Quora Question: Are Elected Officials the Real Elite?

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Answer from Charles Tips, retired entrepreneur:

In the republicanism that we are constitutionally guaranteed in the United States at both the federal and state levels, elected officials are properly not an elite but instead public servants, and due social honor for the sacrifices that entails. It is statism, the form of governing preferred by our progressives, in which the ruling class, hereditary or not, takes on elite status.

This was very sourly pointed out by Karl Marx when his social democratic movement (the route to communism in those western democracies that could achieve it by parliamentary rather than revolutionary methods) in Prussia was co-opted by Otto von Bismarck in his drive to unify Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm I. Marx pointed out that the fate of social democracy would be to become a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie in permanent need of an underclass as the means to maintaining their own elite status. The full text of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme is online and quite revelatory as to the true intentions of progressives.

The drive of U.S. progressives to create a political elite has taken place largely in my lifetime, with a significant start in the early 60s with first Wisconsin and then John Kennedy as president giving the okay to public-sector unions, something even Franklin Roosevelt had said could never be allowed for obvious conflict-of-interest reasons. Since then, compensation in the public sector has climbed from 80 percent of the average private worker to 162 percent recently. That does not count the handsome defined-benefit pensions common in the public (but not private) sector.

Add to this the number of politicians who have grown enormously wealthy of late through lives of "public service" and the fact that the Obama's vacations cost taxpayers $85 million, or almost $11 million a year, and we are clearly dealing with a political class that perceives itself deserving of elite treatment.

Fortunately, this elite conceit seems to be largely absent from the Republican Party, a few "Establishment" figures perhaps apart. That may explain the unprecedented gains the GOP has had at the state and national levels over the last eight years, years in which many an expert proclaimed the party left for dead. Looks like the Democrats will need to drop their delusions of grandeur if they are to get back in the game.

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