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There is one fact which, whether for good or ill, is of utmost importance in the public life of Europe at the present moment. This fact is the accession of the masses to complete social power. As the masses, by definition, neither should nor can direct their own personal existence, and still less rule society in general, this fact means that actually Europe is suffering from the greatest crisis that can afflict peoples, nations, and civilisation.
- José Ortega y Gasset
The Revolt of the Masses1
THE PRIMARY VIRTUE OF DEMOCRACY is that it bestows equality upon equals. Its main vice is that it also bestows equality upon unequals. In 1930, José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955) published The Revolt of the Masses, in which he examined the political and social crisis of Europe, and of Western civilization generally. He was not the only thinker to recognize this crisis, but his assessment is particularly important since it locates the root cause in the widespread distribution of social power to the masses.2 His evaluation, highly illuminating when it was written, is perhaps even more relevant in our time. The "revolt of the masses" continues and is gaining momentum as we proceed into the twenty-first century, and it consists in the social distribution of equality to everyone, irrespective of qualifications and individual merit-based characteristics.
The revolt of the masses is a product of what Ortega called "hyperdemocracy," in which power is more or less evenly distributed throughout society and results in cultural degradation and deterioration.3 At the core of his perspective is an unpopular but nevertheless important understanding of one of the most important questions of politics and society, as well as the answer to it: Who should rule? Ortega understood that "human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic."4 Human excellence, the standard for society, is only to be found in the few and not the many, humanly speaking. Now if ruling must be the reserve of the few, as opposed to the many, then our current age of hyperdemocracy and radical egalitarianism, in which...