on what would actually work, which is, I think the way to think about these things. They were engineers of sort, not the fuzzy humanities students of sort. They were shape rotators, not word cells. I remember that. Wow, that meme came and went. I think you were central to them. You're central to a lot of memes. I was. You're the meme dealer and the meme popularizer. That meme I get some credit for, and then the current thing is the other one I get some credit for. I don't know that I invented either one, but I popularized them. Take credit and run with it.