CNBC today features a wonderfully piquant little article, under the title "Businesses' Bets on the GOP May Be Backfiring." http://www.cnbc.com/... Notes that the US Chamber of Commerce, among other bidness organizations and firms, spent many, many millions "electing" Tea Partiers to Congress. And are discovering to their chagrin that ideology ain't so good for Big Bidness after all. Prime instance: the Export-Import Bank, which greases export transactions by use of public money and the Full Faith and Credit of the US tax base, is about to first run out of walking-around money, and then expire altogether, thanks to Loonie insistence on spending cuts to "offset" continued funding of one socialized part of The Hated Government that Bidness finds very necessary. And there's plenty of other examples where even the Rich Guys are finding that "their legislature" ain't exactly serving Bidness Interests. Who woulda thought it?
Michels' Iron Law of Organizations, http://digitalcommons.ilr.cornell.edu/... (.pdf) or see Wiki, http://en.wikipedia.org/... confirmed by reality-based observation, postulates that oligarchy (and in our case, kleptocracy,) is inevitable. Ruling elites, once the Group gets much larger than 10 or so humans, always end up running the show, owning most of the stuff, and enslaving or en-serfing the rest of us to one degree or another. That's the way it is, was, and always will be. The hope is that some combination of fear of uprisings, guilt, shame, and bits of altruism, and even truly enlightened self-interest, will moderate the predatory behavior and parasitic demands of the Few. That seems to me to be what our Founders had in view when they "gave us a Republic, if we can keep it."
For a while, surpluses and the resulting middle class presence (which Aristotle and others observe is a sine qua non of even the forms of democracy) let us believe that "elections make a difference, or at least have consequences." Even the Occupy people are struggling to find a model for themselves and the rest of us that does not devolve into elitism, where the dedicated and self-interested few end up running the show (for good, or mostly for ill) because everyone else has to earn a living or somehow feed themselves and their families. Looks like the political equivalent of buyer's remorse is bumping up against the irrepressible spirit of Molly Brown, but the "heavies" have all the advantages, and there's always a rich supply of Machiavellis and Roveians to pander to them and grow and amplify and effectuate the various parts of Topdownism.
Even the Kleptocrats are finding that buying legislatures full of Ungovernable Whoopdedoo Yahoos that want to drown government, that totem of legitimacy, in a bathtub and to just charge ahead with transferring all the real wealth from the many to the few, and to institutionalize War, The Imperial Gladiatorial Games, is not as smart as they thought. Bidness has played the "over-regulation" card one time too many – these people live, and profit off of, most parts of the "socialist structures of government," from courts and police and infrastructure, to arcanae like "tax incentives" and "tax breaks" and the Ex-Im Bank, and the protections from lawsuits that come from meeting regulatory requirements. (The courts are also hemorrhaging legitimacy too, of course.)
On the "progressive" side, guess what? Our champion, the President, has also proved to be a very mixed bag. Many of us were all about "leaving it all on the road" to bring him and his people into the Executive. Now we have the NDAA and its kin, and various bailouts, and continued and expanded Imperial Projections of Power, and crushing of whistleblowers who dare to effectuate the promises of "transparency," and most here have their own concerns about the current administration, consoling themselves with various formulations of "it's the best we can do" and "the other guys are worse."
In the roughest kind of way, people are nominally ruled only by their consent. People need a sense that their rulers are "legitimate," and the election process supposedly provides that necessary underpinning of the social contract. The Arab Uprisings, people in the streets of Israel and Europe and Africa, seem fundamentally to be the result of the erosion of legitimacy. The pundits are even using that word ever more frequently.
Oligarchs end up living in fear of the Mob, and use all their arts and artifices to cram it down into its cave. Maybe I am just naive, but it sure seems to me that we have passed a limit level, passed the point where the necessary quantum of legitimacy has been bled out of the System by all the predators and parasites that many here write about and expose, in the small way that exposure here and in blogland manages. What happens when the demand for legitimacy is not satisfied by the existing institutions any more? The historians out there know, very well.
And many self-identified progressives are finding that we too have bought a pig in a poke. And that we are just milling around, maybe waiting for that little spark that will ignite the Mob thing, with consequences and directions that some hope to control, and none ever can.