Centerfield

Knowing Yer Enemy: Iran And Communist States Are Politically Oligarchies

We liked to talk in the Cold War about how our opponents were Communist Dictatorships, and today about how Iran is an evil theocracy or dictatorship. But neither is true. The "evil" bit seems reasonable to me, but they aren't/weren't dictatorships, but oligarchies.

Actually, in the early stages of each state, that was fair enough - I don't think too many people ignored Lenin, Stalin's, Mao's, or Khomeini's orders - the conquences tended to be bad. They WERE dictators. But after that, powers had a way of balancing at least somewhat just to make sure tyranny didn't happen again. The chief executives couldn't just do whatever they wanted. That's still true.

This post will say some nice things about oligarchy, so I want to first it make clear that I think republican representative democracy works much better. Representative democracy has a decidedly better human rights, economic, and research record.

Oligarchies have structures with balancing powers, just like the American Presidency, Congress, and Judiciary. An executive must convince several people to do anything serious instead of ruling by whim. And, even when the executive of a state passes within a family, there's a powerful elite to rule when idiots come to power. Oligarchies are capable of self-reform. Rome upgraded itself gradually into having elected executives and lower house. China hardly looks like the same nation as under Mao.

Oligarchies mostly have some kind of aristocracy with special rights. Often they're the only electors. In Communist states, it's the Communist Party.

Oligarchy was invented in Classical Greece, where it was massively successful, notably in Sparta. This post is really a response to me reading classical Greek historians, and thinking, hey, that's still going on today. It outperformed direct democracy in the issue of empire. Athens and other city-state democracies of the day were mostly richer and more innovative than Sparta.

Athens was at a loss when the cities started conglomerating by conquest into bigger states. Athens had sucess twice growing empires, and lost it both times, and then was conquered by Macedonia; that was the end of Athenian democracy until Greece escaped the Ottoman Empire.

Each time, Athenian citizens grew arrogant and lost their empire by making stupid decisions, like the City of Washington, DC does, and having poisonous internal politics. Oligarchies grew arrogant, but still chose decent generals, because of their better checks and balances. We do better because we have many cities, only one of which has the arrogance of an imperial city. To be president, you have to win mostly non-Washingtonians, and there is no imperial-city vote in Congress. No native Washingtonian has ever been elected President.

Rome was founded as an oligarchy (they called it a republic), with a monarchy and nobly-elected Senate to keep each other in check, and grew more liberal as time went on. Their rise went on for century after century until about a century after the Republic fell and was replaced by a much worse-performing monarchy, the Empire, After that, it slowly shrank and grew more and more static and unadaptable.

Over centuries, oligarchies tend to acquire limited notions of human rights. Human rights, including voting rights, do grow over time, but the idea of equality is mostly absent. The aristocracy keeps some advantages over the centuries.