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There are few power dynamics as enduring as ruling classes’ disdain for the governed. Whether in the polished salons of Western liberal democracies or the corridors of power in the Global South, elites consistently reveal their true view of the masses: not as sovereign citizens but as irritants, dependents, or vermin to be managed, mocked, or suppressed.

This contempt is not mere rhetorical flourish; it exposes the brittle foundations of oligarchical rule in an era when “creative minorities” – to borrow from elite theory traditions – have ossified into self-perpetuating dominant majorities, lacking the legitimacy that once sustained their predecessors.

Elite contempt is doctrinal, not an aberration

But that is only the thin end of a reactionary wedge of attitudes that are considered normal in elite-democratic theorising: that the masses of people are basically irrational, stupid, emotionally-driven, and have no idea about their own interests. They are mob-like and need to be controlled. And that’s considered a good thing because elites and their paid for experts do know everything and must therefore lead. 

The contempt of ruling elites for the governed is doctrinal, elite commonsense. Classical elite theory, democratic realism, liberal scepticism of mass politics, and Nietzschean philosophy supply the legitimacy and intellectual scaffolding for reaction. Societies are and must be ruled by organised minorities – what Gaetano Mosca termed the “ruling class” and Vilfredo Pareto the “governing elite”. 

Democratic theorists who prize elite guidance to compensate for mass ignorance reinforce this worldview by cataloguing the vices of the masses. Walter Lippmann, in Public Opinion (1922), portrayed the public as incapable of mastering complex realities.

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“The world that we [elites] have to deal with politically,” he wrote, “is out of reach, out of sight, out of mind [of mere masses].” Citizens navigate life through crude simplifications, “stereotypes” and “pictures in their heads,” requiring elites to manufacture consent through informed insiders and propaganda-like guidance. Direct democracy was a dangerous fiction; the public needed a secular priesthood with the technical expertise to mediate between masses and governments.

Joseph Schumpeter echoed this in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), reducing democracy to a competitive struggle among elites for the people’s vote. The........

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