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While Weber saw some value in democracy as a market-like mechanism for competition between leaders and parties, he did not view it in a romantic, idealized light. Even as the general public legitimizes government with elections, the policies are essentially those of the Elites; the participatory role for citizens is proscribed.

Thus the end-state of capitalism as foreseen by Weber closely maps our present reality: elections legitimize Elite control of the economy and Empire while the citizenry are powerless cogs in a highly rationalized and bureaucratic "iron cage." The "inner cage" within the "iron cage" which Weber could not foresee was debt-serfdom, the indenturing of the citizenry via exponentially rising debt.

Oswald Spengler, who wrote The Decline of the West in the early 20th century, extended this flinty-eyed view of democracy's limitations.

Spengler elaborated the causal connections between money, influence and elections best summarized by H.L. Mencken's acerbic observation: "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale of stolen goods."

In Spengler's analysis, once voters are organized into groups funded by wealthy Elites (that is, into voting blocs, parties and interest groups) then the election is nothing but a recorded legitimization of a government immune to non-Elite citizen influence.

As wealth becomes increasingly concentrated in Elite hands, the struggle for political power is dominated by money. From Spengler's ontological perspective, this reduction of elections to a battle for influence by concentrated wealth is not corrupt, it is the necessary end of capitalist democracy.

The reason is simple: "The private powers of the economy want free paths for their acquisition ... No legislation must stand in their way. They want to make the laws themselves, in their interests."

Recognizing its role as the propaganda conduit of concentrated wealth and power, Spengler scathingly characterizes the mass media thusly: "Electrical news-service keep the waking-consciousness of whole people and continents under a deafening drum-fire of theses, catchwords, standpoints, scenes, feelings, day by day and year by year."

Thus democracy and Plutocracy are one in the same in Spengler's view.

Spengler predicted the rise of what he termed Caesarism, political leaders wielding Weber's Charisma as a social authority powerful enough to overcome the forces (negative feedbacks) limiting the concentration of power into one person or Executive office.

Caesarism marks the death of the ideals that originally informed the State and its institutions. The classic ideals have expired even as the institutions are conserved (see Preservation of Institutions Trap in Chapter Fifteen, Interlocking Traps) and maintained as simulacrum masking the reality that all authority now rests with the Caesar executive. This transition from democracy to an Imperial Age parallels that of Rome.

In an uncanny foreshadowing of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the subsequent emergence of the U.S. as sole global Empire, Spengler anticipated the rise of idealistic imperialism in the aftermath of a major geopolitical enemy’s demise.

Spengler also foresaw a devolution of participatory democracy. Though the citizenry once fought to establish fundamental civil liberty rights, in the late Plutocracy- dominated stage of democracy the citizenry has little interest in exercising those rights. Participation in elections drops, and the most qualified candidates opt out of the political process.

This entire process--the growing domination of political power by concentrated wealth and the devolution of participatory democracy and institutions into simulacrum of their former authenticity--perfectly captures the essential character of the present era.

Despite their illuminating, groundbreaking analyses, I am unpersuaded by these three thinkers' "end of history" projections. Marx's muddled "dictatorship of the proletariat" ran aground on humanity's innate self-interest (people turned out not to want to work hard on the commune for everyone