Dan Sanchez — Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy

Regardless of how it came about, it seems clear that whatever prospect there was for a truly populist Trump presidency is gone with the wind. Was it inevitable that this would happen, one way or another?

One person who might have thought so was German sociologist Robert Michels, who posited the “iron law of oligarchy” in his 1911 work Political Parties: A Sociological Study of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy.

Michels argued that political organizations, no matter how democratically structured, rarely remain truly populist, but inexorably succumb to oligarchic control.

Even in a political system based on popular sovereignty, Michels pointed out that, “the sovereign masses are altogether incapable of undertaking the most necessary resolutions.” This is true for simple, unavoidable technical reasons: “such a gigantic number of persons belonging to a unitary organization cannot do any practical work upon a system of direct discussion.”

This practical limitation necessitates delegation of decision-making to office-holders. These delegates may at first be considered servants of the masses:

“All the offices are filled by election. The officials, executive organs of the general will, play a merely subordinate part, are always dependent upon the collectivity, and can be deprived of their office at any moment. The mass of the party is omnipotent.”
But these delegates will inevitably become specialists in the exercise and consolidation of power, which they gradually wrest away from the “sovereign people”:

“The technical specialization that inevitably results from all extensive organization renders necessary what is called expert leadership. Consequently the power of determination comes to be considered one of the specific attributes of leadership, and is gradually withdrawn from the masses to be concentrated in the hands of the leaders alone. Thus the leaders, who were at first no more than the executive organs of the collective will, soon emancipate themselves from the mass and become independent of its control.

Organization implies the tendency to oligarchy. In every organization, whether it be a political party, a professional union, or any other association of the kind, the aristocratic tendency manifests itself very clearly.”…

There are two aspects of oligarchy operative in the US. The first is plutonomy aka plutocracy, of the rule of the wealthy. The second is technocracy, or the rule of "experts." The US political power is wielded by both.

The idea was that Trump, being among the wealthy, would not be subject to the same influences from the wealthy ownership class that others would be. However, political power in actually wielded on a day to day basis through the administrative bureaucracy (Russian: nomenklatura) and the military, paramilitary and intelligence services (siloviki). This can be consider the deep state that provided continuity in policy across changing administrations. Trump learned quickly that he would be stymied unless he played ball with the governmental technocracy.

FEE

Trump Surrenders to the Iron Law of Oligarchy
Dan Sanchez

David Sloan Wilson — Why Groups Fail (Hint: For the Same Reasons that Nations Fail)

To solve the problem of abuse by power-hungry leaders, the first step must be the adoption of a worldview that makes it obvious.

When leadership fails, the whole group is dragged down. An elite may not constitute the operational leadership but rather is the dominant subgroup that selects or controls the leadership of a group.

To solve the problem of abuse by power-hungry leaders, the first step must be the adoption of a worldview that makes it obvious.

One such worldview is evolutionary theory, in particular Multilevel Selection (MLS) theory, which has an extraordinary range of applications in the biological sciences and is only beginning to appear on the radar screen of the human social and behavioral sciences². Evolution is relentlessly relative. It doesn’t matter how well an organism survives and reproduces in absolute terms, only relative to others in its vicinity. Against this background, individuals who strive to maximize their relative standing in a group, even at the expense of the whole group, aren’t surprising. They are at the core of the theory. The main puzzle is to explain how individuals evolve to behave for the good of their group in ways that might decrease their relative advantage within the group.

The solution to that puzzle is a process of selection among groups in a multi-group population. Once again, the logic is relentlessly relative, which means that a group can sabotage a multi-group organization as easily as an individual can sabotage a group. MLS theory doesn’t make everything nice, but it does specify the conditions required for any group to function as a corporate unit (reminder: the word “corporate” is derived from the Latin word for “body”). If the group isn’t organized to prevent disruptive self-serving behaviors from within, then fuggedaboutit.…

The current institutional structure breeds toxic leaders, not by genetic evolution of course, but by the selection of social strategies in behaviorally flexible individuals. The only solution to this problem is a change in the institutional social environment.…

Our psychological immune system evolved in the context of small groups with a relatively even balance of power and did not prepare us for the larger societies that emerged with the advent of agriculture. These societies therefore became despotic, ironically more like chimp societies than small-scale human societies. Fortunately, cultural evolution is a multi-level process, no less than genetic evolution, and the largely cooperative mega-societies of today a product of ten thousand years of cultural group selection, largely but not entirely in the form of warfare4. Once again, MLS theory doesn’t make everything nice. It specifies the conditions under which groups of any size evolve—or fail to evolve—into corporate units. It is up to us as policy selection agents to make things nice with the insights provided by MLS theory.…

A final point is that the relentlessly relative logic of MLS theory is scale-independent. It applies to nations, multinational corporations, and global commons issues such as the climate and world economy, no less than a single business or imaginary groups of four people working on a verbal problem-solving task. Compare Case and Maner’s elegant experiments on why groups fail with Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s big history book on why nations fail. You will see that when it comes to Multilevel Selection, all the world’s a stage.

Must-read. I've just hit the highlights.

Evonomics
Why Groups Fail (Hint: For the Same Reasons that Nations Fail)
David Sloan Wilson | SUNY Distinguished Professor of Biology and Anthropology at Binghamton University and Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo

See also

The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties.[1] It claims that rule by an elite, or oligarchy, is inevitable as an "iron law" within any democratic organization as part of the "tactical and technical necessities" of organization.[1]
Michels theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies. Michels observed that since no sufficiently large and complex organization can function purely as a direct democracy, power within an organization will always get delegated to individuals within that group, elected or otherwise.

Wikipedia

Iron Law of Oligarchy

The Power Elite is a 1956 book by sociologist C. Wright Mills, in which Mills calls attention to the interwoven interests of the leaders of the military, corporate, and political elements of society and suggests that the ordinary citizen is a relatively powerless subject of manipulation by those entities.

Wikipedia
The Power Elite

The Iron Law of What Again?

Darcy K. Leach

Consortium News (April 2014)

The Iron Law of Oligarchy Returns

Danny Schechter

Evading The Iron Law: Culture And Ritual In Social Movement Organizations

P. Osterman

How the Iron Law of Oligarchy Extends to Peer Production

Paper: Laboratories of Oligarchy? How the Iron Law Extends to Peer Production. By Aaron Shaw, Benjamin Mako Hill. Computers and Society (cs.CY); Social and Information Networks (cs.SI); Report number: ci-2014/96 

Abstract
“Peer production projects like Wikipedia have inspired voluntary associations, collectives, social movements, and scholars to embrace open online collaboration as a model of democratic organization. However, many peer production projects exhibit entrenched leadership and deep inequalities, suggesting that they may not fulfill democratic ideals. Instead, peer production projects may conform to Robert Michels’ “iron law of oligarchy,” which proposes that democratic membership organizations become increasingly oligarchic as they grow. Using exhaustive data of internal processes from a sample of 683 wikis, we construct empirical measures of participation and test for increases in oligarchy associated with growth. In contrast to previous studies, we find support for Michels’ iron law and conclude that peer production entails oligarchic organizational forms.P2P Foundation

How the Iron Law of Oligarchy Extends to Peer ProductionMichel Bauwens

The causal mechanism behind the "iron law of oligarchy" as democratic organizations grow is that the organization tends to become hierarchical above a certain number owing to the transaction cost of consensus decision making. Hierarchical organization, along with power relationships and structure, is simply more efficient, as Peter F. Drucker has convincingly argued about the development of the firm.

This is a reason that subsequent to the hunter-gather stage at which a sparse humanity could function more or less on consensus-building, the agricultural stage and then the industrial stages led to increasing organization and power relationship and structure, especially after the development of the ancient city-state as a political institution. This was a natural and evolutionary development in accordance with the law of least action, otherwise known as "water runs downhill."

This is the dilemma facing humanity since the advent of liberalism in the Enlightenment. There is an inherent tension between popular, participatory democracy and efficient organization. The social, political and economic challenge is to work out tradeoffs that enable humanity to recapture the liberty and dignity of Rousseau's noble savage"while also harnessing the advantage of modern organization and management.