This is an inevitable result of representative democracy, certainly under capitalism and probably inherently. If we want 'democracy' in the initial sense of rule by the _demos_, then some other way of organizing political life is necessary. I do not think that can be excogitated in advance but only in the process of overthrowing capitalism.
People are 'stupid' because there is no direct or intellgible linkage (under capitalism) between motive and act, and it is impossible for even the elite to fill in this gap adequately. This leads, incidentally, to the superstition that mistakes/errors/calamities could have been avoided by "more intelligent" or "more competent" people. (This is the grounds for the failure to see the success of the Bush Administration. They succeeded where Eisenhower, Reagan, Carter, Clinton, and Bush I had failed. That required an act which could not succeed by the standards set by a majority of the elite (conservative and liberal or progresdsive), but it worked, and no more clever scheme could hav worked probably. Obama has accepted the results of that five-year struggle and is building on them. Far from being at work "repairing the damage" to the "Empire" he is consolidating or attempting to consolidate the gains.
And there is no way, in terms of earlier conceptions of imperialism, that we can explain wht has been happening for the last three+ decades. [Digression: Any group temporarily in charge will try to give benefits fot friends and allies, but those benefits should not, ordinarily, be conceived as the driving motive of national policy. Invading Iraq was simply carrying out a national policy established in the 1950s and adapted to the new circumstances of "globalism" or "The Empire of Capital." (I can't be the only person on this list who has read and thought about Wood's magnificent work.) The Middle East policy of the U.S. was originally deeloped in terms of the interests of u.s. oil companies, just as the Marshall Plan was focused on the interests of u.s. capital. Those policies have been reshaped in the interests of a capitalism which is global BUT WHICH MUST OPERATE WITHIN INDIVIDUAL STATES, ruled by their own ruling classes. States that threaten this global capital (which is both national and international: this is what confused Negri into the silliness of his _Empire_).
The Iraq war was, then, not _centrally_ for the interests of U.S. capital, even of u.s. oil firms, but in the interests of capital as such. Middle East oil could not be left under the independent control of "irresponsible" states. It could not be controlled directly by The U.S. as in old-style imperialism, but all its ruling elites had to be disciplined and made responsible to international capital, european and Japanese as well as U.S.
Remebmer, the British Empire is long gone but British capitalists have sailed merrily along. This was not typically the case with pre-capitalist empires. Dennis R is still thinking in terms appropriate to Carthage and Rome, et al. There will be no repeat of World War I, as competing capitalist empires battle to the death. But that does not confirm Kautsky, since this new empire of capital is still capitalism, as described by Marx, Albritton, Postone, Wood, et al - a totality which establishes the alternativesof socialism or barbarism. We are experiencing barbarism, and have been for a century.
That is the context in which we must make jour own history - but we have to recognize the context to have any hope _at all_ of 'choosing' the alternative. We need (among many other things) to once and for all give up the bourgeois dream of Progress by simple steps leading from here to there.
And that brings me back to Miles's point: how do we make informed decisions in a democratic society when so many are this fucking clueless?
We don't, of course, inside the rules of representative democracy. The abstract - isolated - individual has no way of understanding the meaning of his world - and that can be recognized without some of the implications of "fucking cluelessness." The citizen of the bourgois state is not stupid or ignorant, but only in struggle under conditions which (to repeat myself for the n-th time) we cannot predict or will into existence. But that is another question.
Carrol