[From article]
A representative party is one in which elected officials carry out some close approximation of the desires of the people they claim to represent. The party serves to aggregate the most articulate individuals from a group of people who share some common interests. Those individuals may be innovative to some degree, but they should not drag their constituents in directions that they would not naturally go. Representative are just that -- representatives.
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Thus, in principle, all decisions made by government were made with the consent of the governed.
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The representative model is now defunct, destroyed in somewhat different ways by the two political parties.
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The Democratic party of today is not a representative party, but a top-down political machine organized around a reformulation of traditional socialist ideology.
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a small group of intellectuals drawn almost exclusively from a handful of elite universities. Trusting the public will is a laughable proposition for academics, who consider themselves a superior breed -- like the philosopher kings of Plato’s Republic.
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At a practical rather than an ideal level, socialism has never been particularly democratic. The socialist state has always been the instrument of one or another narrow group of planners, not answerable to the public’s will.
Moreover, the actual Democratic Party of today is actually a degenerate socialist party, often mixing crony capitalist practice uncomfortably with socialist rhetoric. Obama’s speeches, and perhaps his self image, aren’t all that different from Fidel Castro’s -- but he does have a far wealthier circle of friends.
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At the risk of being called racist, the Republican Party seems to function more or less as the nameless team that plays against the Harlem Globetrotters. They provide the illusion of a contest to events that have been carefully choreographed in advance.
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Most Republican politicians, in short, have come to represent no one but themselves.
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When our government becomes powerful enough to ignore the public, it becomes something fundamentally different from what it was. When the law is made up on the fly, the very concept of the law is rendered meaningless. No amount of outrage, or satisfyingly rational arguments, will let us vote our way out of an oligarchy.
http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/07/the_logic_of_elitism.html
July 18, 2015
The Logic of Elitism
By
E. M. Cadwaladr
