The great paradox of collectivist politics is that in spite of its assertion that everyone matters and that the individual is subordinate, it has a strong, apparently inevitable tendency to concentrate decision-making in the hands of progressively fewer and fewer people. Only the most extreme royalist or Nietzschean elitist could contemplate with equanimity such a narrow base for the formation of policy determining the lives of millions.

The puzzle goes deeper than this, for collectivists happily invoke crowd-sourcing as a proof of the wisdom of the group, but when it comes to politics they are not only content with but they absolutely insist upon government in the name of the people by an elite civil service.

One may, of course, doubt the sincerity of the collectivist's interest in the aggregate output of the crowd, not least because they, unlike economic liberals, have no information theory to explain how a population of individuals can be so creative, but also because in most cases I suspect that the input of the mass is only sought to confirm views and directions already taken, as if it were a rigged plebiscite.

Or is it just another example of collectivist rhetoric being used as a mask for the prosecution of aggressive individual interest? It might be so, it might be so.