Toy Story 3 is just superb. Go and see it.

One highlight is Barbie abruptly hollering out one of the greatest ideas of Thomas Jefferson:

Authority should derive from the consent of the governed; not from the threat of force

Hurrah!

Yet … what if those governing start off that way, but then slowly but surely change the rules towards rewarding themselves first and looking after the governed second?

How are the governed to withdraw their consent from this situation, when the governors of all main political parties seem to have more in common with each other than with those who pay taxes and vote?

This problem featured in a very different context in the famous 1957 book by Milovan Djilas, The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System.

Djilas had been one of the very top Titoist communists after WW2. Some older Serbian staff working in the Embassy in the early 1980s hated his memory, as (they said) he had dominated Belgrade after the war wearing jackboots and carrying a whip brutally to impose comunist rule.

With the publication of this book Djilas was sent to prison by the Yugo-communists and achieved international glory as the first senior communist leader to renounce communism in its Stalinist-bureaucratic form.

Djilas’ core ideologically devastating argument was that far from replacing a class-free society, the new communist elite themselves had become an effective class, hoarding power and privileges for themselves at the expense of the masses.

Which leads us now, via Barbie, straight to this:

The current state of American politics can be summed up in this poll data, published today by Rasmussen Reports:

75% of Likely Voters prefer free markets over a government managed economy. Just 14% think a government managed economy is better while 11% are not sure.

Well, one would hope so. But here is the kicker:

America’s Political Class is far less enamored with the virtues of a free market. In fact, Political Class voters narrowly prefer a government managed economy over free markets by a 44% to 37% margin.

… It strikes me that these data largely explain the political turmoil of the last year. The political class, now firmly in the saddle in Washington, wants to substitute government control for free choice wherever possible.

Since members of the political class communicate mostly with each other, they evidently underestimated the extent to which such policies would be unpopular with mainstream Americans.

A point also made eloquently by Glenn Reynolds (Instapundit).

All of which applies to the European Union too. Whatever its merits in allowing all sorts of processes to be ‘harmonised’ for general public benefit, the fact remains that the ‘consent of the governed’ is not exactly something which preys upon EU elite minds as they pile on new ‘Directives’.

Where is all this heading?

Somewhere dangerous, I fear.