Professor Quigley and the democratic sham
By Antonia Feitz
web
posted November 22, 1999
The virtues of democracy are constantly preached to the nations of the world. Yet the elites who actually run the show have made no secret of their contempt for democracy itself, and especially for the people who believe in it. Far-fetched? Not at all. Consider what US Professor Caroll Quigley thought about political parties way back in 1966. Warning, this is what the elites really think.
He wrote: "The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one perhaps of the Right, and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extensive shifts in policy.... [E]ither party in office becomes in time corrupt, tired, unenterprising, and vigorless. Then it should be possible to replace it, every four years if necessary, by the other party, which will be none of these things but will still pursue, with new vigor, approximately the same policies". [1]
In other words, only simpletons believe that changing the government will change government policies. Under the party political system, democracy is a total sham. It has been so for many years, and the sham is intentional. But anybody who draws attention to that fact is labelled a 'conspiracy theorist' by the media. Journalists in the mainstream media are either unutterably stupid, or else unutterably hypocritical. Take your pick. Actually, mainstream journalists are now being exposed for the fools and/or hypocrites they really are. After all, Quigley's anti-democratic system of government is now out in the open. It's chic. It's even got a name: they call it the Third Way. All the sophisticated people of the world think the Third Way is progressive but it's nothing of the sort. It's an unholy marriage between socialism and capitalism and combines features of both. The two sides have divvied up the spoils. Under the Third Way, the socialists have been licensed to exercise tyranny over people's thoughts and actions, and the capitalists have been given free rein to be as rapacious as they like with no moral or social obligations.
Consider Australia. Australia has compulsory voting. Yep, you even get fined if you don't vote without a good reason. Such as dying. But Australia's electoral system has been so corrupted by the major parties that election results no longer even vaguely represent the will of the people. For instance, in the last federal election in 1998, with 8.4 per cent of the primary vote, the One Nation Party failed to win a seat in the House of Representatives. But with 5.3 per cent of the vote, the National Party won 14 seats. True. It's THAT bad.
This travesty only happened because the government rushed through legislation specifically designed to achieve that result. Why? Fear of the One Nation Party, which was a genuine grassroots alternative party. So, faced with a rising tide of voter dissatisfaction with the major parties, the Australian parliament actually legislated to deny people their legitimate political voice. That's democratic?
Yes, according to elite opinion. Britain's Tony Blair is so impressed with Australia's anti-democratic preferential voting system, he's thinking of introducing it into Britain. Watch out Canada and the US. If Blair succeeds, he won't have to put up with those irritating independents and minor party representatives that his own country's first-past-the-post system presently delivers. The Murdoch media empire is firmly behind the push. That's surely contempt for democracy. Now let's look at the contempt for democrats themselves.
Unsurprisingly, the anti-democratic Professor Quigley admired people he called aristocrats - Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt was the example he gave - and those he called semi aristocrats - such as the Rockefellers and the Kennedys. Extolling the virtues of the aristocracy, this American scholar seriously claimed that they "placed no emphasis on display of material affluence" and were "more sincere ... and less hypocritical than the middle class." [2]
Dear reader, it might even come in handy to remember that according to Dr Quigley, you can always tell people's class from the way they treat their servants. Yep, "... the lower classes treat these as equals, the middle classes treat them as inferiors, while aristocrats treat them as equals or even superiors". [3]. But of course! Everybody knows how the lower classes treat their servants! And no doubt the Rockefellers and Kennedys treat their servants as their superiors. Why, I for one wouldn't be in the least surprised to learn that David Rockefeller brings his chauffeur breakfast in bed!
In the light of this self-deluded foolishness, one can only wonder what planet Quigley was beamed down from.
In contrast to the 'noblesse oblige' of the American aristocrats, Quigley defines the middle class by their "decisiveness, selfishness, impersonality, ruthless energy, and insatiable ambition". How odd then, that those qualities more aptly describe the 'semi aristocratic' Kennedys and Rockefellers than the likes of your local butcher, baker or candlestick-maker. But the majority of the middle class are what Quigley called the petty bourgeoisie. Note the Marxist language. He loathed them. Eerily, he described them in terms that are reminiscent of the Australian media's abuse of One Nation supporters thirty years later, even down to the parallel with the Nazis.
According to Quigley, the petty bourgeoisie - "clerks, shopkeepers, and vast numbers of office workers" - are "very insecure, envious, filled with hatreds, and are generally the chief recruits for any Radical Right, Fascist or hate campaigns against any group that is different or which refuses to conform to middle class values". They "live in an atmosphere of envy, pettiness, insecurity, and frustration. They form the major portion of the Republican Party's supporters in the towns of = America, as they did for the Nazis in Germany thirty years ago". [4].
From this diatribe, it's easy to see why the elites fear and loathe ordinary people. For a start, through bitter experience too many of them see through the political charade, and consequently will often support a genuine grassroots opposition party if one arises. They don't play the 'game'. For that, they are a constant threat. Interestingly, Quigley's loathing is a classic case of psychological projection because it is the likes of him who hate, not the shop-keepers and the office workers. Far from hating people who don't "conform to middle class values", they simply want to be left alone to live their lives with as little government interference as possible.
It's the likes of Quigley and his intellectual heirs who insist people
conform to their politically correct world view. They are the ones who
intrude into everybody's lives, telling them what to think, and even how
to rear their children. They are the ones who cannot live and let live,
who are incapable of minding their own business. Why? because they see
themselves as superior beings whose mission in life is to guide us lesser
mortals to accept their enlightened views. And if we resist, we will be
forced. The plethora of anti-discrimination tribunals and human rights
commissions attests to the truth of that.
After the One Nation Party's experience, Australians don't need dry academic tomes to know about the elites' hatred of ordinary people. According to the Australian mainstream media, the Party's supporters were 'whiners', 'ugly', 'troglodytes', 'racist', 'hard-core bigots', 'losers', 'village idiots'. And 'a disorganised, ratbag, white supremacist, inarticulate and dumb mob of populists and opportunists'. [5]. This venomous bile emanated from some of Australia's media elites. So much for the much-vaunted virtue of tolerance, let alone the possibility of genuine democracy.
By now, the media worldwide is well-practised in this demonization of outsiders. It's a tried-and-true technique which works like a charm. In 1964, Republican Senator Barry Goldwater's campaign for the US presidency looked very strong. Goldwater's patriotic appeal to the Republican grassroots made him a threat to the Establishment. When his political opponents failed to stop him, the Establishment sooled the media onto him in exactly the same way they did to One Nation's leader, Pauline Hanson, thirty odd years later.
His views on the issues of the day were lost in a barrage of hysterical media accusations that he was 'extremist', 'racist', etc. It's all so depressingly familiar: "... the press was so violently antagonistic to Goldwater that even if they had wanted to be honest about it, it was impossible for them to be honest because they were so busy looking for weaknesses... [T]he press ... performed the function of the opposition." [6]. And it's still happening. All over the world, grassroots parties get the same treatment, smeared as 'populist', 'racist', extremist' etc.
So there you have it, ladies and gentlemen. While using - no, abusing
- democracy for their own advantage in securing lap-dog governments at
their beck and call, the elites privately despise it. The likes of David
Rockefeller, Rupert Murdoch, and Henry Kissinger are NOT democrats any
more than Professor Carroll Quigley was. The only reason he was so frank
about his opinions was because he never expected his door-stop of a book
would ever be picked-up by any member of the despised petty bourgeoisie.
Silly him. Like all the elites, he suffered from hubris. 
1. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope: a History of the World in our Time
(New York : Macmillan, 1966), p.1248.
2. Ibid., p.1241
3. Ibid., p.1243
4. Ibid., p.1243-4
5. Scott Balson, Murder By Media: Death of Democracy in Australia (Queensland
: Interactive Presentations, 1999), p.3
6. W. Cleon Skousen, The Naked Capitalist (Salt Lake City, The Author,
1970), p.101
Antonia Feitz is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right.
