To understand how this illogical consent is manufactured, both in the US and in Canada, an excellent article by Professor Shadia B. Drury suggests that it begins with a naive and manufactured conception of democracy. The author demonstrates that a purposefully cultivated fake populism provides the necessary conditions to enact five key strategies to manipulate the public into voting against its own self interest.
She characterizes our political culture as being infused with a populist rhetoric that ignores the plain fact that we live in an "unprecedented global oligarch" -- or, the rule of the rich on a global scale. That we are constantly bombarded with this populist rhetoric would suggest to an alien visitor that we live in a radical (ie, populist) democracy that caters to the needs of the many, and not the privileges of the few. As she says,
"Even though oligarchy reigns supreme, democracy is so revered in our society that it has become a new god. People are willing to die for it, launch wars in its name, and bomb others in the hope of converting them to the true faith. The prevalence of this naive conception of democracy allows us to be hoodwinked by our ruling elites into supporting an agenda that serves the interest of the global oligarchy while pretending to be radically democratic or populist."
Professor Drury maintains that we have inherited our understanding of democracy from inflated American rhetoric such as Abraham Lincoln's memorable Gettysburg Address, where he romanticized democracy as "government of the people, by the people, and for the people." However, it is a false notion that the people are a single united entity -- in reality they represent a plurality of diverse opinions and conflicting interests. And so any meaningful understanding of democracy must be based simply on the rule of the majority. This means that a democracy is only as good as the majority of the people in society -- as Professor Drury writes,
"If the majority is ignorant and bigoted, then democracy will be the tyranny of the ignorant and bigoted."
Philosophers have acknowledged down through the ages that politics is a perennial conflict between the few rich and the many poor. This tension is best mitigated in a democracy where a middle class, that is neither rich nor poor, emerges as a useful safeguard against class warfare that extreme disparities between rich and poor invite. But today, the rich have the upper hand, the middle class is shrinking, and the gap between rich and poor is growing at an alarming rate. The prevalence of policies that continue to favor the rich at the expense of all others will inevitably invite class conflict.
In the past our democracy was made tolerable through the compromise between the rule of the few and the rule of the many. In such a liberal democracy the will of the majority was consciously limited by the rule of law, and limitations were placed on executive power, the separation of church and state was maintained, the judiciary enjoyed an independence from the ruling party, and the rights of individuals and minorities were protected. All of these liberal principles prevented our democracy from turning into a tyranny of the majority.
But liberalism does not easily co-exist with democracy. Unlike democracy, liberalism is by nature elitist -- it prefers excellence to mediocrity, eccentricity to conformity, and unique individuals to collectives. Writing in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, the father of liberalism, felt compelled to defend liberty in an age of democracy. He understood that democracy poses a serious threat to liberty.
It is this tension between democracy and liberty that the monied class has exploited -- by their efforts, elitism has become a term of abuse. By hurling the term "elitist", any institution, individual, society or policy can be effectively discredited. And yet, elites are a fact of life, and exist in every society:
"What's important is not whether a society is elitist, but rather what kind of elites it has -- there are good elites and bad elites. Even a democracy needs elites. In fact, it cannot function without them. A good ruling elite must strive to make the popular will, the will of the majority, as good as it can be. This means studying the issues, presenting the facts, setting out the pros and cons of alternate policies, and talking to the people as adults."
What distinguishes a democracy from an autocratic society is not rule according to the will of the people, but the existence of a plurality of good elites competing for power. In other words, democracy and elitism are not incompatible. There was, in fact, a time when good liberal and conservative elites competed for power in our democracy, but these have been replaced with neoliberals and neoconservatives. These new elites serve the rich, impoverish the middle class, and ignore the needs of the poor. Our understanding of democracy has become naive and unrealistic through the concerted efforts of these unscrupulous elites.
The rise of this new breed of elites, come to exploit the tension between democracy and liberty -- as well as the perennial conflict between rich and poor -- coincides with the ascendance of the corporate entity. As noted earlier, corporatism has come to dominate our culture and society. We read daily the reports of corporations acting just like individuals in financing the political process to their own advantage, aided by the enormous sums of money at their disposal; we read of corporations writing the laws, and with a direct hand in creating the regulatory infrastructure under which they will operate; we read of corporations as benefactors to politicians, and understand the realities of pay-for-play in today's democracy; we read of the vast wealth that corporations generate for top-tier managers and investors, and from it we witness their own insatiable sense of entitlement. It is the corporation -- and the pervasive culture of corporatism -- that has spawned this new breed of corrupt elite.
But still, the rise of corporations and the political class that serve them could not have happened without the acquiescence of the majority. The question is how; and in understanding how, what might then be done to restore our democracy. The Drury article identifies five key strategies that have been employed by our new elite to empower this fake populism.
(1) Demonize liberal elites as champions of the indolent.
As a first step, it is critical to delegitimize the elites in general, by casting them in opposition to democracy, by defining all elites as liberal. It is instructive to note that while teachers, lawyers, judges, artists and university professors are so labeled, the bankers and money-managers and corporate executives are not. Rather, they are cast as allies of workers against the liberal elite.
The narrative puts forward the idea that capitalism is "meticulously fair" and therefor rewards the virtuous and industrious. It also creates the fiction that the poor and unemployed are lazy, and deserving of contempt. This creates the false alliance, where working class people need to stand with the ultra-rich in opposition to the bums and the elites that coddle them. Of course, as Drury says,
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