Who’s Who in Politics? Max Weber’s “Politics as a Vocation”

I would like to further examine Weber’s discussion of the ways in which people (i.e. citizens) may participate in the politics of the state.
Weber argues that there are essentially two levels of political involvement: pursuing politics as an avocation or as a vocation. People who pursue politics as an avocation have only a casual, indirect, and occasional role in political affairs. They turn out to vote and lend their support to political causes from time to time, but their main function is to elect representatives who will ultimately make political decisions on their behalf. Though such people help make the political process run smoothly, politics is not in fact their eminent concern. People who pursue politics as a vocation, however, are much more directly involved in the political process – fighting for specific political causes – and therefore hold much more power. Weber suggests that professional politicians who are economically independent (wealthy) will tend to conduct their politics more honorifically than those who may have an incentive to change the economic order of society. However, he cautions that politics is always about more than “struggles for objective goals” – it is also about “patronage of office.”
From an empirical standpoint, Weber’s classification of political activity seems to make a lot of sense. I will provisionally use the U.S. political system as a baseline of comparison (since that is the system I am most familiar with). To be sure, most Americans could be considered as those practicing politics as an avocation (or not exercising their political rights at all). About half of Americans vote, which is perhaps the easiest political act to engage in. Professional politicians in America (by which I mean those holding elective office) do seem on average to be much wealthier than their average constituent, and the relatively low pay of such distinctive jobs discourages people of average means from seeking to “live off” of politics.
But I really want to address the normative implications of Weber’s diagnosis. Is it right that politics should be conducted differently by different kinds of people? I concede that there is something inherently attractive about giving the majority of people – for whom politics is only a peripheral concern – a marginal (one could even say fictive) role in the political process. Aristotle (and Weber, I suspect) believed that there was an elite class of people that was comparatively more qualified to govern, and that they should be considered first-order citizens. I think that employing a system of representative democracy is actually a quite ingenious way of convincing everyone that they have a stake in the political process while at the same time preventing the crowds of unqualified people from making truly important and difficult political decisions (for they need only to decide who would best represent them).
I disagree with Weber, however, on the issue of economic independence (wealth) being a desirable precondition for holding public office. I am particularly skeptical of the idea that the wealthy are more likely than the rest to “live for” politics (at least for altruistic purposes). At the end of the day, politics is about resolving disputes in a diverse society that affect everyone on some tangible level; that is, everyone has a stake in politics. Now, if the people charged with resolving the disputes do not themselves reflect the diversity that is in society, then the dispute may never be resolved. (Would the civil rights inequalities have been resolved in the 1960s had no black leaders engaged in the political debate?) If society is represented only by the rich, then we are all the more likely to have a Marxist state that reflects only the interests of the rich. I argue that a diverse state should have a truly representative political community, whatever conflict that may bring. That is the essence of politics.