I agree that certain individuals today and throughout history have had a disproportionate impact on how decisions are made, resources allocated, rules favoring one group or another are tweaked or modified or overturned. Many are unelected and many work behind the scenes. The Federal Reserve Board is a good example.
However, I also believe that there are constraints in the equation even among the most powerful. Louis XVI was an absolute dictator but was murdered by his own people. Napoleon rose to power and declared himself emperor and established an empire that continues to influence us today (the legal code of Louisiana, for example). Mao murdered millions and had a centrally planned economy but the heirs of his system find even they have had to make some modifications after 1989 that the early leaders would have never dreamed of. They didn't do this because they wanted to but because they had to. The people demanded it and even an absolute monarch must at some level heed the will of the people.
My view is that this tug of war between the few and the many, between the rich and the poor, the owners of capital and the workers has been playing out since the most primitive cultures developed surplus income, and with it, the ability to accumulate wealth. The history of ancient Greece, Rome, and the more recent conflicts in Europe over the past 200 years between the liberals (advocates of representative parliamentary democracy) and conservatives (monarchists of one form or another) seems a messy, noisy struggle over how best to organize a society. I believe several different formulae work. For now the liberals have won in the West, but the Chinese hybrid model or a Singapore model may be demonstrating it is at least a viable alternative.
Rupert Murdoch may buy papers, but ordinary people have to read them. The oligarchs may declare their currency must be at a certain level by fiat, but clearly traders around the world may have different opinions. We may want to cut interest rates to goose the economy, but there are real world consequences in terms of the dollar, inflation, etc. The small group of people you feel is in charge of the world may desire to punish Iran, but Russia clearly is not interested in going along with this plan. They may want to punish China, but China helps buy a billion dollars of our debt every day. They may want to be greeted as liberators and plant Jeffersonian democracy in Iraq, but the Iraqi people clearly have other ideas about the matter (and they are prevailing despite all the power and high technology and concentration of power we enjoy).
If the oligarchs completely ruled everything, the world would look much more like Europe in the 1200s than the West today. We would not have Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security, the 5-day week or the 8-hour workday, OSHA, the FDA if the owners of capital, who gain nothing directly from these programs and would gain quite a bit from their elimination, if the wealthy few were entirely in charge. True, they got their tax cut, a massive transfer of societal wealth away from the poor to the richest 1% and their war, which was fought disproportionately by the poor, and they managed to convince Americans that the estate tax (the "death tax" as they called it) was a populist issue. But they could not manipulate the 2006 thumping and have little power over the 2008 one to come.
Conspiracy theories implicitly assume that there is one set of levers to control the engine of state and that whoever has their hands on the levers is a unified group with a uniform agenda. History strikes me as much more messy than that. As Kurt Vonnegut said, we are all just farting around down here and anyone who tells you differently is lying.
Our current system, the product of liberal democratic movements mostly in Western and Northern Europe, is at once fragile and strong. The fact that the many have a voice means that voice can be manipulated, and the current occupants of the White House demonstrate that manipulation can be executed with breathtakingly bold effectiveness. But even viewers of Fox News eventually get wind of an external reality, a relative in New Orleans or a friend in Iraq or a surprise jump in their family health insurance deductible, and they usually get it. A little slow on the uptake, but they do get it. That is the strength of our system, that despite all the lobbyists and the secret energy meetings and the sidestepping of laws and oversights, in the end, ours is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Governments, particularly popularly elected ones, do a lot of stupid things that most certainly do not always represent most of the people, but on balance they usually end up getting it right.
If 200 years ago, I had said that one day slaves would be free, blacks could vote, women could testify in court and even vote themselves, that Senators would be directly elected and even 18 year-olds could vote, anyone alive would have called me a fool and a visionary. If I had said there would be an income and an inheritance tax and a social security safety net for the old, poor, and disabled, most reasonable people would have said never.
But of course all those things happened and I think we can continue to surprise ourselves with what we can do under an Obama-Clinton administration. Just a thought.
