Carolina QuotesThe formal mechanisms of mass liberal democracy – regular elections, competing political parties, universal suffrage, and legal and political rights – do not significantly mitigate the monolithic and uniform concentration of managerial power. The “despotism” of the regime – its tendency toward the monopolization of political, economic, and cultural power by a single social and political force of managerial and technical skills and the expansive, uniform, and centralized nature of its power – is a direct consequence of the contracted composition of the lite and the restriction of its membership to element proficient in managerial and technical skills. The narrowness of the elite that results from this restriction insulates it from the influence of non-managerial social and political forces and reduces their ability to gain positions within the elite fro which they can moderate, balance or restrain its commands. Their exclusion from the elite contributes to the frustration of their aspirations and interests and encourages their alienation from the conflict with the elite and the destabilization and weakening of the regime.
Samuel T. Francis Connected to the Carolinas
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- Leviathan and Its Enemies: Mass Organization and Managerial Power in Twentieth-Century America
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“The formal mechanisms of mass liberal democracy – regular el…” Samuel T. Francis. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-DE4AB87A19. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/de4ab87a19
More from Samuel T. Francis
The lesson of 4,000 years of social history is that sexual behavior, consensual or not, has consequences for others, that it often affects (and hurts) others in ways society needs to control, and that unregulated sex renders social bonds, especially in the family but also beyond it, impossible. We can regulate it through law or through socially enforced moral custom or both, but we have to do it somehow. History knows of no human society that has not regulated sexual behavior and forbidden some kinds of it, nor is there any reason known to social science to suppose that a society that fails to do so is possible. A "society" that makes no distinction between sex within marriage and sex outside it, that does not distinguish morally and socially between continence and debauchery, normality and perversion, love and lust, is not really a society but merely the chaos of a perpetual orgy. It is an invitation to just such an orgy that the proponents of normalized and unrestricted homosexuality invite America.
Those who hold such skills are able to dominate the state, the economy, and the culture because the structures of these sectors of modern society require technical functions that only specially skilled personnel can provide. The older elites simply lack those skills and eventually lose actual control over the key institutions of modern mass society. As the new, managerial elites take over, society is reconfigured to reflect and support their interests as a ruling class—interests radically different from those of the older elites. Generally, the interests of the new managerial elites consist in maintaining and extending the institutions they control and in ensuring that the needs for and rewards of the technical skills they possess are steadily increased, that society become as dependent on them and their functions as possible.
[Buchanan] appealed to a particular identity, embodied in the concepts of America as a nation with discrete national political and economic interests and of the Middle American stratum as the political, economic, and cultural core of the nation. In adopting such themes, Mr. Buchanan decisively broke with the universalist and cosmopolitan ideology that has been masquerading as conservatism and which has marched up and down the land armed with a variety of universalist slogans and standards: natural rights; equality as a conservative principle; the export of global democracy as the primary goal of American foreign policy; unqualified support for much of the civil rights agenda, unlimited immigration, and free trade; the defense of one version or another of "one-worldism"; enthusiastic worship of an abstract "opportunity" and unrestricted economic growth through acquisitive individualism; and the adulation of the purported patron saints of all these causes in the persons of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King, Jr.