In this article, we’re going to address Dr. de Mesquite’s Selectorate Theory, which is a theory that the distribution of wealth and power in a society depends on the proportion of eligible voters to non-voters. In this theory, the eligible voters are referred to as the “selectorate,” as they select who’s in charge. In countries like Saudi Arabia, China, and North Korea, the selectorate is extremely small and thus, the best way for decision-makers to retain their power is to focus on satisfying only that small group of people. Oftentimes, the selectorate in these authoritarian countries is composed of generals, party staffers, and relatives to the autocrat. In countries like Germany, Denmark, and Finland, the selectorate comprises the voters and their politicians, who are voted into power by eligible adults. In the United States of America, the selectorate has changed since the passing of Citizens’ United, as now corporations play almost the same role in choosing politicians as voters do. Overall, the size of the selectorate helps to decide on how egalitarian and free the country in question is. This has less to do with the ideals of ideologies and more to do with simple power-resource dynamics, because material conditions determine social conditions. In this article, we’re going to look into how selectorates develop, and what is wrong with traditional selectorates. This may be one of the more important articles I ever write on this website, due to the fact that if we get this wrong, all the new concepts in the world won’t save us.
In the United States of America, we’ve seen progressives expand the selectorate again and again. We’ve seen the abolition of literacy tests, and we’ve seen people fighting against both Voter ID legislation as well as fighting for felons to vote. In the United States of America, almost anyone can vote on almost any issue, and while their representatives will most likely go with whatever their corporate donors want, that’s still worrying to a degree. The problem with American politics is that most people, even if they are politically engaged, are informed by corporate and government media outlets. When political information is reduced to emotional appeals, symbolism, and thought-ending cliches, the selectorate often act as just extensions of their media-owning masters. Due to the fact that Americans treat politics like they treat football games, with political parties being teams to cheer for and identify with, most Americans don’t really know much of anything about economics and political theory. When political parties are treated like football teams, you’re not questioning your own team and it’s players as much as you should, rather being focused on just your team winning instead. Presidential elections in America are more akin to the super bowl and SNL than anything else, with witty retorts determining who wins “debates,” clandestine election rules determining who runs and wins in the primaries, and all in all, our political process just resembles a complicated sportsball game at this point. The problem with American politics is that, in letting everyone vote and in letting people view it as a national pastime, as a way to reaffirm your identity and advance your in-group interests, we’ve outsourced our thinking to the news media. When corporations are constructing your worldviews, when you know as much about economics and political theory as a five year old who knows addition knows about math, it’s easy to mislead people.
In cases like the “right to work” movement, we’ve seen American proletarians happily vote against their interests as long as their team told them to. Truckers in America today make only 50% of what they used to in the 1970’s, due to the attacks on unions, but many truckers today would call you a communist for suggesting they unionize again. It’s not because syndicalism and communism are the same thing but rather that the narrative about unions has been twisted by corporations to the point that they’re reviled now. The perversity of the American political system is that the vast selectorate’s submission is completely voluntary to a large extent, and America has begun to showcase the same traits as more traditional authoritarian regimes as the years go by. In America, because we’ve made a game of politics, where national elections resemble the super bowl more than reasoned discourse, where media corporations add negative connotations onto whatever is less profitable for them, we live in a society of automatons triggered to vote one way or another by knee-jerk emotional reactions to news stimuli. People freak out about white erasure in Netflix films, while not even addressing Trump’s Platinum Plan, which doled out half a trillion of dollars to black businesses. Americans treat their favorite political leaders with the same unquestioning support that we see in authoritarian regimes. It doesn’t matter how many of them, if any of them, even benefit from policies, as long as the exalted leader sputters out of a string of loaded words, with connotations crafted over decades by corporate media for anti-worker purposes.
Unlike in Europe and Japan, where the populations are relatively homogenous and a culture of compassion isn’t looked down upon as something only pansies want, America doesn’t have much of that. In Europe and Japan, the governments actually try to tackle problems that the people are facing, because the people are less divided to begin with and a culture of compassion, of extending resources to others similar to you who are in need, has been allowed to develop. In America, we never had those dynamics and we’re suffering for it, eking out a living in a country with an anti-worker government run by groups manipulated into hating each other. Here, politics for parties is stuck in a cycle of trying to absorb new groups with concessions made by existing bases, with no group ever really getting what they want. Democrats want the ghettos in inner cities to exist as much as Republicans want the run-down trailer parks in Alabama to exist, because it guarantees them a longer-lasting narrative that they can play up to retain their base. Until Trump’s Supreme Court picks did away with abortion earlier this year, it was commonly thought that conservatives kept it around so long in order to drum up support from their evangelical base. When Trump had both the congress and senate in his hands, they never touched abortion, so it’s interesting that only this past year, under Biden’s tenure, have conservatives gone after it. It is worth noting that, from a class interests perspective, the Supreme Court is motivated less by political convenience and more by whatever principles they subscribe to. Keeping the political theater’s narratives alive is less important to the Supreme Court than legitimizing their views and etching their names down in history.
When we understand why America’s selectorate is so feeble, unlike our counterparts in other developed nations, it makes more sense why we’re the anomaly. America has never been a democratic socialist country like our friends in Europe, nor has it embraced the collective capitalism seen in Japan. At the time that these transitions were happening in our peers, unions had tamed the free market and made it benefit us in ways that no country has replicated since. There was no state solutions needed for a market that had been beaten into submission by workers and labor-friendly politicians. This is best exemplified by two things in particular, I believe: associating benefits with employment during World War 2 and the lack of a need for universal healthcare, given the union healthcare benefits that Americans used to enjoy, in the 1950s. During World War Two, in order to avoid companies engaging in bidding wars for the employees left in the workforce, FDR capped pay. Companies responded by offering incentives for workers to work for them in the form of juicier benefits, resulting in the bidding war taking place in terms of benefits, as opposed to direct income. Following World War Two, as the unionization rate of the workforce continued to increase, so did the benefits we received from our employers. Pensions, free healthcare, and other kinds of subpay were par for the course during this time period. Across every other developed nation in the world, universe and single-payer healthcare systems were being voted into place. At the time, there was even a very strong push for America to adopt such a system, but due to our golden age of syndicalism allowing so many people to benefit from free private healthcare, the transition seemed redundant to Americans and legislation for it never was passed.
In the following decades, as unions were decimated and healthcare transitioned from a non-profit industry into a for-profit industry, that mistake has come to haunt us. The mistake that our country made was in not ensuring state guarantees for these benefits, instead relying on the market not to try and buck off the unions that had been riding it for years. As material conditions changed, as new technologies facilitated the affordability of longer-range supply chains, as trade alliances began to form between China and America, we would see the gradual eradication of organized labor begin. America today is close to where it was at the start of the Gilded Ages, with no guaranteed healthcare, no old-age pensions besides a social security system that pays out pennies, stagnant wages, and so on. The void left by labor organizations has been picked up by corporations eager to disrupt solidarity and pump our heads full of pro-employer propaganda. Trickle-down economics is a good example of this, as is the perverse idea that minimum wage isn’t supposed to be lived off of by a family, but rather help high school kids get entry-level jobs. The term “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps,” which was once a humorous phrase that referred to the absurdity of doing such a thing, is now genuinely believed by many Americans. All in all, America today offers very little to its citizens and it’s own people have justified worse and worse conditions for themselves with corporate-approved, delusional yet motivational outlooks. Even though our selectorate is vast, rational voices matter less and less year by year as we’re drowned out by capitalist propaganda.
The takeaway is that although the size of the selectorate matters, people can be duped and mislead to the point that they see things in ways that only the elite would normally see things, betraying their own class in the process. While the selectorate theory works in many countries, its validity depends entirely on how the people view themselves, with Americans often having grandiose ideas about their fortunes to come. Chomsky called this group of people “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” and he wasn’t wrong, because all this bootstraps rhetoric is genuinely out-of-place in the minds of workers. If people in the 18th century saw the “pulling yourself up by the bootstraps” rhetoric as a humorous phrase meant to imply the impossibility of something, it’s really disturbing that this phrase is treated today as not only doable but desirable. I could go on and on about this problem that America has culturally, as I have to work with delusional conservative coworkers every day, but there’s another related thing I want to touch on. We all know that the Soviet Union’s rulers operated differently than the rulers of the socialist states they spawned, but there may be a reason why this was the case. When we look at the Soviet Union, with its rapid industrialization, emphasis on public transportation, development of quality medical facilities, and universal education, it’s easy to ask why this development did not occur in other parts of the Marxist-Leninist world.
I emailed Dr. de Mesquita several years ago, asking about the services offered to Soviet citizens in the Soviet Union. Unlike China, Cuba, and North Korea, the Soviet Union made good on most of its promises in one way or another. The answer was that while the Soviet Union provided these things, they didn’t provide them to everyone despite their claims to the contrary, and often did just enough to ensure the smooth functioning of society. Dr. de Mesquita argued that the Soviet Union’s leadership were simply incentivized to keep the workers healthy, get them to and from work, and provide shelter for them. Dr. de Mesquita went on to say that while the Soviet Union produced many technicians, it didn’t produce professionals of the proficiency that we have in the west. It seems that the Soviet Union was so productive in comparison to its peers primarily because it had to be, sharing borders with some of the most powerful colonial empires in history. Stalin was preparing for WW2 throughout the 1930’s, believing if the Soviet Union didn’t meet its production targets, that it would surely meet its end in the war to come. At the time that Stalin took power, the Soviet Union was the only socialist state in history and it was believed by its leadership that its position was extremely precarious. The development that took place in the Soviet Union under Stalin, was both rapid and crushingly brutal for its workers. The weekend was banned, families were pulled apart by conflicting work schedules, and life resembled an endless act of labor for many of the workers. It seemed that the Soviet Union, with no allies, surrounded by powerful adversaries, built itself up to ensure its leadership weren’t removed from power by outside influences.
In places like China, North Korea, and Cuba, we didn’t see similar pushes to industrialize on the same scale because the socialist camp had already been established. There wasn’t a need to be rational and practical, due to the cushion afforded by having so many powerful allies. As long as Cuba had Soviet nuclear weapons, it didn’t need to worry about its neighbors. As long as China had the Soviet Union to back itself up, as well as a pacifist Japan acting as it’s biggest adversary, its leadership never felt the same pressures that the Bolsheviks did. It’s here where, if we combined Leopold Kohr’s theories about international power dynamics with Dr. de Mesquita’s theories about the selectorate, we can begin to understand why nations move in the directions that they do. In Leopold Kohr’s studies, he found that cultures weren’t more warlike than one another, and that the amount of war one nation indulged in was directly correlated with how much power it wielded over its neighbors. The Ottoman Empire, launching endless wars into the heartlands of Europe for centuries, only waged war because it could afford to do so with no fear of recourse. It seems that in Kohr’s observations about why countries went to war, that the lack of possible recourse and the possibility of winning were the biggest factors in predicting whether a country went to war with another country. Countries don’t wage wars they know they’ll lose and this has always been the case. In understanding this interesting sidenote, we can begin to understand how international power dynamics shape the actions of the selectorate in countries with top-down systems. For these small groups with voting power, they’re primarily motivated by retaining their wealth and power, rather than improving the livelihoods of the citizenry. The developments in the Soviet Union, from the rushed education to the factory-like medical system to the rushed development of housing, was out of necessity to bolster Soviet economic growth and cement its status as a stable state capable of withstanding war.
The gains in living standards, in countries with small selectorates, were completely circumstantial. It was simply a positive externality, rather than any purposeful process. When we understand that the class interests of the selectorate determine what legislation is crafted and passed, we can begin to see politics in a rational light. For all their successes, everything the Bolsheviks tried to accomplish after several decades was dictated by what the apparatchiks wanted. Ideology mattered little at all, and when we look at modern China, where college isn’t free and healthcare is private, it makes you wonder what’s so communist about Marxist-Leninism or its descendants. The reason why we can’t trust regimes with such concentrated political power is because wherever the power goes, so does the wealth due to peoples’ natural inclinations to accrue resources where they can. Should this situation arise, where the politically powerful become wealthy, the proletarians can never be represented in such systems due to a divergence in class interests. If you’re a socialist and you cannot grasp this truth, that class interests will always exist, then you’re a danger to the working class in advocating for any system that centralizes power. State Socialism needs to be more decentralized and transparent by nature, with checks and balances in place, and that’s not the kind of system that comes about through revolution. That is the kind of system that is peacefully installed, consented to, and upheld by workers because it’s in their best interests.
The governments that form during revolutionary periods, composed of a small minority of the population, are doomed to failing the people. These governments necessitate a huge concentration of power early on, just due to the quick decision-making involved in fighting civil wars and overthrowing preexisting government forces. As we’ve seen with every installation of Marxist-Leninism, the victors don’t relinquish their spoils and give power over to the people post-revolution because it goes against their new class interests. If material conditions determine social conditions, if wealth incentives matter more than ideological principles, than Vanguardist revolution by its nature may doom socialist movements to failure. Selectorate theory may be uncomfortable to look at for many socialists, but it makes sense and we’ve seen its applications countlessly. How we’d go about instituting socialism in America through other means remains to be seen, but we need to give it every effort we have to think of new ways to go about things. If MIT’s study “Limits to Growth” is wrong and technology keeps advancing, with the wealth that America has at its disposal, we might create a very dystopian place with an impossible-to-remove government if the selectorate becomes too small. Socialists like to think that this won’t matter to them, that they’ll be on the winning side, but that’s not the case most of the time. When we look at the purges and the civil wars in the Soviet Union, it was socialists killing other socialists most of the time. Lenin considered other leftists to be the largest threat to his regime, in a time when the largest military force the Bolsheviks were fighting was the pro-capitalist White Army.
The fact that America is trying to stifle emerging national socialist trends is frightening, because it’ll give way to vanguardist movements in their place that won’t be taken seriously at first. These Vanguardist movements don’t necessarily have to be Leninist or even recognizable by socialists today, but just work well enough to do the job. America is just a ticking time bomb and is counting on conservatives continuing to role play as the employer rather than the employee. To truly defeat the threat of vanguardism and the despotism to follow, we first need to bring about class consciousness and prove that our socialism can work. It’s why DMSG is involved in second-worldism, because if we can point to examples of what we advocate for working, then we can go about convincing people rather than conquering people. If we can win in convincing people, then socialism might finally succeed in what it was meant to do for the people. No dictators, no genocides; just results.
P.S. – Last year, the island I’m on went without power for three months, so it might be a challenge for me to post in the upcoming hurricane season but I’ll try my best.
