In this episode, Oren talks about the impact of Trump's executive orders on immigration, and the role of the "jurisdictional defense" as a means of defending the rule of law. He also discusses a new book by Gautano Mosca, "The Ruling Class."
00:00:00.260What's better than a well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue?
00:00:04.120A well-marbled ribeye sizzling on the barbecue that was carefully selected by an Instacart shopper and delivered to your door.
00:00:10.860A well-marbled ribeye you ordered without even leaving the kiddie pool.
00:00:15.320Whatever groceries your summer calls for, Instacart has you covered.
00:00:19.460Download the Instacart app and enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders.
00:00:24.340Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply.
00:00:27.020Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.
00:00:30.000Good afternoon. How's it going, everybody? Thanks for joining me. I am Oren McIntyre.
00:00:38.200Obviously, a lot going on with the third day of Trump's presidency.
00:00:44.180The hits have continued to come. The executive orders have continued to flow.
00:00:50.660We have seen the issuing of a repeal of affirmative action, at least from the executive side of things.
00:00:58.600And just more and more, Trump is allowing people to be deported, apparently, without any kind of need for asylum.
00:01:09.340The asylum process. I'm looking more into that, see how these things are kind of flowing fast and furious.
00:01:15.900So we're going to continue to check those out.
00:01:17.360Actually, on Friday, I'm going to have Jeremy Carl on, and we're going to get in with some more depth on the official nature of these different executive orders,
00:01:27.600how they impact specifically affirmative action and many of the other things that Trump has promised to work on.
00:01:33.140So we'll do a deeper dive on that. That's not the topic of today's show.
00:01:37.600But obviously, just wanted to point out that Trump is taking action.
00:01:42.040He's doing what he can with the executive pin.
00:01:46.320And obviously, there's a lot more to get done.
00:01:49.680The executive orders, anything that is done with them can be undone with them.
00:01:53.980And so you do need to submit these things into law.
00:01:57.760The changes that he has made to birthright citizenship and other things are monumental changes.
00:02:02.840They are huge wins if they stick around.
00:04:59.440It's challenging from the sense that the, you know, the topic is dense and complex.
00:05:04.300But he is not writing in a way that obscures what you're trying to understand.
00:05:08.020So if you want to read The Ruling Class for yourself, I wouldn't say accessible is the word, but it's a mountain you can climb.
00:05:14.820I think if you put your time into it, it's not something that you're just going to go through and say, I have no idea what this was trying to say.
00:05:23.180So getting to the actual topic at hand.
00:05:27.120And like I said, Gitano Mosca, one of the foundational guys when it comes to elite theory.
00:05:32.820And again, while he makes the point that the ruling elites are the ones that make all of the biggest decisions, ultimately, that one of the things that defines a good and just nation, one that is a society that you want to live in,
00:05:49.640is the fact that power is actually constrained in some way, that there are rules that everyone, even the powerful, ultimately have to obey, or at least if not have to obey, are encouraged to obey.
00:06:04.660And we'll kind of get to the difference there in a second.
00:06:08.020So one of the things that people don't understand about power, one of the things that is often confused, is that there are different states of order, right?
00:06:20.220And this is often a mistake that conservatives and libertarians make, is they think that you just kind of start with liberty.
00:06:28.060And if you have a country that is based on liberty, if you have a nation that is based on liberty, then everything else flows from that.
00:06:35.760But that's actually the wrong way to understand social organization.
00:06:40.500All society begins, I guess you can kind of say at some level, in states of disorder, and they move towards states of order.
00:06:49.720That's kind of what you're doing when you're building a society.
00:07:11.880And then you increase that level of order.
00:07:14.540And so at your base level, you kind of have war, right?
00:07:16.700Like that's the least organized, least orderly state is a state of war.
00:07:22.300And then you move from a state of war to a state of monopoly of violence, right?
00:07:29.300Like once there is one person or one organization that has control of kind of the application of violence inside a society, you move from a state of war to at least a state of managed peace, right?
00:07:45.260You have some level of peace and order inside your society.
00:07:49.440So you go from war to order, and then you go from order to law, right?
00:07:56.480Law is the next step where, you know, first you just had people fighting each other.
00:08:00.820Then you have, you know, the monopoly on violence is sealed into one organization or person.
00:08:06.140They have authority, but that authority is not checked by anything, right?
00:08:10.820So it's better than war because you don't have this constant fighting.
00:08:14.060You don't have the war of all against all, the Hobbesian state.
00:08:18.320But you, it's not still ideal because all the power is concentrated in one organization or one person, and they can kind of do whatever they want.
00:08:27.620And so the average person is kind of stripped of any rights, any ability to defend what is theirs.
00:08:34.180There's no private property, really, ultimately, because the person in charge can just kind of do what they want.
00:08:39.960So you go from war to order, then you go from order to law, and law is constraining the power of those that have the monopoly on violence, those that have the ability to wield the power of the state.
00:08:56.380And finally, then you can have the opportunity to cultivate liberty, right?
00:09:02.440Once you have gone from war to order, order to law, then if you have a judicial defense, which is what we're going to talk about today, you have the opportunity of liberty.
00:09:16.080So judicial defense is a critical step in kind of your ascending the orders of civilization.
00:09:23.080You want that to be there as part of your civilization.
00:09:26.560That's going to do a lot to define the lives of the people living inside your society.
00:09:33.900So Gaetano Mosca says that, yes, you, of course, we want order, right?
00:09:39.380We want to move from the state of war to the state of order, but we don't want to just stay in the state of order.
00:09:44.700Yes, the elites are going to have the power.
00:09:47.740It's going to run things, but we want to move to the next level.
00:09:52.540We want something that constrains that power.
00:09:55.380Now, the problem for, again, a lot of conservatives and libertarians, they think the way that you constrain power is just by saying it, right?
00:10:02.860Like you write it down on a piece of paper.
00:10:27.060He points to many historical examples in which people have declared themselves to be, or rather declared their nation to have equality before the law, but in practice, it never happens, right?
00:10:38.640Like they announce that, but then in function, it never occurs.
00:10:44.080So it's not enough to just say that that exists.
00:10:47.520You actually need something that enforces these, right?
00:10:51.040So you need this juridical defense, right?
00:10:53.620And so when you're instantiating this, it has to be more than just a piece of paper somewhere, something you've written down.
00:11:02.440It is something that you want to have imposed through opposing power, right?
00:11:08.540If you've ever heard me talk about Bertrand de Juvenal, you recognize that this is something that he and Gatano Mosca agree on, is ultimately what creates opposing sets of, or what creates a restriction on power is opposing sets of power, or what Gatano Mosca calls social forces, right?
00:11:30.940So these social forces oppose each other, and that's what actually creates this defense, right?
00:11:37.080That's what actually creates this way in which that power can be constrained.
00:11:42.400It's not constrained by the law itself, just the written document.
00:11:46.820It's constrained by other social forces that will be able to push back against what they are doing.
00:11:53.160All right, so he says that this defense is ultimately a core respect for government and law.
00:12:08.860And so the amount of respect for government and law in any society is really going to define the quality of life of the people living inside of it.
00:12:19.720And he says often that this is thrown into chaos during times of technological and economic advancement.
00:12:27.140So this is something that can exist in your society, but then can kind of be suspended as like radical changes.
00:12:35.660And so when we see technological and economic advancement, we can think of it as a good thing, but it's actually something that can throw kind of the respect for law and order and government into periods of chaos.
00:12:45.940So we kind of think of this progress as a constantly good thing, but it might not be for the people who are living under it in certain situations.
00:12:54.320Yeah, maybe you have quality of life increases because like new medical technologies come out or you can feed more people and that's great.
00:13:00.500But those are also going to create like social revolutionary forces that are going to upend the different ways in which your society was balanced.
00:13:09.620Because again, social forces are what actually creates the ability to have this defense, to have this codification of law and this respect for the law.
00:13:20.500The political organization of your society is what is going to determine the way that this defense takes place.
00:13:28.700So, you know, it's not just something that emerges out of nowhere.
00:13:33.240Your society needs to have a certain level of complexity and organization, a way in which it is formed so that this can exist.
00:13:41.280And again, he says the worst scenario, right, the way in which this is least evident is when all of your power is unified in one place.
00:13:52.240So he, despite being an elite theorist, right, he's not actually for absolutism.
00:13:57.200He thinks that absolutism is going to quickly dissolve kind of the quality of life of people inside your society.
00:14:05.740And ultimately, you don't want these super simple unified powers to exist or your ability to have judicial defense is just going to, it's going to fall apart, right?
00:14:36.120You need additional divisions of power for this to really work.
00:14:41.420And he goes with the classic, you know, Aristotle, Polybius, you know, the classic assertion that the mixed constitution is what actually restrains power, right?
00:14:52.120That that's what really creates the most balanced society.
00:14:56.720And so he says, we want to see these emergent social forces that are going to allow for the mixed constitution.
00:15:02.060But the thing is, you can't just kind of will them into existence.
00:15:06.100They have to be real organic forces in your society or no one is going to respect and follow them, right?
00:15:12.740So if you have, you know, the king and then you're just like, well, we'll just kind of create these other social forces and they'll be the ones that kind of dial back his power.
00:15:21.620That's not going to work because no one's going to respect those social forces.
00:15:25.520They're just going to follow what the guy with power says.
00:15:28.300You need real organic forces that kind of emerge inside your society that wield true power and can kind of constrict what that original bringer of order had.
00:15:40.360The bringer of order is still really important, to be clear.
00:15:43.200He's not disrespecting the bringing of order.
00:15:45.640He's not saying that we don't want that.
00:15:46.980He recognizes this as a critical step towards the betterment of society and the complexity of society.
00:15:53.080But ultimately, you have to move beyond that.
00:15:55.840It is not enough to just have that kind of unified singular power.
00:16:02.160You need organizations that are going to go ahead and push back against it.
00:16:06.720Again, not just because you wrote them down on paper, not just we said there are three branches of government, so therefore they push back.
00:16:12.860No, you actually need real organic sources of these social forces that are going to say no and they're going to have a foundation deep in kind of the custom tradition, understanding and day-to-day life of the people that you are interacting with.
00:16:31.980So, sorry, check my notes here real quick.
00:17:47.240If people are constantly worried that the tyrannical king can just come by and tear up, you know, whatever they've made, I've accumulated wealth or property, I've built this thing, you know, my family, like I value all these things and, you know, the power can just rip it away.
00:18:02.080Then you create a great degree of instability in your society and you also remove the incentive for people to build things on their own.
00:18:10.320Again, I'm not telling libertarians anything they don't know here, right?
00:18:13.540Private property is kind of the basic thing that incentivizes people to build and create.
00:18:21.380And so he kind of runs through the ways in which those social forces are created that will give you that level of security.
00:18:32.120The first thing he suggests, he says, the very first thing you need to do if you want to create opposing social forces is you need to break away the secular and ecclesiastical powers.
00:18:46.260And you might have heard of this separation of church and state, right?
00:18:50.120Now, it's not exactly the separation of church and state that we think of today, the like hyper Reddit atheist version of it.
00:18:56.640What he's really saying is you don't want your you don't want your priest caste to rule your entire civilization because the power of the divine is too much.
00:19:07.980It's, you know, and he recognizes, you know, Gartano Mosca is not against religion.
00:19:11.680He recognizes the power of religion, the necessity of religion.
00:19:15.140He says that this is one of the things that helps civilization, though.
00:19:21.080You know, he points out that, you know, Ethiopia is a Christian society and, you know, high civilizations in Europe are Christian societies.
00:19:27.220So just pointing to religion and saying that's sufficient to understand the constraint of government or social forces, that that's not enough.
00:19:40.480He's not saying that this is what you you don't need this.
00:19:43.780He's just saying, ultimately, you don't want your priest caste to be running the society, because if if their word is law, right, if the king is just completely divine, if he is the the god emperor, then there is no way you're ever going to get any opposing social forces because you've unified the two most important social social forces in any given society.
00:20:04.660So there's never going to be any kind of opposition.
00:20:07.220He's really recognizing the power of religion there as an opposing social force.
00:20:11.340And he says, you want that outside, right?
00:20:14.000You want that outside instead of being completely locked into into the ruler.
00:20:22.880You don't want the divine and the ruler to be the same thing.
00:20:24.920So that's kind of the first thing that you need to do in order to create the possibility of opposing social forces.
00:20:32.100You want the church to be able to push back against the state and the state to be able to push back against the church.
00:20:36.740You don't want them unified into one thing completely.
00:20:39.820That doesn't mean that the state needs to be entirely secular.
00:20:43.220It doesn't mean it needs to not recognize religious tradition or identity.
00:20:47.520It's you just don't want them to be exactly the same thing.
00:20:50.540You know, that's more of what the founders had in vision when they were kind of avoiding the establishment clause.
00:20:56.900It's it's not, you know, oh, we can't have any religion in our society.
00:21:00.500It should never inform our laws or what we do.
00:21:03.580We just don't want it to be exactly the same.
00:21:05.760The religious power and the government power should not be one to one.
00:21:09.360The next thing he says that you need to do is you need to think about how you're going to distribute kind of wealth and power in society.
00:21:19.260And here he's not saying, you know, well, we need to have some kind of central communist, you know, structure that's going to unify the economy or decide where money is going to go.
00:21:29.720What he means is basically you want a middle class.
00:21:32.580That's really what he's talking about is you need to develop a middle class, because if all the power and money is going to be unified into just the ruling elite, then their interest is going to be all that matters.
00:21:45.280There's going to be no pushback against it.
00:21:48.000There's going to be no opposing social force, because just like if you have all the power concentrated into the divine, there's going to be no, you know, no opposing forces to each other.
00:21:56.860If you have all the money and wealth and power in one class entirely, then there will be no opposition to them.
00:22:03.220And again, he's not saying there won't be an elite class or ruling class that you need to abolish the ruling elite, get rid of the idea of the ruling elite.
00:22:12.720He very much understands that there will always be a ruling elite.
00:22:16.000But he is saying that if there is if it's all unified in that ruling elite, if there are no other stakeholders in your society, no other classes that have permanent property and wield authority,
00:22:26.660then you can't get opposing social forces because everyone is so dependent on the ruling class on the upper class that they never really have any kind of pushback.
00:22:36.220And so it's really important that you kind of create a middle class so that there are people who are landed, who own property, who are kind of outside the system that is completely ruled by the elites so that you don't have this complete monopoly on power at the top.
00:22:52.720You know, the high and low of the juvenile versus the middle is trying to get rid of that.
00:22:58.000Right. So so the juvenile points out that power is always trying to get rid of that middle class for this reason, because it recognizes this middle class as an opposing social force.
00:23:08.320And that's so it's naturally working against that.
00:23:10.940But if you're not just interested in your own power, if you're interested in the good of society, you actually do want that middle class.
00:23:17.620So it can continuously act as a bulwark against abuses.
00:23:22.720You want those opposing social forces, right?
00:23:25.660You want an expansion of those social forces by the way in which wealth and power is distributed inside your society.
00:23:35.200Another thing that he points out is that you really need time and organization.
00:23:41.080So another reason you need a middle class is that they're going to have the spare time.
00:23:47.620To create organizations that can push back against kind of the concentration of power.
00:23:54.080So you can't have a formal defense if there aren't organizations that are working to push back against the powerful.
00:24:03.680If you have a middle class who has excess wealth and some leisure time, they have the time to organize.
00:24:09.340And when you have the time to organize, you have the ability to create different institutions that are serving your interests.
00:24:16.500And so you can have different community organizations who are recognizing the needs of the people in your area and that can push back against just the ability of the ruling class to step in and control everything all the time.
00:24:29.680You want people to have the ability to go to churches, community organizations, fraternities, guilds, unions, all of these things so that they don't always have to go to the organizations that are created or go to the direct power of the ruling class.
00:24:46.140That you want to have a middle class and its opportunity to appeal to those organizations so they can push back.
00:24:52.640And this is, again, where you get this idea of the defense.
00:24:57.280You also need time in the sense of you need tradition, right?
00:25:01.520You need time in the sense that you need time to organize so that you can push back.
00:25:08.320This, again, it's not enough just to say, well, we're going to manufacture a middle class tomorrow and that'll restrain the power of the elite.
00:25:15.080No, you need to build traditions in your society.
00:25:19.140Ideally, the organic traditions of your society will cultivate that middle class, right?
00:25:25.240The complexity of your society is not flat.
00:25:27.920It's not just the ruler off top with all of the power and money and then just everybody else doing their own thing.
00:25:37.000They don't have any organic understanding of their place in society and the way in which they can organize for their own advantage.
00:25:43.300You know, you want to have those traditions that kind of inculcate that for people in different generations because the longer institutions exist, the longer they are respected and the more they will have to be respected by the ruling class.
00:25:58.140The ruling class does not want you to have traditions, which is the opposite of what most people think, right?
00:26:04.300Like most people think that, oh, conservatives are trying to keep traditions because that's what holds people down, right?
00:26:10.280Like that's always the narrative that you heard from kind of progressives is that the traditions of the society are there to hold you down, keep you in place, do what the man tells you to do.
00:26:20.620But actually, Mosca is saying very much the opposite, that these traditions restrain the ruler much more than they restrain the ruled.
00:26:30.880Because ultimately what you're looking for, as always, you'll see this theme over and over again.
00:26:36.460I've talked about it quite a bit and it comes up in pretty much every thinker that I talk about.
00:26:43.100What you're looking for ultimately is people who restrain themselves and expect the government to also be restrained by the same rules.
00:26:51.920Because the government is looking and saying, oh, well, we can't actually force people to do this because they're disciplined, they're controlled, they have accumulated power and organized their own institutions.
00:27:04.360And so there's only so much we can demand from them because they exist in that state.
00:27:10.380Unvirtuous people, people who are given to vice, people who are not organized, people who are slovenly, they're weak, they don't have strong family bonds, they don't have strong identities, they don't have strong religions.
00:27:22.300Those people are easy to manipulate, easy to rule.
00:27:25.460Again, the flatness of the society, right?
00:27:27.740You've just got all the money, all the organization, all the power up top, and then you've got everybody else at the bottom.
00:27:35.060That is not going, there's no defense in that scenario.
00:27:38.240There's nothing for the average person to appeal to, right?
00:27:42.400But if you have a situation where there's a strong middle class and they are creating organizations, they are virtuous, they are organized, they are taking the time and intentionality to create this.
00:27:53.320There's a strong tradition of expecting those organizations and those beliefs and those family bonds and ties and communities to be restricted, respected.
00:28:02.160If that exists, then power can't, is just looking at that and saying, you know, I don't think I can do that.
00:28:10.660And ideally, they won't want to do that, right?
00:28:13.120Because they will themselves be restrained by those very same traditions and expectations.
00:28:18.060But again, it's kind of the inverse of what you would expect if you were listening to progressives.
00:28:25.500Oh, the tradition is what's tying up, tying you down.
00:28:28.840No, because you are tied down, because you are disciplined, because you are virtuous, you can resist the efforts of the elite to control you.
00:28:39.160Like actually building that community, building those bonds, keeping them healthy, building those alternative social forces that push back and provide defense actually strengthens your ability to refuse power.
00:28:52.580That's what guarantees your private property, your rights, as we call them in the United States today, right?
00:29:00.400Because if you have those expectations, the rights don't come from the Constitution.
00:29:07.900The Constitution doesn't give you the rights.
00:29:09.860Now, in the Constitution, we say they're God-given rights, right?
00:29:14.740But on the earth here, as it's practiced, how power is actually constrained, the reason that those rights are so resilient is because people believe in them.
00:29:24.440In the sense that, oh, they are given to me by God.
00:29:27.500And because I believe in them, the people around me believe in them.
00:29:55.800And it's really important because, again, a lot of people look at that and they'll just say, oh, well, you know, power just does whatever it wants.
00:30:05.100So as soon as power disrespects them, they can just tear them down.
00:30:08.040No, that's exactly the opposite of what Mosca is saying in the ruling class.
00:30:12.120He's saying that, no, these things are very real if everyone is invested in them, if everyone believes in them.
00:30:17.720The political formula is not just a noble lie.
00:30:20.760It's not just a lie that power tells to stay in power.
00:30:24.920It is something that power believes ultimately and that the people believe.
00:30:30.380And that reciprocal belief is what imbues it with the power to restrain government and restrain the behavior of the people.
00:30:38.660It gives government its power, but it simultaneously restrains its power as well.
00:30:43.360And so if you have a constitution that just says, well, you wave it around like, I've got free speech because it says so right here.
00:30:50.860No, I've got free speech because if the government tries to lock me up, me and all of my friends who also believe in free speech are going to fight back.
00:30:58.960And we've got the backing of the church and we've got the backing of the community and we've got the backing of every social organization that is existing because we are working together toward a shared moral vision.
00:31:11.020We have this innate understanding of who we are as a people, and this is how we conduct ourselves.
00:31:16.500So if power steps in and says, oh, well, actually, we're going to arrest you for conducting yourself that way.
00:31:22.960Because most people are going to refuse to even comply.
00:31:25.920You're going to have so much noncompliance.
00:31:27.540You're going to have police and soldiers that won't do it because they already believe this at the core, that every one of these expectations is layered in to your belief system.
00:31:38.640And that is what gives you this juridical defense, right?
00:31:42.440That's what actually creates the defense.
00:31:45.000And again, this is what Mosca expects from a complex and good society.
00:31:49.860He does not expect power to be able to do whatever it wants, whenever it wants.
00:31:56.840When I found out my friend got a great deal on a designer dress from Winners, I started wondering, is every fabulous item I see from Winners?
00:32:05.220Like that woman over there with the Italian leather handbag.
00:32:37.200You need to separate the divine and the secular, at least again, not purging the divine, not denying the existence of the divine, not saying we don't appeal to the defined principles when we're creating law, but just that the actual enforcement mechanism, the governance itself is not priestly.
00:32:54.020It is done by a separate force so that these, you know, the kind of the government force and the religious force can oppose each other.
00:33:05.540You need to just make sure that power and money are distributed somewhat in your society, that you build a middle class that is able to push back against these forces.
00:33:28.900Now, the thing he says to watch out for, the thing that you really need to watch out for is the unification of a principle or a pattern.
00:33:38.760So he says if one principle or pattern comes to dominate your society, then it's going to start to dissolve these opposing social forces.
00:33:49.560You need to watch out if everyone and every aspect of your society starts to get organized upon one line, that's bad, right?
00:33:58.020So what we actually want is our church to be organized in a very different way than our government, which is organized in a very different way than our businesses, which is organized in a very different way than our family structures, which is organized in a somewhat different way than our community structures, right?
00:34:16.320Each one of these different forces needs to be organized on different principles.
00:34:22.540Once you start organizing everything on the same principle, even if they were opposing social forces, they will start to dissolve and become one thing, right?
00:34:33.800If you've watched this channel before, you probably know where I'm going with this.
00:34:45.660Because if you start with a bunch of different social forces that you are relying on to push back against each other, and then you start organizing everything on one principle, all these different social forces that were separated and creating that tension and creating that defense against power, they start to come together.
00:35:04.740And all of a sudden, you get one unified whole.
00:35:07.920And in the modern world, this kind of managerial, utilitarian, entirely secular understanding creates a unifying principle, right?
00:35:21.200We all have to organize everything on the principle of massified, secular, kind of deracinated bureaucracy.
00:35:30.640That is what everything needs to be organized on.
00:35:33.940I don't care if it is your, if it's your church, I don't care if it's your government, I don't care if it's your business, you know, you're even dating is, you know, it gets done by dating apps now, right?
00:35:45.340They all get collapsed into the same type of organization.
00:37:23.100Because you as an individual, as rational as you might be, you're never going to understand everything.
00:37:29.400You are not smarter than the collective wisdom of your civilization.
00:37:33.400So even though you think you have reasoned your way to the best thing, actually it's often better to appeal and follow traditions even if you don't understand them.
00:37:44.760And that's really the hubris of modern man is like, well, every person will just decide for themselves.
00:37:52.320Because if you think that you're going to read every single individual you meet can reason their way to the truth, then you haven't met very many individuals and you're not very honest with yourself kind of about your own limitations.
00:38:02.960And the same is true when it comes to social organization, right?
00:38:07.180If we are organizing our society entirely in one way and every single thing we do is based on this like mass bureaucratic, highly scalable model from our family structures, our dating, our religion, our businesses, our government, our social interactions, everything is based on this model.
00:38:27.860You start to dissolve all of those social forces that pushed back against power and power once again, because it becomes unified and you know, it's like a fire without any brakes.
00:38:38.620It can just run right through because everything was kind of put in the same box.
00:38:42.780And he actually points to this being the problem with the current American situation.
00:38:49.960He says, originally, Baron de Montesquieu, when he wrote about separation of powers, and he's the guy who influenced a large amount of our founding fathers.
00:38:59.180When he wrote about separation of powers, what he was saying was not that like three was some magical number of branches of government.
00:39:07.160You don't actually stop power by just saying, and now in the constitution, I put in article one, two, and three, they give you the Congress and the executive branch and the judicial branch.
00:39:21.720No, the branches of government were supposed to represent opposing social forces, right?
00:39:27.200In something like England, you would have the king and then you'd have the nobility and then you'd have the church and then you'd have the merchants and then you'd have the peasantry.
00:39:36.020And all of these different social forces had some level of representation.
00:39:40.600When Rome was really a republic at its best, right?
00:39:44.140You had, you know, you had the Senate, which was representing kind of the upper orders, but then you had elections at lower orders.
00:39:51.300You had all of these different social forces.
00:39:54.020You have the different priests, you have different forces pushing back against each other.
00:39:57.960And that's what creates certain expectations.
00:40:00.700It doesn't just let one person kind of run through and do whatever they want.
00:40:05.340And so in reality, it's not just the division of power.
00:40:09.940It's not just the separation of powers that actually checks power.
00:40:13.420It's the social forces that the, that power is invested in.
00:40:17.060And so the less we have separate social forces, the more we run into this problem.
00:40:22.980So when the, you know, different branches of the government were, you know, you had the executive, which was kind of like a king.
00:40:29.200And then you had the, the, the, the house, which was truly kind of the body of the people.
00:40:34.920And then you had the Senate, which was kind of the more aristocratic, you know, it had to be, the people had to be, the, the, the senators had to be selected by the state governments.
00:40:45.300So they weren't just directly elected by the people.
00:40:47.680And then you had the judiciary and that was kind of representing its own thing.
00:40:51.240It, you know, it wasn't open to democratic forces.
00:40:54.060And all of these different ideas were separated.
00:40:58.020All these different social forces were separated.
00:40:59.620Now that you could say, and this is an open question.
00:41:02.940This is, this is something that is somewhat suggested in the ruling class.
00:41:06.720When he talks about this, you could say that ultimately the lack of social classes, like firm social classes and a more active state church in the United States might've doomed.
00:41:18.540This model because you, you don't have the level of ingrained social force that you have in other societies.
00:41:26.220And in many ways that's because they're more ancient, right?
00:41:28.660The, the landed nobility, the church, they came, they came of kind of like this feudal era where they, they weren't designed this way.
00:41:36.680It's not like someone sat down and tinkered with all the aspects of kind of the European feudalism to create this balance, but they kind of emerged in this manner.
00:41:46.400And because they did, uh, they were very deeply grounded, like the rights of the nobility, uh, you know, the, the feudal Lords, uh, the, the expectations that the church had, the, the, the beliefs that the peasants had, they were all kind of already deeply ensconced in those traditions.
00:42:01.900And so when they kind of came together, they, they naturally ended up checking each other.
00:42:06.540And that's why, uh, you know, uh, England had a much better time of it and probably advanced more and had a more robust tradition of juridical defense, uh, than, than many other, uh, civilizations, uh, because it had, you know, the, the church was in one place.
00:42:21.720The king was in another, uh, you, you had the, uh, the nobility, all these different things.
00:42:26.720The power was spread out in a much more organic way than it would have been in a more unified society, right?
00:42:33.100In the United States, you just didn't have those forces in the same way.
00:42:37.120And I think in the United States, uh, we were saved mainly in our own kind of feudal-esque system of federalism.
00:42:43.380The United States was just too large and it was never really centralized.
00:42:46.580And the cultures in the distance, uh, just the vast territory of the United States made it very difficult to centralize power, uh, in the way that it had been in other areas.
00:42:56.660And so even though we didn't have perhaps the, uh, the social class that divided power, uh, we had the geographical, uh, uh, differences and, uh, divisions that really divided power.
00:43:11.040And so for a very long time, power couldn't unify, not so much because we had deeply ingrained social classes and expectations that drove it apart, but because it was just wildly different.
00:43:22.220The way that people in Georgia and the people in Maine lived was just very, very different.
00:43:27.980The people living out West lived radically different lives than people living in Massachusetts.
00:43:32.060And so it was just very hard to unify a territory of that size.
00:43:37.820And our federal system really acted as in the same way that kind of the feudal system did in many of these European civilizations in dividing power and creating separate social forces and expectations.
00:43:49.060But the more that technology advanced, and again, you'll remember one of his disruptors, one of the things that often disrupts judicial defense is, uh, is technological advancement and economic advancement.
00:44:03.560Uh, you know, once, once we started to get the train, once we started to get the telegraph, you know, you get the plane, the automobile, uh, you know, uh, telephone, uh, you know, newspapers, uh, mass media, there comes the disruptor.
00:44:19.840You think of unification is a good thing.
00:44:21.420You think of progress is a good thing, but maybe it isn't in this scenario because all of a sudden those barriers to power, those opposing social forces that had been created inside the different pockets of America.
00:44:32.040Those started to dissolve as technology came in, disrupted that order.
00:44:37.580And we started to see the reliance on these unified, massified, uh, bureaucracies in order to operate these new technologies and generate these new, uh, sources of wealth.
00:44:49.600So again, this isn't, you know, we're not attacking wealth here.
00:44:52.600We're not attacking technology necessarily, but we need to understand those things come with consequences.
00:44:58.400Then one of those consequences is upsetting social orders and social forces that were providing this juridical defense.
00:45:06.060So again, uh, you know, the, the point here is that power, uh, exists and it's always looking to basically eliminate these things.
00:45:17.240That's why power always wants to get rid of the middle class.
00:45:19.580That's why power is always looking to get rid of the, the privileges of the aristocracy.
00:45:24.480It's that's why power is always looking to unify with, uh, religion.
00:45:29.420You know, that there's, there's not, it's not a, a mistake, uh, that kind of our centralized total state created its own straight religion, uh, in wokeness.
00:45:38.680Uh, those things are all ways for it to unify and, and, you know, dissolve, eliminate, and bring in, uh, those social forces that once opposed it in under its, its own auspices.
00:45:50.280And so, uh, you know, recognizing that, uh, elite theory is looking at power and saying, yes, a ruling elite exists.
00:45:58.520Yes, a ruling elite, uh, will make most of the decisions and will, uh, have most of the influence and will drive society and tastes.
00:46:06.920However, that is not all that elite theory has to say on the issue of power.
00:46:11.540In fact, Gaetano Mosca did not believe that ultimately you should just, you know, that, that the goal should be to unify power in the elites, to unify power under one, uh, person.
00:46:22.920He said, ultimately we do want this defense that would, that, uh, the mixed constitution, the robust society, the complex society that, uh, you know, make sure that there's a middle class that has its own power and wealth.
00:46:35.680That there is a church that is separate from the state that can have wield its own influence, that there is, uh, you know, a different social organizations layered throughout.
00:46:45.860Uh, so that when you go to court, uh, when you are, uh, you know, locked up for protesting, you know, when, when, uh, the, the state wants to come and steal your stuff, there's a robust tradition and there is a robust, uh, network of other social forces that will push back against that.
00:47:03.220That when, uh, you know, uh, you know, private property is violated, when the rights of the parent are violated, when the individual is, is victimized by power, they don't stand alone.
00:47:14.500The, the, the way to oppose power is not as the individual that's really critical.
00:47:20.380You know, that is really, really critical.
00:47:22.240It is not individual rights that stand against the state is the collective will cultivated through tradition, belief.
00:47:33.220And, uh, you know, separate and separate social forces in society that push back power checks.
00:47:40.100Power right is ambition that checks ambition to use the language of the founders.
00:47:45.580And, uh, in the, in the federalist papers, it is never just the individual rights.
00:47:50.840And this is where conservative and libertarian rhetoric falls off.
00:48:37.520You don't want to just exist in, uh, any of these lower states.
00:48:41.940Uh, so I, I just wanted to go over this because a, there's often a confusion between kind of conservatives and libertarians on the steps here.
00:48:48.460And B, there's confusion about, uh, elite theory and what it actually says about power.
00:48:53.480Again, a lot of people focus just on, okay, elites wield power, you know, end of story.
00:48:58.260Uh, you should learn to exercise power and want to, uh, want to grab power.
00:49:01.860No, uh, you actually want a situation in which power is constrained, but you want to understand how it is constrained.
00:49:09.580You don't, don't just want to kind of vomit out the entry-level civic stuff.
00:49:13.540Uh, when it comes to that, you want, you want to understand the more complex social structures, because we kind of hollowed out all the complex social structures and just left the, uh, you know, the, the judicial system there.
00:49:25.480And pretend like that was the same thing.
00:49:27.420And it really isn't, uh, and, and that's pretty critical.
00:49:30.120So you, everyone should have this level of defense.
00:49:33.160You should have, you know, your cousin Vinny to be able to, uh, stand up for you.
00:49:36.660It's one of my favorite movies, actually.
00:50:27.100So let's go ahead and take a look at the questions of the people here real quick.
00:50:36.680Uh, Andrew Guller says totally off topic, but I've been meaning to ask, uh, are the voices, are the voice weapons from the David Lynch Dune movie true to the book?
00:50:48.960Ooh, um, you know, uh, the voice is a command in, uh, in the book and it, you know, can compel you to take action.
00:50:57.720I'm trying to remember if there is actually a weapon in the book.
00:51:01.980It's been a while since I've actually read the original Dune novel.
00:51:05.280Uh, maybe someone can help me answer that question because I, I don't believe so.
00:51:11.400Like, I don't think they, they channel the voice through a specific weapon, but maybe they do.
00:51:15.840Maybe that was part of the weirding way in the book.
00:51:18.300They have the weirding way, which is the way that the, uh, the Benny Gesserit fight.
00:51:21.980And they can like move hyper fast and that kind of thing.
00:51:24.780Uh, the voice is part of their, uh, their system, but, uh, uh, but yeah, I don't know if it was actually created, uh, as a physical weapon in the book.
00:51:34.080I'm trying to remember if that's the case.
00:51:36.980And then Andrew also says a serious question this time, given Curtis Yarvin's thesis that all effective governance boils down to the skill of the ruler.
00:51:46.660Isn't government by executive fiat, the most beneficial in the long run?
00:51:52.100Uh, let's see, uh, the thesis that government boils down to the skill of the ruler.
00:52:05.260If, if you're going to have the most basic form of government and, uh, you know, this is acknowledged in Plato, this is acknowledged in Cicero.
00:52:13.160Uh, they say, uh, uh, you know, they, they say the mixed government is best.
00:52:17.560Well, Plato doesn't say that, but Aristotle does.
00:52:19.980Uh, Cicero does, you know, the mixed government is best.
00:52:24.480However, if you're going to have a simple form of government, if you're going to choose between one of the three basic forms, oligarchy, uh, democracy.
00:53:00.520Um, I, I would say, uh, I'm, I'm a little closer to what, uh, Mosca is saying here and what guys like Aristotle and, uh, and Cicero have said, uh, that the mixed government is kind of what you are looking for.
00:53:13.760However, I think that, uh, you need a much stronger executive than what we have now.
00:53:18.400What we have now is not a mixed government.
00:53:20.140And that's what, you know, uh, Mosca also points out because we dissolved all of our, our branches, uh, through kind of, uh, the, uh, mass democracy.
00:53:28.760We've really turned ourselves into a oligarchy because in mass democracy, uh, voting is, is really, uh, what can you give me and the, uh, and what, you know, who can manipulate my opinion.
00:53:39.660Uh, and it turns out oligarchs have the money and so they have control of the media and they can kind of manipulate the opinion of the people.
00:53:46.880And so if you kind of dissolve all your social forces in the way that we did, you end up with kind of the oligarchy we have now.
00:53:53.320So we don't really have a strong executive.
00:53:55.520So I, I wouldn't say that you just want everything done by executive fiat, uh, because it does open you up to the problems that Mosca and our founders explained.
00:54:05.260Uh, however, I do think you need a much, much, much stronger executive.
00:54:09.720Uh, the fact that we've kind of opened everything up to democracy at this point dissolves all of those opposing, opposing social forces.
00:54:17.260And so therefore our, uh, our executive looks very weak, right?
00:54:22.720Um, all right, guys, uh, we're going to go ahead and, uh, oh, someone said, answer is there are no voice weapons, uh, uh, voice weapons in the original Dune.
00:54:33.340It was just part of the, uh, of the book.
00:54:35.920I, that's what I thought, but I didn't want to a hundred percent, uh, answer that.
00:54:43.760I was like, I don't think there are voice weapons in the book, but it has been a while since I read the original.
00:54:47.980So, uh, I'm glad somebody was able to pull that up for me.
00:54:50.600All right, guys, thank you everybody for watching.
00:54:52.960If you enjoyed this show or it's your first time on the channel, please make sure to go ahead and subscribe, you know, like notifications, all that stuff.
00:54:59.720So you can catch the streams when they go live.
00:55:01.640If you would like to get these broadcasts as podcasts, you need to subscribe to the Oren McIntyre show on your favorite podcast platform.
00:55:09.960And if you do make sure that you leave a rating or review, it really helps with the algorithm magic.
00:55:15.560Uh, if you'd like to hear, read or listen to my book, the total state, it's now out on audio book as well as the regular book.
00:55:22.580Uh, where I talk a lot about Gaetano Masca and, uh, the other elite theorists and these opposing social forces and how their elimination creates the total state.
00:55:31.160If you want to get more of that fleshed out, then you can pick up my book or listen to it, uh, in the audio book form.
00:55:36.560And of course, if you would like to, uh, uh, get any merch to support the show, uh, you can head over to the blaze website.
00:55:45.060It's a shop blaze media.com and there's all kinds of shirts and hats and mugs and other things, uh, that you can pick up to, uh, support the show.
00:55:53.540I want to thank everybody for watching.
00:55:55.660And as always, I will talk to you next time.