Michael Laver writes: Andy Burnham’s resounding defeat of the upstart right-wing Reform Party in the recent Makerfield byelection, and the lower-profile Conservative defeat of the SNP in Aberdeen South, throw some light on the seemingly inexorable decline of ‘legacy’ parties on the centre right and centre left. Close on the heels of a local election in which Reform swept each of the eight council wards in the Makerfield constituency, the byelection was an existential test for Labour and Reform. Refreshed by a strong candidate who presented himself as new blood, ‘old’ Labour fought back.
The question of whether established political elites eventually lose their mojo and get blown away by up-and-coming elites – or whether they can successfully re-energise themselves with new blood – is the subject of Elites and Democracy (Princeton University Press, 2026) by Hugo Drochon. A safe distance from the sturm und drang of day-to-day politics, this is an academic book written by a widely-published political theorist – for political theorists. With 1,289 footnotes and a 395-item bibliography, it’s not targeting the airport trade. But does it have something to say to the ordinary decent civilian who cares about current affairs and is looking for something to make sense of it all?
The introduction promises this. The first paragraph races through Brexit, Trump, Le Pen, Meloni, Orban, Modi, Duterte, Bolsonaro and Milei, and concludes ‘[w]e live in the age of the revolt against the elites’. This ‘populist’ revolt is, however, ‘the process of replacing one elite with another’, according to Drochon. The bottom-line argument, varieties of which are poked in the chapters that follow, is that democracy in practice is not government by the people, but government by elites of (and if we are lucky for) the people. Elections, seen by the uninitiated as the hallmark of democracy, are simply ways of choosing between governing elites.
This is a promising start. The twenty-first century has seen a remarkable rise in disaffection with the mainstream parties which structured democratic political competition throughout most of the twentieth century. This led to surging popular support for new political movements and parties, and a sharp decline in the fortunes of the traditional political establishment: MAGA in the US; Reform and the Greens in Britain; Sinn Féin in Ireland; the list goes on. Is all this a blip? Or is it the latest manifestation of a long-run evolutionary process in which a rising and vigorous ‘outsider’ elite mobilises the support of an alienated mass of disadvantaged citizens to depose a waning, tired and increasingly inbred political establishment that is running out of ideas? Having replaced the ancien regime, however, the new political elite itself becomes the establishment and increasingly serves its own interests rather than those of the alienated mass of disadvantaged citizens it mobilised to take power. Or will existing political elites, startled out of their lethargy by the upstart rebellion, find ways to refresh themselves and cling to power? That would be good to know.
In a surprisingly brief concluding chapter, the author steps out of his comfort zone as a card-carrying history-of-political-thought scholar and discusses current affairs. ‘[T]he past ten years in American politics can be described as the struggle between the established elite … and a rising elite, formerly non-governing, around Trump.’ By 2024 Trump also ‘had the “tech bros” … on his side: both the political class (the Republican Party) and a section of the ruling class (the economic elite)’. But has US democracy changed forever as a result? Drochon is equivocal. ‘Of course, new voters were brought into politics via the MAGA moment … [so] far, however, Trump’s policies seem to favour tech oligarchs rather than helping the American worker.’ This conventional analysis of contemporary US politics is consistent with the twentieth century elite theories of politics discussed in Elites and Democracy. And it explains why card-carrying history-of-political-thought scholars might want to revisit these theorists. But the ordinary decent civilian is only likely to be interested in a century’s worth of political theory if it tells us why MAGA (or Brexit, etc), why now, and are they here to stay? While topped and tailed with casual references to contemporary politics, the rigorous meat of this book is more concerned with a reassessment of that century of political theory than with what this has to tell us about the future. There is, of course, nothing wrong with this, seeing the book as a new look at the evolution of elite theory through the lens of current events. But it is as well to be clear about expectations.
The body of the book has a conventional one-chapter-per-theorist structure that might well be a text for a graduate seminar. The chapter titles nicely capture the core contributions of the theorists they discuss. With Weber always lurking in the background, we have: Gaetano Mosca (1858-1941) and the ruling class; Vilfredo Pareto (1848-1923) and the circulation of elites; Robert Michels (1876-1936) and the iron law of oligarchy; Joseph Schumpeter (1883-1950) and elite competition; Robert Dahl (1915-2014) and C Wright Mills (1916-1962), polyarchy or power elite?; Raymond Aron (1905-1983) and divided elites.
As noted, each chapter is copiously footnoted and a substantial proportion of the text is in the form of direct quotations from the thinkers discussed. Each chapter, furthermore, has a potted biography of each thinker, reflecting a point of view that we need to know theorists’ back stories before we can fully understand what they are saying. Drochon is strongly committed to the view that the new “Machiavellians” – Mosca, Pareto and Michels – laid the foundations on which subsequent elite theorists built. This is relevant for contemporary social scientists, since Dahl and Schumpeter, who built on these foundations, were an important part of the evolution of early modern political science, as was C Wright Mills in sociology.
But coming back to the present, are Trump/MAGA and Brexit/Farage part of a new mainstream, à la Mosca – part of the ‘constant renewal of the ruling class … a key element of “dynamism”, as the force of the river reshapes the landscape it passes through, sometimes violently …’? Are they part of ‘Pareto’s A-B-C in action: Trump and the tech bros (B), have joined with the people (C), to overthrow the established elite (A). But C will never rule. Indeed, they are more likely … to be worse off’? Or are we simply experiencing yet another era of polyarchy à la Dahl: ongoing competition between rival elites with Trump-MAGA-Brexit-Farage in the ascendancy? Answering this question is highly relevant to those in the traditional party establishment trying to figure out what is to be done to counter the rise of these wannabe movements. The renewal of the ruling class interpretation implies a need, at least somewhat, to go with the flow of that river. Polyarchy, in contrast, implies the search for an effective counter-punch.
It’s not clear – to me at least – how the theoretical arguments in this book help us answer this question. Another empirical straw in the wind to add to Makerfield, both arriving after the book was written, is the landslide defeat of Hungary’s Viktor Orban by Péter Magyar’s Tisza party – notwithstanding a vigorous intervention on Orban’s behalf by JD Vance. Time will tell, of course, but Magyar’s victory has been welcomed by traditional elite politicians across Europe as a return to the good old days. Orbanism was resisted by, and does not seem to have flowed into the mainstream of, European elite culture. The next update will come from the US midterms.
What is clear is that the longstanding theoretical debates analysed and synthesised in this book are concerned with matters just as relevant today as they were a century ago. As long as they don’t expect easy answers, people who want to read their way into the detail and evolution of these debates will find Drochon’s Elites and Democracy a good starting point.