Losing the flavor of legitimacy

The party system of Europe represented the engine of legitimacy in democratic governance. When the party system lost its effectiveness, when it failed in its most elementary duty – to gain the trust of the largest segment of the populace, and to speak for the people – it left behind a political void and it left behind a universe of people who were disenchanted with the political system but who were predisposed to becoming activist in the processes of governance. 

Those people, the masses that could make up the constituency of the mob, on account of their disenchantment with the party structure, were not given to deliberation and reason. Instead they "preferred methods which ended in death rather than persuasion, which spelled terror rather than conviction. They presented disagreements as invariably originating in deep natural, social, or psychological sources beyond the control of the individual and therefore beyond the power of reason." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 312). This universe of people had been "given up as too apathetic or too stupid for their [the parties'] attention. The result was that the majority of their membership consisted of people who never before had appeared on the political scene. This permitted the introduction of entirely new methods into political propaganda, and indifference to the arguments of political opponents; these movements not only placed themselves outside and against the party system as a whole, they found a membership that had never been reached, never been 'spoiled' by the party system." (The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt, 1994; page 311). 

The party system, as the instrument of legitimacy, needs perforce to be broadly representative of the general populace. The defect in that system is that over time the parties are able to succeed with less and less of the public buying into the system. Somewhere along the line the parties cease to wield the legitimacy for which they were created. Instead they lose the flavor of legitimacy and become instruments of authority. The mob they leave behind is a manifestation of a pathological legitimacy. 

It is not a failure of leadership that creates the mob but a failure of people-hood. This goes to the character of the people. Of the two great catastrophes in the wilderness, the first one, the chet ha-eigel masseikha, was a failure of people-hood, a failure of the middle class. It therefore involved a remedy that required a change in the structure of the leadership: the shift from the consecration of the first-born to the consecration of the ministers and priests. 

The second catastrophe, the chet ha-meraglim, was a failure of leadership, of the princes of the tribes. It therefore involved a remedy that required the dying out of the entire generation before the people could enter into the Promised Land. 

The mob is made up of idiots (in the ancient Athenian sense of the term): people who had not had any experience in participating in the processes of governance at the local level where civil society meets the wheels of government. Their idiocy allows them to be wielded into an amorphous heap that knows only how to rage. 

These are the political maladies of legitimacy of 'The Street.'