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You already know: Presidential candidates’ Web sites excel in hiding contact info to reach influential advisors. Jack Valenti and crew have the open-Sesame information. You don’t. How to articulate the philosophy behind this not-so-accidental little omission on many a campaign site? Well, the protagonist in Our Friend the Charlatan, a novel that the British writer George Gissing published in 1901, does a preternatural job of expressing the elitist DC mindset that permeates the Website-creation philosophy of Dems and Republicans alike, even if they won’t fess up to it. Influenced by–wait, more or less plagiarizing from–an obsure French philosophical work, the title character says:

No true sociology could be established before the facts of biology were known, as the one results from the other. In both, the ruling principle is that of association, with the evolution of a directing power. An animal is an association of cells. Every association implies division of labour. Now, progress in organic development means the slow constitution of an organ–the brain–which shall direct the body. So in society–an association of individuals, with slow constitution of a directing organ, called the Government. The problem of civilisation is to establish government on scientific principles–to pick out the fit for rule–to distinguish between the Multitude and the Select, and at the same time to balance their working. It is nonsense to talk about Equality. Evolution is engaged in cephalising the political aggregate–as it did the aggregate of cells in the animal organism. It makes for the differentiation of the Select and of the Crowd–that is to say, towards Inequality.

Sure enough, the blowhard charlatan, Dyce Lashmar, runs for Parliament as a Liberal. Oh, to imagine the Web site he’d have done to con the grubby “Multitude.”

 
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