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April 28, 2022 - The Charlie Kirk Show
39:28
The Iron Law of Oligarchy with Pedro Gonzalez
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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The Iron Law of Oligarchy 00:04:27
Hey everybody, today on the Charlie Kirk show.
What is the Iron Law of Oligarchy?
A thoughtful philosophical conversation with the great patriot Pedro Gonzalez.
We go deep into the philosophy of power and why conservatives need to be serious about winning again, not just losing admirably.
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With us right now is Pedro Gonzalez from Chronicles Magazine, amongst many other wonderful publications.
Pedro, welcome back to the program.
What is the Iron Law of Oligarchy?
Thanks for having me back, Charlie.
So the Iron Law of Oligarchy was proposed by a German-born Italian sociologist named Robert Mikles.
And it's very ominous sounding, but really it's just kind of stating a fact, a fact of life.
And that is that when you look at political parties, because this theory is based on an examination of how political parties in democratic societies actually function, it doesn't matter if a political party calls itself a social democratic party.
In that political party, what will inevitably develop is a kind of hierarchy.
It's just a fact, right?
In any kind of organization, you have a leadership class.
So again, it doesn't matter if a political party calls itself socialist or democratic or whatever.
A leadership class will emerge that delegates tasks and makes decisions that affect the entire, the much larger group.
That is what this sociologist Michels called an oligarchy or in plainer terms, an elite, basically just a leadership class.
Now, this dynamic that he identified in the political party in any democratic society also applies to trade unions.
It applies to companies and yes, democratic society at large.
And the point of this theory, the point of the iron law of oligarchy, is to, I would say, to make people understand that, look, it doesn't matter if you live in a republic or a democracy, a constitutional republic, whatever label you want to use, there's always going to be a ruling class.
You just, you have to accept that.
Because once you accept that, then the task becomes, well, how do we ensure that our leaders are, on the one hand, competent and on the other hand, not abusing their control over key institutions the way a leader would a political party, not for the benefit of society, but for their own benefit.
Do we ensure that the ruling class, again in key economic, political and and and even military institutions, do not abuse their power, their control over these mechanisms to to basically just foist uh, what they want, their worldview or or their agenda, on on the masses?
That that is the iron law of oligarchy, in a nutshell, that elites are inevitable uh, and the best that we can do is just kind of face facts so that we can arm and protect ourselves from the worst and most autocratic kinds of elites.
Elites Control Information 00:05:15
And that ties into, kind of, the whole Elon Musk thing, right?
So is that in order to check power, you need power right, and and so?
So how should we think about the Elon thing as American conservatives, right?
So, I mean, I have a nuanced view of him as a person.
I don't really appreciate, you know, his China um production or his Neuralink stuff, but I certainly love the fact that he's willing to use resources a lot of them to do something what seems to be admirable.
How should we think about this?
Yeah no, that's exactly right.
I think it's important that we don't just become Musk cheerleaders and pretend that he's now, you know, based in right-wing I have I, I honestly know very little about his political views.
I think he's an interesting person, but but I here's what we know for sure, right, the reaction from the incumbent elites, the people who own most of the media and most social media platforms, already was almost entirely negative toward the idea of Elon Musk wresting control of a key institution and Twitter is, I mean, the.
The people that you know were yesterday saying Twitter is a private company.
Therefore, if Twitter wants to ban the president of the United States, they can do that.
And you know, now that Musk has taken over, it's like, well, hold on, it's not a private company.
You know, suddenly it's actually correct when they say that Twitter is because of its, the sheer size it has, because of the sheer size and the control that it has over information, it is actually correct to say Twitter is not just a company.
It is, in its own way, a kind of public institution at this point, just because of the size of it.
Right, and I think that the fact that Musk taking control of Twitter seemed to enrage all of these other elites.
You know, you've got the former CEO of Reddit writing an article in the Washington POST, which is owned by a billionaire, Jeff Bezos, saying, you know, we need more regulations to prevent rich people from owning the means of communication.
That should tell you that these people are afraid of losing control over a tool that allows them to control information the way Twitter does.
Yeah, so that already makes me think.
OK, look, Musk might not share my political views on things like immigration, abortion or foreign policy, but he seems to be making all the right people sweat.
And for that reason, his his hostile takeover of Twitter was disruptive.
And I, you know, I'm cautiously optimistic that he's going to take it in the right way, because, again, when you've got like guys like Max Boot squealing in the Washington Post that.
Musk's takeover of Twitter is a threat to democracy, you know, that tells you that again, the right people are sweating about this.
Yes, so this kind of enter National Review, where they're telling us this is somehow against our principles, which is hilarious because last year they were telling us that it's a private company, do whatever you want, but it's like a private transaction.
And again, it's not National Review as a company, but there's plenty of the chattering people.
Like, this is a dangerous precedent.
But isn't the question should be Pedro, do we want to win?
Right?
Do we actually?
And so walk us through that, right?
Yeah, no, that's exactly right.
Well, there's nothing principled, by the way, of allowing yourself to get plowed over by people who want to destroy your country and shred what remains of what we still call the American way of life.
There's actually, there's nothing principled about losing with what you think are your principles intact.
It's just a totally absurd argument to me.
Again, that's really the only thing I can say to these people is there's nothing principled about letting your family, your country, and your neighbors get plowed over by people who hate them.
Again, yeah, it just, so I mean, that argument just kind of goes and bounces off my head because it's so ridiculous.
And I think that ultimately, again, kind of going back to this idea of oligarchy and elites, we have to face facts.
We actually have to deal, because that's at the heart of the iron law of oligarchy, is we have to deal with the world with how it actually is, rather than how we would like to imagine it is.
In other words, the real versus the ideal.
And in the real world, you actually have to fight for what you believe in.
And I mean, there's several different kinds of battles playing out.
So on the one hand, you've got the whole Twitter thing with Elon Musk seeming to upset the right people.
And on the other hand, you've got this stuff going on in Florida where DeSantis is taking on Disney.
And on that front, it's similar in the sense that it's, you know, we're talking about a massive corporation that has influence over what the public thinks.
And in that case, specifically, you do actually have conservatives.
Like you, I think you were alluding to this at places like National Review, who are saying that, you know, the right needs to respect the sacred rights of corporations to, I don't know, push transgenderism on kids.
Yeah, abuse children.
Fight Banks That Hate You 00:03:34
Right.
Because I think that's really important.
This has been omitted from the conservative criticism in this case of what Republicans are doing in Florida has totally omitted that on the one hand, Disney vilified the bill that was proposed by Republicans in Florida, the parental rights and education bill, which was renamed as the Don't Say Gay Act or Don't Say Gay Law, which is obviously just ridiculous.
And it was a smear campaign.
But basically, Disney spearheaded a campaign to smear a good piece of legislation and by extension all of its supporters.
So that's strike one.
Strike two is when the bill got signed into law, Disney vowed to repeal it.
In other words, a corporation vowed to repeal a law that has tremendous amounts of popular support.
Yeah, but who's actually in charge here, right?
Like, I mean, the company comes in and they're like, yeah, we're going to override you.
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Woke Capital vs Common Ground 00:16:03
So, Pedro, let me ask you: now we have this kind of more consequential fight happening, not in the halls of Congress, but now in corporate America.
In my 10 years of doing this, I can't remember a chapter of advocacy where what's happening in the corporate world gets more attention and honestly has more significance than actually what's happening in the legislative chambers.
What's your thoughts on that?
Well, before we went to break, I was getting to strike three with the Disney versus DeSantis feud.
Strike three was when Disney then threatened to withhold campaign contributions in Florida in retaliation to this law being passed.
So that has, again, see getting to your point.
You have a corporation that is basically trying to influence state legislatures.
Obviously, Obviously, they're doing that on the national level as well.
But yeah, this is a problem when corporations are, we all know that they do this, right?
But they typically, I think, do this in a more covert way.
We're talking about lobbying and doing things behind closed doors.
But yeah, I mean, we're really in the era of woke capital where corporations vary publicly in ways that are, maybe it just seems so insane because of the things that they're advocating for, like in the case of Disney, you know, transgenderism for kids and stuff like that.
But yeah, we've really entered new waters in the sense that you're now starting to see the historic allies of big business, which is the right, the conservative movement, whatever you want to call it, is now starting to actually realize, okay, these corporations are actually a huge problem.
And it's actually the corporations in many cases that are undermining our way of life.
These corporations that have what seem to be their own value systems that they're trying to forcibly impose on Americans.
And again, it's really weird to think about this, to think that Disney has a value system, but it does.
And it's telling you it does when it vilifies people who say, like, look, I don't want my kid learning about weird concepts about sex and gender in kindergarten.
And when Disney freaks out about that, I mean, that tells you that there's something significant going on here.
And I think that the most interesting development is that you're starting to see the right fight back and realize, again, okay, yeah, big government's a problem, but so is big business.
Yeah.
And it's also just the left has understood this game for much longer than we have.
And we're just starting to wake up to it.
And that's something I want to explore with you, which is they wrote openly about power dynamics post-70s and 80s, that if you do not have the institutions, you must capture them.
If you're able to control other people or actually have the power over a society, whether, you know, how people consume information, how people transport themselves, then you can actually control the entire society.
We as conservatives always felt as if we were kind of in this like neoliberal detente, like, oh, there are certain things that will kind of be off limits, like, you know, the production of child movies or, you know, whatever it might be.
And now the right is like, wait a second, all these institutions aren't just captured, but they're used as, they're used as just flagrant instruments of the regime.
And so how are we supposed to counter that?
How should we use power as conservatives?
Because it seems by our kind of default setting, we're really afraid to use power for understandable reasons.
We don't like totalitarianism, so we just kind of get away from it.
But is it time now to embrace it?
Well, I think what you're seeing in Florida is probably the best example that I've seen in recent history of basically rewarding friends and punishing enemies.
And again, that doesn't sound like a very innovative concept, you know, not helping people who want to hurt you.
But it seems to be that that actually is kind of a brand new way of thinking for Republicans and conservative intellectuals, yes.
Right.
And in some sense, I'm being a little bit sarcastic, but it's understandable because I think what's at the back of these criticisms, if you want to take them in good faith, is, well, look, we need to respect and not incinerate what remains of a common ground.
But the existence of a common ground presupposes a shared value system, right?
We have to agree on fundamental things in order for there to be a common ground to which we can return to.
I don't think that's the case anymore.
That hasn't been the case for a while.
It hasn't been the case that there is really a kind of shared thing in America.
It really seems like there are basically at least two competing value systems.
And we're seeing on the level of on the level of, I guess, business and also politics what seem like kind of like back and forth on terms of legislation or back and forths between the governor of Florida and a corporation.
These are actually just kind of manifestations, I think, of basically two a battle between two competing world views, which I'm sorry to say kind of makes it that there actually isn't a middle ground anymore.
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We would all like there to be a kind of common ground to which we can return to, but for now, that just isn't the case.
I mean, this is really, we've really entered the era of Thunderdome here, where it's either someone like DeSantis stands up to people who are trying to essentially groom your kids, or that happens, or these people get to push like these bizarre ideas of sex and gender and even race on your children.
There is no middle ground to return to.
And I think that there are conservatives who I'll say are misguided and kind of still yearn for that common ground.
They just want to go to Disneyland and pretend that this isn't happening.
I kind of understand it, although I don't agree with it.
But then there are other conservatives who are, I would say that they're actually kind of actively undermining these meaningful efforts by people like DeSantis to basically fight for a real value system that is, in my view, much preferable than what woke corporations are.
Yeah, and I mean, it's just, I yearn for common ground.
Of course I do.
I want to live in the country I was raised in, but I'm also not as naive as I was five or 10 years ago to act as if these people are going to stop.
They do not respect our arguments.
This is not a debate.
This is a power struggle.
I don't want that.
Yeah, it's going to get a little bit nasty at times.
Like we're going to have to use political power and we're going to have to go take over companies and build new ones.
But like we didn't start this war, okay?
You're invading our country culturally.
And I don't like it.
I don't, I'm not enjoying it, but I'm also not going to lose.
So I want to play some tape here, Pedro, of this person here on the view, Sonny Huston, hosting or whatever, very obsessed about race.
I want your reaction to this.
Play Cut 57.
And in fact, on Twitter, it is predominantly straight white men.
So when Elon Musk says, wow, this is about free speech.
It seems to me that it's about free speech of straight white men.
And so let them have it.
Let them just go at it.
So Pedro Gonzalez, do you think it's just straight white men on Twitter?
I mean, but they immediately racialize it.
Again, I'm not exactly sure if we should take what she says seriously, but you're starting to kind of hear all these kind of other like racial abstractions now inserted into a conversation about what is obviously one of the most important social media companies out there.
No, I wouldn't take it seriously.
It's not worth actually entertaining arguments like that.
But it does show, to your point, that they actually don't take you seriously.
So in other words, there is a strong case to make that Twitter has basically been very oppressive, that it has, I mean, it's ridiculous.
We even have to, we still have to actually argue with people about this.
But yeah, like Twitter has actively taken a side.
It has suppressed stories that undermine certain narratives.
And I think one of the most obvious and flagrant examples of this is the Hunter Biden story.
The New York Post getting locked out of its Twitter account for like two weeks.
And then afterwards, Jack Dorsey admitting, okay, that was a mistake to basically suppress a story about Biden family corruption ahead of the 2020 election, right?
Like, oops, that was a small mistake that we made.
So there's actually like a legitimate case to make that Twitter has kind of lost its mandate and does not deserve public trust.
But the person that you just played, that clip, they'll never take your argument seriously.
That's exactly what it is.
They'll just throw it back to you and say, well, you're just a racist.
Yeah.
So like that's that's important.
So let me ask you a question.
So we have a bunch of these, you know, like race hustlers like her and other people that are just the fanatics, right?
They're no different than the Islamic theocratic fanatics.
There's no dialogue, right?
It's just they believe this fervently and that's it.
How do we so then how do we use power to win against people like her, right?
Can you help build that out?
Yeah, well, I think ultimately what the only thing you can do is just to protect yourself from them.
I mean, you have to basically marginalize their political influence over you.
And well, how do you do that?
Taking on corporations that represent or corporations that share their values or taking over them, which I think we would like to hope is what we're going to see out of Musk's takeover of Twitter, that people are not going to be locked out of their accounts for saying that ex-transgender person is actually a male or female, right?
I think that's really all you can do is try to reduce their influence in the institutions that express their influence over society as much as possible.
That mean that we're talking about a kind of a wide battlefield that takes place over the arenas of culture, over the over economic fields, over political ones.
I mean, this is this is not only is this like a huge fight in terms of scope, but it's also a long one.
This is not something that is going to be won in the upcoming elections or something like that.
We're in this for the long haul, but so are they.
I think you had referenced earlier, you know, going back to like the 70s and stuff.
I mean, yeah, this is going to be a long fight.
It's going to take time.
It's going to take resources and it's going to take commitment.
Things that I think, again, the conservative movement has, it's not really, it seems like it's kind of reluctant to commit itself to that.
Like we basically want to imagine that if we can just, you know, get more Republicans in office without actually looking at who those Republicans are, things are going to be fine.
And I think this is an important point because Democrats seem scheduled for some pretty serious losses.
But when you look at the state of the GOP as it is right now with leadership like Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, I mean, do these guys seem like they're going to lead us on a successful march to the institutions?
No.
Like we have some serious soul searching to do if we're going to take on the institutions that share the value systems of the people that you call race hustlers.
Yeah.
And the long march to the institutions, I think was Grammichian in its core, but it was this guy, Rudy, can never pronounce his name, Dutchke, who came up with this idea that we must patiently walk through all the institutions.
And to answer your question, no, the establishment Republicans aren't going to be the ones that lead us there.
So is the era of neutrality over?
Because this is something that I think a lot of older Americans and people that are more neoliberal are uncomfortable with, where is it possible?
Because there was this belief, and I think it was falsely rooted in a mirage, that we could have neutral institutions, right?
That you might say what you want to say and we could all be kind of agreed upon agree to disagree, right?
This is kind of the ideal of the neoliberal West.
While that might be possible in pockets, given where we are in America, is that just kind of unrealistic?
And if so, then how do we respond to that?
Yeah, no, I think unfortunately that time is past.
But I think calling it something like an illusion is actually right because that kind of what we're talking about, that way of life, it was only really possible for as long as conservatives had control over institutions.
That's the most important point.
Yes.
Yes.
Which we don't really think about because maybe we've, I guess the change is so recent and so radical that we've never had to think about, well, what happens when we lose really, really, you know, what does it look like when you actually have lost control of the institutions?
This is what it looks like.
So ultimately, what you're just kind of dealing with is this problem where conservatives, like I should say, older conservatives, are kind of longing for a world that doesn't exist anymore because they've lost control of the institutions.
So now it's our job to take them back.
And that is just the reality that we live in.
So again, wanting to return to this kind of neutrality is impossible because the people who hate you control the institutions.
So I asked a group of people the other day.
I said, would you rather control the United States House of Representatives or Google, Harvard, and the New York Times for 10 years?
And the room was split.
And some people said, oh, Congress is much more important.
I said, I mean, obviously, we're not going to control Google, New York Times, or Harvard, but the equivalent of, right?
The number one college, the paper of record, and the place where people go to find information.
Why is it that conservatives don't all of a sudden say, well, it's obvious which one I'd rather control?
Why Conservatives Lose Battles 00:04:50
How do we change that?
I think this is very difficult because it's also, it gets at this problem of how conservatives view institutions.
There's a good study by Richard Hanania on this exact problem.
Like even when we look at like administrations, presidential administrations, Democrats seem to more aggressively staff other Democrats versus Republicans.
Like if you look at the difference between Obama's administration and Trump's administration, Obama largely only staffed with Democrats, right?
Trump's administration was actually more mixed.
In other words, there was more of a mixture between Republicans and Democrat staffers.
But yeah, let me tell you, like, what the justification was, and I don't agree with it at all.
Is that like, we're the better person, though?
Like, we're trying to build a bridge.
Like, we're magnanimous.
Why is that foolish?
Because it totally undermines you.
Personnel is policy, right?
Who you delegate tasks to will determine whether or not that task actually gets done.
And also, what you've introduced into the mixture is a disunity of vision.
That's exactly.
And so, again, there's nothing noble about that, in my view.
There's nothing noble about bringing your enemies into the fold so that they can undermine you.
It just, it's ridiculous.
And but basically, Hanania's study boiled down to liberals care more about being engaged and taking control of institutions and then filling them with their friends and excluding their enemies.
That is, again, this is a difficult thing.
But let me ask you: do you support that?
Should we do that?
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, I agree.
Absolutely.
Yes.
But I don't understand.
Actually, I guess I do.
I understand the excuse.
I don't understand the reason when you really think about it why conservatives aren't doing that ruthlessly.
I think it, I mean, you could say it speaks to the good nature of a lot of conservatives.
And it's true.
I mean, there is something admirable about that.
But, I mean, we're basically talking about the difference between peacetime and wartime.
That's exactly this is wartime.
This is wartime.
We're talking about competing value systems, competing worldviews.
It's just impossible to have that kind of perspective right now.
Where, like, I mean, there's a common saying, right?
I don't, you know, I don't have to agree with you, but I'll fight to the death.
It's that unnauseating Voltaire line.
I'm not going to fight to the death for Disney's right to brainwash my kids.
I'm not.
And I don't care what that makes me.
I don't care if that makes me, if you want to call me a Marxist or whatever.
I don't care.
In America, the people are sovereign.
You know that when you study the Constitution.
You don't have to study it.
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Saul Linsky famously said, Pedro, that a true radical does not go in the streets and throw a Molotov cocktail at buildings or whatever.
It wasn't that explicit, but a radical will wear a three-piece suit, slick back his hair, and work patiently to pretend to be somebody he isn't.
Radical Tactics Against Kids 00:05:15
Do you think, just from a tactical standpoint, the left or the degenerative forces of the West, if you will, the neoliberal kind of union of these different forces, do you think they're making a tactical error by now no longer disguising or camouflaging some of the radicalism, but instead now they're leading with it?
I wish I could say confidently yes, but it does seem like it, I mean, there's a kind of there's a real genuine anti-Americanism that has become so mainstream where you're actually rewarded for kind of flamboyantly hating this country and saying things about like that clip you played earlier, that woman who's talking about how straight white men are awful.
So on the one hand, I would like to think that there's still a, you know, a sizable part of the population that does still recoil at that kind of stuff, that is appalled by that when it's so in your face.
But on the other hand, I think that we really have entered this era where more people than ever actually reward this kind of behavior and actually do appreciate it.
So I don't know if the Alinsky thing applies so neatly as it does.
Well, yeah, the Alinsky had another part, though.
And so this is the question, which is Alinsky did not believe that a political movement would be sustainable if you waged war on its history and its cultural institutions.
He believed that a left-wing movement should take the flag and make it their own.
Does that make sense?
And so they're almost, they're kind of putting that aside.
Yeah, I think there is some truth to that still.
But I guess what I'm getting at is that, you know, the level of hatred for this country that is rewarded by the popular culture, I think that's we're at a time where that's unprecedented.
But I do think that all the signs right now show that the left might be kind of overplaying its hand.
But on the one hand, that does certainly owe to them attacking the history, the traditions of this country.
But on the other hand, I think it has a lot to do with the fact that they're actually going directly for people's kids.
Like I know I keep coming back.
No, I think that is the Rubicon, though, right?
I think that as soon as that is crossed, it is metaphorical war, right?
I mean, it's tribal at that point.
I don't like saying that, but like something sets in that's more than just like lower taxes.
Reptilian brain activates.
Yeah.
No, I mean, it's totally true.
I like the grassroots parents' rights movement, where you're seeing parents going to school boards and throwing out administrators, getting teachers fired, that I have never seen that in my lifetime.
And that is, I think, the most formidable movement in this country right now.
And it is based on parents basically acting to protect their children from threats.
And I think that is where the left has really, really overplayed its hand, is thinking, we're going to take your kids from you.
And we're going to, and not only like brainwash them, because I think this is really important.
A lot of what the left is doing to kids is turning them against their parents.
So, I mean, it's more primal than tribal, but both the words work.
This is what you're talking about, though.
When parents see videos like this of a gay men's choir say, we're going to convert your children, it tends to trigger something that's beyond reason, actually.
Play cut 44.
It's an all men's gay choir saying they're going to convert your children.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, it's that certainly triggers something primal.
But I think that that's really important, right?
So not only are they coming for your kids, but they're also turning them against you.
Like I've interviewed parents who have told me about school staff basically encouraging their kids in private behind their backs.
So you drop your kid off, you go to work, and then with, you know, you don't know this is happening, but the teacher is encouraging your daughter to transition into a boy, but also telling them, your parents don't understand, but I do.
And basically kind of insinuating themselves into the role of a parent, of the trusted person, the most trusted person in their life over their mother and father.
And I think that is, again, I mean, like this, this really provokes something in people that, like you said, is like sub-rational, but that's a good thing.
Well, it's actually spiritual, I believe.
I believe it's spiritual.
Pedro Gonzalez, you're a great American.
Got to have you back.
Chronicles Magazine.
Follow him on Substack Contra.
Thank you, Pedro.
Talk to you soon.
Thank you.
Thank you so much for listening, everybody.
Email me directly, freedom at charliekirk.com.
Support the Charlie Kirk Show at charliekirk.com/slash support.
Thank you so much for listening.
God bless.
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