passage, though long, deserves to be quoted in full:
If the word 'democracy' is defined as the government of the people by
themselves, it expresses an absolute impossibility and cannot even
have a mere de facto existence in our time any more than in any other.
It is contradictory to say that the same persons can be, at the same time,
rulers and ruled, because, to^ use the Aristotelian phraseology, the same
being cannot be 'in act' and 'in potency' at the same time and in the
same circle of relations. The relationship of the ruler and ruled
necessitates the joint presence of two terms; there could be no ruled if
there were not also rulers, even though those be illegitimate and have
no other title to power than their own pretensions; but the great ability
of those who are in control in the modern world lies in making the
people believe that they are governing themselves, and the people are
the more inclined to believe this as they are flattered by it and as they
are in any case,incapable of sufficient reflection to see its
impossibility. It was to create this illusion that 'universal suffrage' was
invented. The law is supposed to be made by the opinion of the
majority but what is overlooked is that this opinion is something that
can very easily be guided and modified; it is always possible by means
of suitable suggestions to arouse in it currents moving in this or that
direction as desired.(2)
All these writers have taken pains to show that the belief that in
democracy sovereignty or the absolute and unrestricted right of
law-making belongs to the people, has no basis in fact. It has been
supposed that the law enacted by the majority vote of the
representatives of the people embodies the unanimous decision of
all the citizens of the state and that, therefore, it is based on justice.
This assumption is the chief cause of the decline of democracy in
the present day. This view has been supported by Mencken, as the
passage given below shows:
Under all such failures there is a greater one: the failure of man, the
most social of all the higher animals and by far the most intelligent, to
provide himself with anything even remotely describable as good
government. He has made many attempts in that direction, some of
them very ingenious and others sublimely heroic, but they have always
come to grief in the execution. The reason is surely not occult; it is to
be found in the abysmal difference between what government is in
theory and what it is in fact. In theory it is simply a device for supplying
a variable series of common needs, and the men constituting it (as all
ranks of them are so fond of saying) are only public servants; but in
Islam: A Challenge to Religion 215