Posted on 06/09/2002 10:34:35 PM PDT by GalvestonBeachcomber
Most Americans are so steeped in egalitarian thinking that they like to delude themselves that they share in running the country. We ordinary folks, in fact, don't run the country and have a slim-to-none chance of even influencing its direction.
Thomas R. Dye, a professor at Florida State University, has made a study of power. Since power in our country resides in institutions, he defines individuals with power as those who occupy the top positions in the government and in corporate, legal, educational, civic and cultural institutions.
He found that there are only about 7,000 of these positions in the entire United States, and some individuals occupy more than one of them. It might sound unbelievable at first, but if you think about it, you will see that it is true.
In a newspaper, for example, there is one position of power: the publisher. Now, he delegates some of his power to other people, but everyone knows that all decisions are ultimately his and his alone.
In the federal government there are only 546 positions of power. These include the president, the vice president, members of the House and Senate and the nine members of the Supreme Court. One hundred percent of the power of the federal government resides in these individuals who occupy the 546 positions. Everybody below them operates with delegated power. That is so because all power of the federal government comes from the Constitution, and these are the only constitutional offices. I don't include federal-, district- and appellate-court judges because any decision they make can be overturned by the Supreme Court.
So the individuals who occupy these 7,000 positions of power are the elite who run the country. Therefore, it is the character of these members of the elite that will determine the character of the country. What you see in government policies, in cultural products and in education policies are the direct result of the decisions made by this relatively small elite.
History affirms this. The reason America did not follow the usual path of revolution to dictatorship was solely the result of the character of one man, George Washington. Washington could have easily made himself dictator, and many of the officers in his army wanted him to do just that. But Washington's character would not allow it.
When the elite who run a country have good morals and high standards, then you have a good country. If the elite become corrupt, you have a corrupt country. The vulgarity, profanity and violence you see in entertainment are there only because those individuals occupying the positions of power in the entertainment industry said "Yes." If they said "No," those things would disappear from the screens and the magazine racks.
Our problem is that most of our elite have become corrupted. Many are nihilistic and hedonistic. The leadership of a country always leads the masses, and they can lead them to high ground or into the swamps. And there's not much I can see that ordinary people can do about it.
I have to confess that I have lost my Jeffersonian faith in the people. All I have ever seen them do, save for a few individuals, is follow like dogs whoever happened to be in leadership positions at the time.
Given the moral and intellectual climate at most of the elite universities our future leaders will attend, I don't have an optimistic outlook for the future of the country.
Nothing new here. Political scientists and Machiavelli knew all of this a long time ago.
However, the people do eventually have a great deal of influence. When they tire of the direction of the country they revolt. You can't keep stretching a rubber band, it ventually snaps.
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