ur political culture is characterized by a radicallydemocratic or populist rhetoric that belies the fact that we live in an unprecedentedglobal oligarchy—which is to say, rule of the rich on a global scale. Our politicalculture exudes so much populist rhetoric that one would think we lived in aradical (i.e., populist) democracy that caters to the needs of the many, notthe privileges of the few. Even though oligarchy reigns supreme, democracyis so revered in our society that it has become a new god. People are willingto die for it, launch wars in its name, and bomb others in the hope of convertingthem to the true faith. Unfortunately, our faith in democracy is as naïve asour faith in God. In my view, the prevalence of this naïve conception of democracyallows us to be hoodwinked by our ruling elites into supporting an agenda thatserves the interest of the global oligarchy while pretending to be radicallydemocratic or populist. To loosen the grip of this fake populism on our collectivepsyche, it is necessary to subject our view of democracy to rational scrutiny.

We have inherited our understanding of democracy from inflated American rhetoric such as Abraham Lincoln’s memorable Gettysburg address (1863), where he romanticized democracy as “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” But this vision of democracy is neither attainable nor desirable. It is unattainable because it relies on the fiction of the rule of the people, as if the people had a single will. In reality, there is no such thing as the will of the people; the will of the people is not a single unified entity but a plurality of diverse opinions and conflicting interests. Any meaningful account of democracy must be nothing other than the rule of the majority. So understood, democracy is only as good as the majority of the people in the society. If the majority is ignorant and bigoted, then democracy will be the tyranny of the ignorant and bigoted. This is why rule of the people in the interest of the people is neither realistic nor desirable.

Ever since Aristotle, philosophers have acknowledged that politics is a perennial conflict between the few rich and the many poor. The government in which the rich get a stranglehold on society is known as an oligarchy, or the rule of the rich in the interest of the rich and the exploitation of the poor. When the many poor control the government, the result is a democracy or rule of the many poor in their own interest. In such a radical or populist democracy, the rich are not given their due. Aristotle was justified in thinking that both forms of government are seriously flawed. Both forms of government invite a degree of animosity between rich and poor that can easily erupt into class warfare. Aristotle rightly argued that both the few and the many, the rich and the poor, had claims to rule. Because the wealthy can contribute to the enhancement of culture and the arts, and because wealth provides opportunities for self-development, self-cultivation, wisdom, and good judgment, the wealthy have a claim to political power. On the other hand, just because one lacks the wisdom to rule, it does not follow that one cannot be a good judge of what constitutes good government—just as one need not be an expert house-builder in order to judge if a house is well built. Anyone who lives in a house where the roof leaks and the foundations shake knows that the house is not well built. Besides, many heads are often better than one. Moreover, an oligarchy may abuse its power and rule in its own interests. In view of these considerations, Aristotle surmised that the best attainable regime is a mixture of democracy and oligarchy. In such a mixture, a middle class that is neither rich nor poor emerges as a useful safeguard against the class warfare that extreme disparities between rich and poor invite.

Unfortunately, the common sense wisdom of Aristotle is sadly lacking in our time. The rich have the upper hand; the middle class is shrinking; the gap between rich and poor is increasing dramatically. Any effort to defend social justice by advocating policies that equalize the benefits and burdens of society is denounced as instigating class warfare. In truth, the prevalence of policies that continue to favor the rich at the expense of all others invites class conflict.

What made our democracy tolerable is that it was a compromise between the rule of the few and the rule of the many. What made it succeed is that it has never been a radical or populist democracy. It was a liberal democracy, which is to say that the will of the majority has been limited by the rule of law, limitations on executive power, separation of church and state, independence of the judiciary from the ruling party, and protection of the rights of individuals and minorities against the will of the majority. All of these liberal principles prevent democracy from turning into a tyranny of the majority. But the combination of liberalism and democracy was not a natural love affair. It was more like the co-habitation of an odd couple. Unlike democracy, liberalism is by nature elitist—it prefers excellence to mediocrity, eccentricity to conformity, and unique individuals to collectivities. Writing in the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill, the father of liberalism, felt compelled to defend liberty in an age of democracy (On Liberty, 1859). He understood instinctively that democracy poses a serious threat to liberty.

The co-habitation of liberalism and democracy in our society makes us assume that the two are natural allies; we assume that democracy automatically yields liberty. But that is not the case. The conflict between them is particularly apparent when democracy is imposed by force on a foreign soil, as it was in Iraq, after the American invasion of 2003. There is clearly less freedom and security under the democratic regime imposed by the Americans than there was under the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. During the dictatorship, Shiites and Sunnis could marry and live in religiously mixed neighborhoods, without fear of being abducted and killed; and women could walk down the streets of Basra burka-free, without getting beaten up. In the absence of the limits set by liberal institutions, democracy can be much worse than dictatorship. What makes our democracy workable is the deep integration of liberal institutions into its core. But this process has taken several hundred years to develop, and cannot be recreated in an instant. Our mad forays into foreign lands are fueled by historical oblivion to the fact that liberal institutions are integral to the proper working of our democracy.

In the current populist fervor, elitism has become a term of abuse. It is an automatic way of discrediting any institution, society, or policy. In my view, there is absolutely nothing wrong with elites; they are a fact of life. Every society has elites. To call a society elitist is neither here nor there. What’s important is not whether a society is elitist, but what kind of elites it has—there are good and bad elites. Even a democracy needs elites. In fact, it cannot function properly without them. The golden age of Athenian democracy in the fifth century BCE could not have existed without the leadership of Pericles, who was an outstanding individual and a democrat. To be a democrat is to believe that ordinary people have a capacity for good will and good judgment—but only if they are informed. Not everyone in a democracy has the leisure to be informed about all the issues—that is the function of the ruling elite. 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, the way Pericles did.

A decent ruling elite in a democracy does not pander to the people as if they were children, seduce them with promises of the impossible, mislead them into expecting the unattainable, or manipulate them for partisan political purposes. Good elites in a democracy do not pretend that there are any easy solutions, magic cures, or fool proof policies. Responsible elites do not claim to possess strategies free from all negative repercussions and unanticipated consequences. 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.

Our conception of democracy is so naïve and unrealistic that it has allowed us to become dupes of the most unscrupulous elites. There was a time when good liberal and conservative elites competed for power in our democracy. But liberals and conservatives have been replaced with neoliberals and neo-conservatives. These new elites serve the rich, impoverish the middle class, and ignore the needs of the poor. Progressive conservatives such as Robert Stanfield, Joe Clark, and Danny Williams, have exited the scene. There are still the likes of Hugh Segal, championing the cause of the poor, but these lonely voices are drowned out by the din of the neo-conservatives. Meanwhile, the Liberal Party has lost its way, and liberals have given way to neoliberals who support the same economic policies as the neoconservatives.

The dramatic ascendancy of gargantuan wealth could not have happened without the acquiescence of the majority. But how can this acquiescence be elicited? It seems to me that there are at least five key strategies that are used by the ruling elites and their right-wing pundits to hoodwink us into a fake populism. It is my contention that all these strategies are parasitic on the prevalence of the naïve conception of democracy criticized above.

(1) Demonizing liberal elites as champions of the lazy and indolent.

The first step is to delegitimize elites in general, as being at odds with a democracy, and to define all elites as liberal. Teachers, lawyers, judges, artists, and university professors are counted among the elites, but not bankers, money-managers, corporate executives, or multi-millionaires. In other words, the richest men in society are not part of the elite. Instead, they are presented as allies of working men and women against the latté liberal elite. And that is the coup de grâce.

In a speech delivered on December 7, 2010, Christine O’Donnell, a poster-child of the Tea Party movement in the US, declared that evils usually come in threes, and that the three evils of the day were (1) the anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, (2) the death of Elizabeth Edwards from cancer, and (3) the extension of unemployment benefits by President Barack Obama.

In the same speech, O’Donnell made sure to praise the president for extending the Bush tax cuts for the rich on the same day. At the heart of this apparent mean-spiritedness is the conviction that the capitalist system is meticulously fair and therefore rewards the virtuous and industrious. It follows that the poor and unemployed are lazy bums who live off the tireless industry of productive, hard-working people. By inventing a huge underclass of bums and free-loaders living off the largess of the state, the fake populist ideology forges a spurious alliance between the working classes and the ultra-rich. The message is that the poor are not only stupid and lazy—they are blood-suckers demanding the expansion of government to serve their interests—and the liberal elites are their champions. So, the working classes had better stand with the ultra-rich against the bums and liberal elites. The working classes had better stem the tide of the free-loaders and the liberal elites by putting pressure on politicians to roll back social security, government heath care, and the rest of the social safety net. The most striking thing about O’Donnell’s world view is the total lack of compassion for working class men and women who are subject to forces beyond their control, such as inflation and unemployment. This hostility to the working classes, who have suffered the consequences of a recession resulting directly from the greed and mismanagement of the moneyed classes, is what passes for populism in our time. Although O’Donnell lost her bid for a senate seat, many other pseudo-populists have made their way to the corridors of power in Canada as in the United States. If their voices are not as loud and clear in Canada, the credit must go to the uncanny ability of Prime Minister Steven Harper to silence and censor members of his Party. But now that Rob Ford, the new mayor of Toronto, has been anointed by Don Cherry, Canada may not be totally immune to the overt nuttiness of American politics.

(2) Undermining the liberal separation of church and state.

It is not enough to demonize the liberal elite; the triumph of fake populism requires the destruction of the liberal aspects of our democracy— especially the separation of church and state. This strategy involves using religion and family values to demonize liberalism. The idea is to blur the distinction between freedom and license; in so doing, liberalism is painted as the ideology of the vulgar, licentious, sexually perverse, and atheistic. In this way, liberalism is presented as a threat to any decent, god-fearing society, while conservatism is the ally of the upright and devout. This strategy has been brilliantly documented by Thomas Frank in What’s the Matter with Kansas? (2004). Frank argues that in the United States, Christianity has been used surreptitiously to demonize liberals and further a corporate agenda. But a direct appeal to Christianity may not be as effective in Canada. Accordingly, the Prime Minister has relied on a more ingenious tactic. He has managed to convince a plurality of immigrant minorities—Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs—as well as Christians, to unite against a common enemy—namely, the wanton immorality of secular liberal society. In this way, liberalism, which provided the solution to the warring religious sects of Christendom in the seventeenth century, may ironically be defeated by the miracle that it made possible—namely, the existence of a plurality of religions living peacefully side by side. The strategy is predicated on oblivion to the indispensability of liberal principles in the proper functioning of our democracy—especially the principle of separation of religion from politics.

(3) Promoting a crude conception of representation.

Once the liberal elites are discredited, they can be replaced by the notion of anti-elitist ruling elites. The trick is to blur the distinction between the people and the ruling elite. On this view, representatives in a democracy are simply instruments of the will of the people, eager to do its bidding. In a recent discussion on elites and elitism on CBC radio (The Sunday Edition with Michael Enright, January 2, 2011), former Parliamentarian and Reform Party member, Deborah Grey, seemed genuinely surprised that she was counted as a member of the ruling elite. She believed that she was one of the people, representing the “gut wisdom” of the people. Like Sarah Palin, Christine O’Donnell, and other members of the pseudo-populist Tea Party movement in the United States, our neoconservative elites regard themselves as mere servants of the will of the people.

This spurious conception of representation allows unscrupulous elites to pretend that all limitations on their power are limitations on the power of the people. It explains how the Prime Minister of Canada can shamelessly declare that the judiciary should be accountable to his government, implying that the judiciary was just another pernicious liberal elite that must genuflect before the power of the people. In an important speech delivered in Parliament in December of 2010, Bob Rae beseeched the Prime Minister to refrain from indulging in loose rhetoric about making the courts “accountable” to the ruling party; he explained that interference with the judiciary by the party in power is the essence of dictatorship. In other words, dictatorship is parasitic on a crude or populist conception of representation. In contrast, a more sophisticated conception of representation regards the representative as someone entrusted with power by the majority of his or her constituents; someone trusted to exercise good judgment, guard the common good of the nation, and vote according to the dictates of his or her conscience.

(4) Introducing voodoo economics.

This strategy involves the dissemination of a voodoo brand of economics (also known as trickle-down economics) that promises to be the magic star-dust that will save the world. According to this economic “theory” the whole society benefits when the rich get richer. In the United States, this economic thinking has led to absurd policies such as huge tax cuts for the rich in times of crushing deficits, or launching irrelevant wars that augment corporate profits while killing and maiming the children of the poor. Supposedly, the economy is like a tide that raises all boats.

In truth, the economy is nothing like a tide. The metaphor feeds on the naïve view of democracy, which assumes that there are no conflicting interests. The interests of the few rich by the oxymoronic. This spurious conception of representation allows unscrupulous elites to pretend that all limitations on their power are limitations on the power of the people. It explains how the Prime Minister of Canada can shamelessly declare that are allegedly identical to the interests of the many poor, as if exorbitant rewards for the rich automatically make everyone better off. The reality is that in Canada as in the United Sates, the middle class is shrinking and collapsing into the ranks of the poor and unemployed; the contributions of the rich are inflated to astronomical proportions, while the contributions of ordinary folks are dramatically undervalued. The result is a growing deficit of social justice because the benefits and burdens of society are inequitably distributed with the rich getting the lion’s share, while the rest bear the heaviest burden.

(5) Cultivating the Illusion of meritocracy.

The success of the economic agenda of the global oligarchy and its fake populism depends heavily on exploiting the meritocratic conception of inequality on which liberal society is based. Liberalism was a successful revolution that replaced medieval inequalities based on birth with liberal inequalities based on merit. Unlike aristocracy, meritocracy regards life as a race in which status in society depends on talent, diligence, and hard work. Appealing to our deeply ingrained meritocratic sentiments, the new elites maintain that the rich deserve their riches as a reward for their skill, ingenuity, risk, sobriety, and diligence.

The assumption is that the wealthy are self-made men and women who have pulledthemselves up by their own bootstraps without any social assistance—as if theeducation, health, and other opportunities that enabled them to make somethingof themselves were of no account. In reality, all the athletic ability of aWayne Gretzky or the musical talent of an Oscar Peterson is of little worthwere it not for the opportunities to cultivate themand these opportunitiesare provided by the society in which one happens to be born. This is why thewealthy should not resent paying higher taxes. They owe it to the society thatmade their achievements possible.

When meritocracy replaced aristocracy, capitalism replaced mercantilism. The latter was an economic system based on power, privilege, and monopoly. In contrast, capitalism was based on opportunity, individual initiative, entrepreneurship, and competition. But the trickle down economic claptrap has endowed corporations with hitherto unprecedented power that surpasses the oligarchic monopolies of old. Society has become increasingly dependent on corporations that are “too big to fail” because their failure threatens the livelihoods of tens of thousands of people. But if corporations are too big to fail, then they are too big to exist in the first place. However, neoliberal and neoconservative governments are reluctant to reign in corporate conglomerates; they prefer to bail them out with taxpayer money.

In this way, an inverted form of no-fail capitalism has developed—a capitalism in which the profits are private and the losses are public. This inverted capitalism makes a mockery of the meritocratic principle that was supposed to justify the inequalities of the capitalist system in the first place. In light of this, it is uncertain how long the illusion of meritocracy that legitimizes the power of the wealthy can be sustained.

In conclusion, let me be totally clear—it is not democracy that our troops are fighting side by side with the Americans to defend—it is the global oligarchy that they are dying for. I have argued that this global oligarchy is sustained by a fake populism. Moreover, the strategies used by the peddlers of this fake populism depend on a naïve, unrealistic, anti-liberal, and anti-elitist conception of democracy that is neither historically nor philosophically tenable. Unless we divest ourselves of this untenable view of democracy, we will continue to fall prey to this fake populism and its consequences—destroying the liberal elements of our liberal democracy, expanding the power of the corporate elite, creating huge disparities between rich and poor, dismantling the social safety net, and inviting class conflict.