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When you see the same family names in so many places (Bush, Kennedy, Clinton) the oligarchic tendencies are pretty obvious. It's fucking crazy that 2 Bushes have been president, and Jeb Bush is a governor, and might one day be president. This would never happen in a healthy democracy.
I was just thinking that from 1988 to 2008 (20 years), a Bush or Clinton was president the entire time. From 1980 to 2013, a Bush or Clinton was either President, Vice President, or Secretary of State the entire time. If Hillary or Jeb Bush wins in 2016 and serves two terms, then from 1980 to 2024, the only years that a Bush or Clinton will not have been in one of the three executive offices of the United States is 2013-2016. Let that sink in: for 40 out 44 years, members of the same two families will have occupied the top 3 offices in government, and for 28 years, they will have been President.

Man. I thought we got rid of hereditary monarchies in 1776, but that's a helluva lot longer than most kings served.

There was an Adams or a Jefferson serving as either President or Vice President of the country, as well, for the first twenty years of our nationhood. And then after an eight year break, the son of the first President Adams became Secretary of State. And then President himself. An Adams or Jefferson was President, VP, or Secretary of State for the first 36 out of 44 years the US existed!

I'm not sure what the above proves. Neither then nor now is what's going on anything like a hereditary monarchy. For one thing, Hillary Clinton is not the heir of Bill Clinton. And in both cases other people have been in the mix holding power. Washington during Adam's Vice Presidency. Obama during Hillary Clinton's Secretaryship of State. Which kind of kills the "mono" part of a "monarchy" -- if there are a bunch of different people from a bunch of different families running around with power. (Is "polyarchy" a word?)

So don't get too freaked.

(Also, plenty of first world democracies have hereditary monarchs. The United Kingdom, Sweden, the Netherlands, Spain, Australia, Canada, Japan, etc. The existence of a hereditary monarchy isn't necessarily anti-democratic.)

This is nothing new. John Adams was the 2nd President and his son was the 6th President. William Harrison was the 9th president and his grandson Benjamin Harrison was the 23rd president. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Roosevelt were distance cousins. Just reading that Franklin's wife was closer in relation to Theodore than Franklin. Include John, Robert, and Ted Kennedy. Surely there would have been a greater dynasty if John wasn't assassinated.
While your point is entirely valid, it's worth remembering that while the various Bushes are related genetically, Hillary Rodham is related to Bill Clinton only by marriage, therefore it's not a hereditary link.
Secretary of State isn't one of the top three offices in the Federal Government.

Speaker of the House and President pro tempore of the Senate are both higher, and plainly more important.

It can also easily be argued that the Chief Justice and Fed Chair (granted the Fed occupies an unusual quasi-government role, it's fully within the control of the US Government) positions are far more important, influential, and powerful as far as the Federal Government is concerned, compared to the Secretary of State.

> one of the three executive offices

There are not "three" executive offices of the US and the secretary of state certainly isn't one of the three. It's the highest rank cabinet position, but definitely not in the same category as president/vice president.

Kings often have shortish reigns, but you're comparing the performance of multiple families to the reign of an individual king. 50 years is nothing compared to the time a set of multiple royal families can hold a throne.
I love this factoid: when was the last time a Republican won the presidency without either a Bush or a Nixon on the ticket?

1928

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/in-the-loop/post/who-wa...

What about Eisenhower?
What makes you think that this wouldn't happen in a healthy democracy? You see dynasties in many other areas (business and sports, for example), so why is it surprising to see it in politics?
Well in business, you can give your kid the company, and if any employees protest you just tell them "this is not a democracy" so that's not the best comparison.
Does this happen much in sport? I see it a lot in music, acting and business, because nepotism is so easily perpetrated there, just as in politics. Sports I can't think of any familial dynasties. Might just be because I don't really like sports but when have there been 2 players who were the pinnacle of their sport? In fact, even in music we see manufactured dynasties but rarely organic dynasties (eg. Julian Lennon was nowhere near as popular as John Lennon but he nonetheless got a hit record). It all just suggests that these are orchestrated, oligarchical results, rather than the result of healthy democracy.
The point of this "iron rule" is that those dynasties are not surprising at all. What makes a system less bad than others is damage mitigation. The power of Bush or a Clinton isn't quite the same as that of a Bourbon or a Romanov and, even more important, the modern day versions collapse in refreshingly unspectacular ways if they do.
One of the big arguments made against Hillary Clinton in 08 (by Obama) was the argument against dynasty.

Of course half the democratic operatives worked for one or the other on the campaign... and aides and fundraisers are a key part of the oligarchic elite.

Did you read the part in the wiki article about student unions?

>>Every year between one quarter and one half of the membership turns over, and Gregory argues this creates a situation where elected student leaders become dependent on student union staff for institutional memory and guidance.

Although Obama was president, Bill Clinton's former Chief of Staff, Leon Panetta, who is very close to him personally was Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA while Bill Clinton's wife was Secretary of State. All top positions in the Department of Defense, CIA, and Department of State are connected to this very small group. It's amazing that Obama is president and Bill Clinton's closest allies are in top positions. Long after the Clintons are gone their influence will remain in the 'institutional memory'.

Not necessarily. In U.S. politics the most important persons are always figure heads. Their prominence hides democratic and not so democratic mechanisms behind decision making or electing these figure heads.

The more troubling thing about the U.S. is, that the public demands qualities from their leaders which bear no meaningful predictive power on their leadership skills. At best, these politicians are a "costly signal" for the competency and reliability of the party behind that leader, whose members or employees are duing the actual work of governance.

> In U.S. politics the most important persons are always figure heads. Their prominence hides democratic and not so democratic mechanisms behind decision making or electing these figure heads.

Interesting, watching US politics from the outside it seems like Obama (OK, the executive branch) has a hell of a lot of power. Personally I agree with a lot of his recent "legacy forging" executive orders, but they sure don't feel very democratic.

If Jeb Bush became president, I would expect a very Bush-like reign. War with Iran, for example.

Same with another democracy - India. The "Gandhi"s have been ruling for over half a century.
Just to make things clear, this Gandhi family is not related at all to Mahatma Gandhi.

At India's Independence, Jawaharlal Nehru was the Prime Minister. His daughter, Indira, married Ferozeshah Ghandy [1], who was born into a Parsi family.

Indira Gandhi's son Rajiv Gandhi married an Italian woman, who is now known as Sonia Gandhi [2]

Sonia Gandhi's son Rahul Gandhi is now a Member of Parliament.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feroze_Gandhi [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonia_Gandhi

Why not? Was is the definition of a healthy democracy? How do you judge a democracy as healthy or unhealthy?

It's quite common for children to follow in their parents footsteps. Parents of any field can train their children in that field providing significant advantage over other children. Would it not stand to reason that children of politicians are best positioned to be politicians themselves?

>It's quite common for children to follow in their parents footsteps.

Sure, but there are arguably 300 million people in America who "would like to be president" I imagine. It's every child's dream, isn't it? To grow up to be president one day?

There are millions of people who want to play professional basketball, too. And many more "professional basketball player" positions available as there are POTUS. But even still, after the ~3,000 professional basketball players that the NBA has seen pass through it's doors, only 78 of them have become "second generation" professional basketball players. [0]

The odds of both sons of a former POTUS becoming (or even having a strong chance of becoming, in Jeb's case) president are just out of this world when compared to other disciplines.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_second-generation_Nati...

edit: I changed 10,000 pro basketball players to ~3,000 as per forrestthewoods's info below.

The endpoint of his thought process was to join Mussolini.

  "Michels stated that the official goal of representative 
  democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, 
  that representative democracy is a façade legitimizing 
  the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, 
  that he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.[1] Later 
  Michels migrated to Italy and joined Benito Mussolini's 
  Fascist Party, as he believed this was the next 
  legitimate step of modern societies. The thesis became 
  popular once more in post-war America with the 
  publication of Union Democracy: The Internal Politics 
  of the International Typographical Union (1956) and 
  during the red scare brought about by McCarthyism."
I still don't understood how that followed. What am I missing?
Tyrants are servants of the people, and enemies of the oligarchs.

That's why republican democrats hate them so intensely, and have been murdering tyrants by sword and word for so many centuries.

From the article... 'Darcy K. Leach summarized them briefly as: "Bureaucracy happens. If bureaucracy happens, power rises. Power corrupts."' -- how does this not also apply to corporations?

This is a super pertinent question when a company grows over some threshold size

The only successful model I'm aware of, for dealing with that when it comes to huge scale corporations, is the Berkshire Hathaway model. Delegation to great operators across major, highly independent units. Even then, inside of the large units you inevitably get a replication of the problem with increasing scale.

It's clearly one of the reasons Google did what they did. At 60,000 employees they were beginning to drown in the bureaucracy of it all.

I don't think free-market advocates would say that it doesn't apply to corporations/companies. I wouldn't either, as an anarcho-capitalist, say so.

The difference is that in a corporation it doesn't matter if the individuals in power get corrupted. If you work on the assumption that bad behavior by the company/corporation is pushed-back in the free-market, then the corrupt actions have to serve the customers/clients, otherwise other companies are given an advantage.

Of course, that singular assumption is a huge sticking-point for a lot of pro/vs discussions when it comes to free-market principles.

The difference is that within a corporation, power accumulation is the expected behavior.
My burning man camp, http://thephage.org/, recognized the underlying oligarchy in our own organization and decided to make it open and explicit by identify leaders through proxy voting (https://github.com/ThePhage/phage-proxy) on a few different axes: who each individual thought was best at conflict resolution, who we would each go to for life advice, etc.

The end result was remarkably high-confidence, transparent, and harmonious. I expect proxy voting will have a far more significant role in the future.

>'cook2': ('A second Phageling you trust to enjoy cooking with!',

Cooks are leaders at Burning Man?

Is this similar to instant runoff voting? Only had time to glance at the code..

> Is this similar to instant runoff voting?

No it involves building a graph of voter preferences to find the central nodes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxy_voting#Delegated_voting

For a counter-argument, see Karl Popper's The Open Society and it Enemies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Open_Society_and_Its_Enemi...

I think this is largely explained by Hayek's 'Problem of Knowledge in Society': http://www.econlib.org/library/Essays/hykKnw1.html

Direct Democracy was impossible and representative democracy was necessary because it was impossible to aggregate the wishes of a populace.

Mass telecommunication solves or at least paves the road to solving this problem.

What people may wish for and what needs to be done seem, to me, to be completely different things.

Take Germans and their nuclear power plants. Despite the plants in Japan failing because of conjunction of shoddy construction, earthquake and tsunami, of which only 1 could even be a case in Germany - Germans closed their nuke plants in response.

I don't see how wise decisions would result from aggregation. We've not been shaped by evolution to be rational or realistic, but to have an inflated opinion of self and of our chances - because that was advantageous.

I really doubt that is the case when it comes to running countries.

I think that direct democracy enabled by online voting and blockchain technology will eventually supersede the current representative system of democracy. I can understand that pre-internet it was necessary to have a representative democracy as it would not be possible to have all citizens vote in-person or by mail on all issues, but with the internet a direct democracy seems viable even at a large scale.

While there would be security and privacy issues to overcome with a digital direct democracy, at least it would not be as susceptible to corporate capture as our current representative systems of democracy.

Serious question: given the track record of direct democracy in California, what reason do we have for expecting that direct democracy would work for a country as large as the United States?

And who runs foreign policy? How do state secrets work? Is there still a president and a bureaucracy and cabinet ministers?

I believe California has demonstrated that the public voting directly on propositions is a terrible idea.
The problem is not technological, it's definitional.

From the definition of "society", any society must make decisions that affect all of its members, otherwise they aren't a society, they're a collection of non-interacting individuals. From the definition of "decision", these decisions must be framed by an individual - we have yet to master mind-meld technologies. From the definition of "power", the people who make the decisions have the power.

Majority voting is a red-herring. The way that existing power structures operate today is to frame the terms of the decision: they define what the alternatives are. Take a look at who sponsors ballot initiatives in California: very often, you'll find that a process that's as close to direct democracy as you'll get in modern society was actually sponsored by a wealthy billionaire or corporation behind the scenes, and he has crafted both the legislation and the public messaging around the legislation to suit his interests. If the voting public is faced with two alternatives and option A enriches elite #1 at the expense of the public while option B enriches elite #2 at the expense of the public, you can't really say that the voters have power.

I mean, I don't actually feel like direct democracy will work, as you will get uninformed, but popular decisions being made.

Take a look at the SF Housing crisis, I feel like a large part of the "lack of houses, but lots of companies" problem is the result of Proposition 13 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Proposition_13_(197...). This means that each municipality would much rather host a company that pays tax than have housing (which the city comparatively loses money on), which leads to the current problems. (At least in part)

I fear other propositions like that one, which sound great ("No more taxes!"), but have subtle, but large consequences would get passed by such a system more readily.

Agreed, we can begin by wholly replacing the House, electing minimally compensated emergency representatives in the event of infrastructure failure. Legislation may be voted upon and edited word-for-word, tracked by a git-like interface, each edit vetted and voted upon by the whole country.
Slightly pessimistic. Also, in 1911 knowledge about what works and doesn't work was a lot more limited. The safeguards modern democracies employ now are far superior. At the very least the control of information doesn't work as well as some people would like...

On the other hand there will always be a power differential between those who strive to political leadership (often sacrificing a lot on the way) and those who don't participate at all. And even in a completely equal power share, the power of an individual in a nation of millions is so small that it is easy to confuse it with zero.

1911 is about half way between the rise of modern democracy and present day, and the pace of development is faster in the beginning. Parliaments and political drama had been around much longer still.
This is precisely why we should change our sampling process for selecting representatives, from corruptible elections, to completely random selection.

For more info, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition

The problem here is that you ultimately will get a class of advisors/administrators in the civil service or from third party lobbyists that will serve as a backbone of experience for these groups of people, and they will be needed simply because they lack the experience and knowledge required to make correct decisions.

That in itself will likely devolve into an oligarchic structure.

"Michels theory states that all complex organizations, regardless of how democratic they are when started, eventually develop into oligarchies."

How is sortition going to help? It should either also become an oligarchy, or simply be a dysfunctional government, or not actually have anything at all to do with this subject.

Just wrote a sortition channel mode after seeing this.

Of course there's always the chance that your randomly elected leaders might then choose to do away with sortition.

https://github.com/LukeB42/psyrcd/blob/master/scripts/sortit...

For a nice study of how this law extends to online peer production communities, see https://mako.cc/academic/shaw_hill-laboratories_of_oligarchy...