A History of the Global Elites

It is common nowadays to hear talk of ‘the elites’, especially ‘the global elites’. On the one hand, these phrases seem to refer to Bill Gates, George Soros, Larry Fink, Klaus Schwab and other Bond villains, plus the figures who play Oddjob to Goldfinger – accredited sidekicks and secretaries like Joe Biden, Ursula von der Leyen, Anthony Fauci, Tedros Ghebreyesus and Gary Lineker. One the other hand, they refer to the entire higher educated class of professionals, teachers and administrators, the class of ‘nowheres’ as distinguished from ‘somewheres’ (David Goodhart) or ‘uppers’ as distinguished from ‘downers’ (Ferdinand Mount), or ‘democrats’ as distinguished from ‘deplorables’ (Hillary Clinton). This is confusing, but it makes sense. There are extremely powerful figures operating at a high level of influence. And then there are the enforcers. And then there are the jobsworths.

There is a hierarchy of elites, then – an uncelestial hierarchy – running from the conspiratorial through the corrupt and the colluding to the compliant. We all know this; but we tend to think about it sociologically rather than politically. For the edification of the one or two sceptical Cobbetts still in existence, I thought I’d sketch out a short conjectural historical explanation of the politics of ‘The Thing’, as A.J.P. Taylor referred to the ruling class: in other words, A History of the Global Elites.

In our history we have several ancient visions of a centralised world order. One was the Roman vision: Empire! And the other was the Christian vision: Papacy! These were fused by Constantine, but split again, in the West, though not in the East, and in the West maintained a high rivalry for a thousand years. However, this rivalry had nothing to do with ordinary life in medieval England, say, or France, where there was no centralisation, no state, no sovereignty and only lordship: in particular, feudal lordship. Feudal lords, as everyone knows, were in effect private, not public: and they existed in reciprocal relations of local service. The vassal owed the lord service; and the lord owed the vassal protection. Our medieval kings were just the first lords amongst many. Everything was a matter of practical subsidiarity: decided at the appropriate level. But into this working system stole the Roman lawyers of Bologna and other universities, who started speaking to the imperialists, and the Roman Christians who sought to turn Christian practice into ecclesiastical world order using selections from the Bible and Aristotle and also Roman law. They disagreed about much, but they agreed about the importance of central domination.

To cut a long story short, feudal struggles between rival lords were resolved by the kings, who, as the pre-eminent lords, forged high alliances with the centralising Roman-Christian-Greek theorists and forged low alliances with the people – especially the somewhat unattached mercantile people: those people who in the 14th Century associated in guilds and in the 17th Century in clubs and companies. The kings used their alliances to establish themselves at the apex of the novel thing called a state, armed with a doctrine of sovereignty (which meant supremacy): and this threw up new ideas such as raison d’état, the idea that everything should be done for the state, and absolutism, the idea that everything should be done for the state absolutely.

Is this clear? The centralisers of the first stage were the emperors and popes, with their claims about being dominus mundi, lord of the world, or vicarius Dei, vicar of God. The centralisers of the second stage were the European kings of the 16th Century and afterwards, with their claims to rule as supremely as the emperors and popes had done, but only within their own territories, now called states.

If you are interested, I take the first half of the story from a letter Lord Acton wrote in 1861, which Michael Sonenscher found so impressive that he printed it entire as an appendix in his recent book After Kant. And I take the second half from a book by Reinhart Koselleck from 1959 called Critique and Crisis.

The second half of the story is that there was were reactions against the sovereign kings, against raison d’état and against absolutism. Overt reactions against it– like those of egalitarian Protestant sects – failed. But one reaction which succeeded was that of the Freemasons. Descended from obscure traditions (Cabalistic, Hermetic, Rosicrucian, Templar), the Freemasons were in fact businessmen who were appalled by the absolutism of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. They formed secret corporations to defend a certain sort of freedom, and they protected themselves with elaborate and arcane rituals but also by emphatically asserting that they had no interest in politics.

Koselleck’s particular point is that asserting-that-they-had-no-interest-in-politics was a highly effective way of being political. The Freemasons disliked the absolutist state. They disliked states. They disliked politics. They liked business, they liked freedom, and they were convinced of the superiority of their mercantile cosmopolitanism and their capacity to solve the problems of the world by using moral arguments rather than using crude political expedients. But this was to become a politics of its own.

The suggestion here is that it was the Freemasons who were responsible for the politics of the ‘global elite’. We can skate over the 19th Century because even Marxism was no more than a spirited sideline in a much grander story. Freemasonic politics was, and is, overtly antipolitical. It dislikes states. It also dislikes democracies. It dislikes limits. It is technocratic. It likes science. It is very sure of itself. It generates a vast network in which one gets on as one boosts one’s signal. It wants freedom, for the members of the arcane cult: those who adopt the neo-masonic beliefs (nowadays about diversity, migration, climate, pandemic) as badges of honour, and adopt quasi-masonic rituals to go with them (wearing masks, taking the knee, protesting that one is an ally of this or that community, assembling in Davos and wherever COP is to be held next year). It assumes that this science, this morality – technology plus appropriate belief – is enough to solve the problems of the world: and that what usually passes for politics is in fact inferior folly and distraction. It is very much in favour of the hypothesis of ‘The Anthropocene’, since it can pose as the St George that is going to slay the dragon of Machiavellianism, now that the Machiavellian state has proven that it has no ‘solutions’ to the problems of the world.

The neo-masonic global elite believes in solutions. Politics, as we know it, is a dirty business: and involves silt and sediment and scum– things that do not dissolve (like Donald Trump and Nigel Farage): but politics as the global elite knows it is, or should be, clean: it only approaches a problem if it involves a solution: dissolving something in some magnificent new solvent, to be designed by a corrupt scientist somewhere and signal-boosted by the colluding and compliant systems of the states that no longer work because they have been Gramscianly buggered-up by the long march of masonry through the institutions. The states no longer work because their old Machiavellian étatiste capacities have been eroded by the universalist, globalist, unpolitical, gentle progress towards a service state which is in fact a world state – except that it won’t be called a ‘state’, because the word ‘state’ is a tainted word.

I wonder what they’ll call the ‘world state’ when it comes? It won’t be ‘world state’. It’ll be Gaia – or Govenia, or Gretaria, or something equally vapid. Or it won’t even have a name. Someone should write a dystopia about how the Chinese and Islamic worlds will come to a grand world-historical compromise whereby Islam will supply the religion and China will supply everything else. All we will do, probably, is supply the name. We are good at advertising and doublethink.

Well, there are people in our civilisation, thinkers and theorists, who try to defend ‘politics’, and talk positively about Hobbes and Machiavelli. But those people – I read their books – also seem to have injected the neomasonic antipolitical gene therapy into their cerebral cortices, so it remains to be seen whether any of them of them will wake up and realise that they are doomed if they don’t realise that the state has been weakened too much by the masons.

I am not defending the state. But it is important for us to recognise just how much the history of politics reveals that the state has been undermined by the clever machinations of the centralisers of the third stage, the neomasonic global elites. They are worse, probably, than the old centralisers. They see no limits to their empire. And they are more certain of their right to rule than even the Romans and Christians.

The only hope, as the great political theorist Bertie Wooster put it, might be to restore a bit of the old feudal spirit.

One thing I did not mention earlier on is that one of the other reactions to absolutism, and a successful one for a time, was distinctly English. It was constitutionalism. 1688 and all that. This constitutionalism was also adopted by the Americans, who abstracted from English models while rejecting English rule and English traditions. Constitutionalism worked well between the 18th and 20th Centuries. It certainly preserved liberty by insisting on balance. It was responsible for that remarkable thing, liberalism. But it is possible that constitutionalism, too, has been twisted beyond repair by the masonic elites: to become just one more method by which they impose their antipolitical protocols on us.

Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.