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Politics : Israel to U.S. : Now Deal with Syria and Iran -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (16270)	9/4/2007 10:58:21 AM
From: sea_urchin	Respond to of 22250

Gus > The iron law of oligarchy is a political theory, first developed by the German syndicalist sociologist Robert Michels in his 1911 book, Political Parties[**]. It states that all forms of organization, regardless of how democratic or autocratic they may be at the start, will eventually and inevitably develop into oligarchies. The idea is a lot older than that. Go back to Ancient Greece and to Polybius. en.wikipedia.org >>He [Polybius] is also renowned for his ideas of political balance in the government, which was later used in the drafting of the United States Constitution<< And it is clear that the Founding Fathers had anticipated what has now befallen the US where democracy has in fact been overthrown. It is also clear that the Founding Fathers attempted to build safeguards into the Constitution to prevent this but these safeguards have been subverted by a Republican Party bent on tyranny and a spineless Democratic Party majority. freerepublic.com >>For monarchy, he [Polybius] claims, inevitably degrades into tyranny. Tyranny is then replaced by aristocracy, which in turn degrades into oligarchy. Oligarchy then is overthrown by democracy, which ultimately falls into its own corresponding distortion, mob-rule (or ochlocracy). In Polybius’ analysis, the cycle then starts up again (monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy) since anarchy inevitably creates a void that some new demagogue will fill. 'Anaku/klwsij, the sliding from one form of constitution into another, is unavoidable because of the inherent weakness of each simple form of constitution.9 The catalyst for the decay in each simple form, Polybius says (6.7.7), is hereditary succession--the automatic handing down of the privileges of a particular form of government to future generations without their ever having to internalize for themselves the discipline necessary to maintain those privileges. Each of the three simple forms of constitution serves well enough at its inception, since founder kings arise out of their very excellence of character, aristocracies (by definition at least) form from the noblest of society, and democracies too embrace the highest ideals at the outset. The problem lies not with the initial impetus that forms these governments but with the fact that they each suffer entropy, or internal decay.<<