Reform’s taxing steps on the road less travelled

World of Politics with Harry McGee – harrymcgee@gmail.com

Jimmy Walker was a mayor of New York during the prohibition era, and indeed at the time of the Wall Street crash. Like so many politicians before and after he was eventually felled over a corruption scandal.

His political legacy included an amazing quote about trying to reform the political system.

“A reformer is a guy who rides through the sewer in a glass bottom boat.”

Take the first line of any party political manifesto and chances are the word reform will feature prominently. Fine Gael and Labour went further last time and promised a ‘democratic revolution’ that us all thinking of Moscow 1917 until we remembered it was just Enda Kenny and Eamon Gilmore. Now, read on.

Anyway, reform never happens quickly unless there is an actual revolution or there is a crisis so deep and destructive that something needs to be done (and it usually too late).

And even when there are revolutions or insurrections or regime change, if you return to the scene of the crime a decade or more later, you will find that the old institutions have been replaced by new ones that are more or less the same as the old one except that they have been rebranded.

Think of the pillar boxes for post changing their colour from red to green after independence. Well that goes for any new administration. They create their own shiny new institutions but soon it becomes apparent they need to be organised.

And once rules of organisation are set, an elite emerges to implement those rules – and as the human condition dictates – to protect and perpetuate their own positions.

This theory was developed by Robert Michels, a German socialist, who described it as the “iron law of oligarchy”. His argument was that no matter how democratic the spirit is at the start, the administration inevitably falls into the hands of an administrative elite who will resist any challenge to their power or any change to the system that has been created.

Michels essentially argued that the very goal that democracy set out to achieve could not be attained, and that representative democracy was a front that only gave legitimacy to the elite running the whole show.

It sounds cynical but there is more than a grain of truth in it and I think it’s particularly true for larger and more complex societies.

At the weekend, I was reading a report on the tell-all book written by Valerie Trierwaller, the former partner of French president François Hollande.

It wasn’t the two-timing president’s antics that I found most interesting – it was his background. He is a socialist but the top level of French socialism seems to be very different than our image of gritty moustached union representatives arguing their case in sparsely furnished rooms.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.