On Friday, six weeks after a deadline that was reluctantly signed into law by Trump, the Department of Justice released over 3 million documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The drop caused a lot of discourse online over the weekend as journalists and investigators began poring through the documents.
Because of the sheer scale of the information released, most of the early revelations have focused on easily-searchable names and organizations that appear in the files. Numerous public figures who claimed to have had little or no ties to Epstein were revealed to have been in closer contact with him than they had led the public to believe. More details have also come out about Epstein’s contact and involvement with multiple intelligence agencies. And additional photographs of figures already known to be closely associated with Epstein provided an additional window into how—at absolute best—insanely creepy and weird their activities with the supposed financier were.
On that note, much of what’s already been found in these files has further highlighted just how disgusting, depraved, and down-right evil Epstein and his accomplices were—which is made all the worse when paired with the obvious lack of interest the so-called justice system has had in even pretending to bring about justice for the victims and consequences for Epstein’s enablers and collaborators. And that will almost certainly continue as researchers and journalists move further beyond the big names that were obvious to search for early on and wade through whatever else may be hidden in the millions of other files.
But already, the revelations have fed into the broader frustration and anger that was already being directed at the global elite before the Epstein revelations, and that encompasses matters beyond the scope of this, albeit far-reaching, story.
Especially since the Great Recession, there has been a growing consensus among the public in most countries that the people in power are worsening our problems rather than fixing them and that many of them are willing to commit blatantly evil acts if it serves their interests. The early manifestations of this anti-establishment wave resulted in political repudiations like the early Occupy protests, the Brexit referendum in the UK, and Trump’s first victory. Even after the global establishment pushed back, this anger has persisted and, in many ways, been accelerated by governments’ responses to the pandemic—culminating in the persistent, so-called “anti-incumbency” bias in elections worldwide in the years since.
But all this raises an important question: if it’s grown so uncontroversial to say that today’s elites are terrible, why are we still stuck with them?
That is a question that a lot of brilliant thinkers have been pondering since long before this current anti-establishment wave took hold. Some of the earliest that really tried to understand how power works and evolves within society were the so-called Italian Elite Theorists.
Elite Theory
Gaetano Mosca was a pioneer in this tradition with his 1896 book The Ruling Class, which sought to develop a theory explaining why every society, even those considered democratic republics, ultimately ends up ruled by a small minority. Furthermore, he observed that this ruling class relies on more than naked force to maintain its power—things such as legitimizing myths, nationalism, religion, fear of foreign enemies, etc.
The economist Vilfredo Pareto built on Mosca’s work. He agreed that elites always exist, but argued that the specific elites in power change over time. He said that societies tend to cycle between two types of elites: cunning, manipulative elites that rule through persuasion and deception, which he called “foxes,” and more domineering elites who rule through naked force, which he called “lions.” Pareto also argued that most of the ideologies pushed by elites are rationalizations for their status, not genuine attempts to understand how to bring a better world for society as a whole.
Building on those insights, the sociologist Robert Michels went further and argued that the elite–non-elite divide that Mosca and Pareto laid out on a societal level actually exists in all organizations—even nominally egalitarian ones like local democratic town halls and socialist parties. This is now known as the Iron Law of Oligarchy.
Even in organizations founded on egalitarian principles, some subset of the group will still need to serve as administrators if the organization is to function at all. But that control over the rules and procedures gives the administrators a degree of power and advantage above rank-and-file members. Typically, rank-and-file members are happy with this, because people usually don’t want to take on the work of making or monitoring every decision for every organization they have any involvement with. But even if people did want that, it’s just not structurally possible for every member to deliberate over or monitor all leadership decisions in real time. Most lack the necessary time, expertise, or interest.
So, stepping back, the Italian elite theorists help us understand that the existence of an elite is not some modern aberration. It’s a necessary byproduct of social cooperation that transcends political entities like the nation-state and affects all parts of organized society.
However, as all three of the above thinkers explained in their own way, just because the existence of an elite is unavoidable does not mean the position or status of any given group of elites is guaranteed. As Mosca suggested, especially when it comes to political leaders, legitimizing myths are an important aspect of maintaining access to power.
Said another way, the public’s active or passive acceptance of an elite’s authority is critical to their power. A thinker who dove a lot deeper into this concept hundreds of years before the Italian elite school was Étienne de la Boétie in his book The Politics of Obedience. But this is not something that happens naturally. Every potential ruling class that wants to attain and maintain political power needs to propagandize the public—the “public” being, as Walter Lippman defines it, the subset of society that is interested in current affairs and can affect them by either supporting or opposing the actors.
A lot has been written on how elites use propaganda. Lippman himself and his contemporary, Edward Bernays, are good starting points for that topic. But an often-underappreciated component of elite propaganda efforts is the actual control over the information space where the propaganda—and any potential counterpropaganda—takes place. As Martin Gurri laid out in his book The Revolt of the Public, every major advancement in information technology in human history—from the adoption of alphabets to the invention of the printing press—has resulted in a transition to a new ruling elite. Because, crucially, the new technology breaks the monopoly the previous elite had enjoyed over the information space.
And that, of course, speaks to the other factor that determines which elites are in power, which is the technical and structural setup of society. Information technology is only one part of that. Another thinker who applied this insight to explain the rise of our current global elite was James Burnham.
The “Managerial Revolution”
Burnham—a former communist—argued that, while he and his fellow Marxists were correct in the early twentieth century that the world stood on the edge of a revolution, they had been mistaken about what kind of revolution it was. Instead of a revolution by the working class against the capitalist class, what the world actually experienced was what he called a “managerial revolution.”
In short, Burnham argues that, over time, ownership gives way to control. And, in increasingly-industrialized societies, control over raw resources, the means of production, and government affairs is centralized in the technical and administrative managers that make up the bureaucratic components of all kinds of organizations—from businesses to governments—what Burnham called the “managerial class.”
Sam Francis expanded on Burnham’s thesis in the nineties, arguing that as this managerial class becomes the de facto ruling elite, it becomes self-legitimating. It acts and governs against popular opinion when doing so serves its own interest. And further, a bureaucratic elite works to mediate power through credentials, procedures, and compliance systems that serve as institutional chokepoints for the elite to protect and expand their power.
Indeed, history backs up Burnham and Francis’s theories quite well. As is probably best laid out in Murray Rothbard’s essay “Bureaucracy and the Civil Service in the United States,” a distinct shift took place in the American federal government beginning in the late 1800s. For the first hundred years or so after the Constitution was ratified, political power was primarily concentrated in elected officials. However, especially after the signing of the Pendleton Act, power began to shift to the unelected bureaucrats. In the following century, this federal bureaucracy’s interest shifted from advancing the ideologies of politicians and voters to protecting its own interests—all while it expanded in size from a couple of thousand permanent employees to well over three million.
That has culminated in our current system of government, where, no matter how popular a potential policy is, if it goes against the interests of the permanent bureaucracy in DC, it will be dismissed as politically impossible. But, if a policy or intervention will benefit the bureaucracy, the government will move heaven and earth to see it done—even if it’s unpopular with the public.
And, indeed, as Burnham predicted and others have observed since, that centralization of power into the managerial class happened outside of government too. For instance, look at how much power HR departments wield in corporate settings, or how a distinct class of administrators effectively runs universities, or even how most large corporations are led by managers who worked their way up rather than the intrepid entrepreneurs who used to run the private sector. Our entire school system is even structured to train tomorrow’s elites for bureaucratic managerial work rather than for creative problem-solving or entrepreneurship.
The Problem: The State
All of these insights from all of these thinkers are helpful for understanding how and why the current elite in this country—and really all countries—came about. But it still doesn’t really explain why we cannot seem to escape this terrible, plundering, obviously self-interested elite.
Here again, the work of Murray Rothbard helps provide the answer. The problem is, in short, the state.
As Rothbard and other thinkers in his tradition have laid out, the modern state is a unique form of political governance where the ruling elite attempts to maintain a monopoly on the use of violence in a given territorial area. Power is not spread across and balanced between distinct social classes of elites, as it was in most societies throughout history until around 400 years ago. Instead, power is concentrated in one supreme entity that we’re taught to view as standing separate from and above the rest of society.
While it’s tempting to think of the modern state’s power as coming from its ability to use aggressive violence, it’s often more helpful and precise to think of the state as an absence of violence. Criminals use aggressive violence, too, after all, and it’s generally understood that we are justified in violently resisting that aggression. But what makes a state unique is that we’re all supposed to believe that, with this one subset of the population, we are not justified in resisting their aggressive violence or threats. In other words, states don’t really get their power from their ability to use violence, but from the absence of resistance. It is the one group in society where, no matter what they do to you, you must obey.
In other words, the state is a collective fiction that effectively exempts the political elites in society from the need to compete with other potential elites or social classes who might be able to provide whatever the state’s services are even better than the current elite. And, as Rothbard has detailed, the elites running the American federal government have been happy to share that unique state power with their fellow managerial elites outside the government—especially in what’s supposed to be the “private” sector. Since the Progressive Era, the government has been intervening heavily in the economy, specifically to help businesses at the top of various industries stay on top.
So, the reason we cannot seem to get rid of the current bureaucratic managerial elite inside and outside of government, and all the eccentric establishment politicians and unexciting, crony heads of industry they prop up, no matter how ineffectual, unimpressive, self-serving, or downright evil they act—blatantly—in front of the people they claim to be serving, is because we have become so indoctrinated with the delusions of statism.
The Solution: Liberty
The answer to all of this is—as it so often is—liberty. Specifically, the liberty to walk away from bad, self-serving elites.
It is understandable that many are feeling pessimistic about our ability to do so in the wake of this latest partial release of the Epstein files. Not only because it demonstrated, once again, the depravity of several of our so-called leaders, but because it has exposed the elite’s complete disinterest in even seriously investigating the potential crimes of their fellow elites. They are, effectively, untouchable.
But, although the potential for this to change in the short term appears extremely slim, there are reasons to be optimistic when looking a little further down the road. As Gurri laid out in The Revolt of the Public, the global elites have already lost their monopoly on the information space with the adoption of the internet. And on top of that, artificial intelligence is poised to automate the exact kind of administrative, clerical, and bureaucratic work that has defined the managerial class and made their positions necessary. In other words, the structural dynamics that helped propel the current elites into power are in the early stages of shifting and reversing.
That’s not to say the current elites are necessarily doomed to lose their status over the next few years, or that we can just sit back and let technology solve our problems for us. Only that the potential for actual systemic change—for a genuine societal pivot in a positive direction—is arguably higher than it has been for hundreds of years. As disturbing and frustrating as they are, we should not let episodes like this latest Epstein release discourage us. We need them to energize us.
