In “Consent Without Consent,” from Profit Over People, Professor Noam Chomsky offers clarity and insight into the workings of our modern democratic system (pages 43-44):

The issues were addressed 250 years ago by David Hume in a classic work. Hume was intrigued by “the easiness with which the many are governed by the few, the implicit submission with which men resign” their fate to their rulers. This he found surprising, because “force is always on the side of the governed.” IF people would realize that, they would rise up and overthrow the masters. He concluded that government is founded on control of opinion, a principle that “extends to the most despotic and most military governments, as well as to the most free and most popular.”

Hume surely underestimated the effectiveness of brute force. A more accurate version is that the more “free and popular” a government, the more it becomes necessary to rely on control of opinion to ensure submission to the rulers.

That people must submit is taken for granted pretty much across the spectrum. In a democracy, the governed have the right to consent, but nothing more than that. In the terminology of modern progressive thought, the population may be “spectators,” but not “participants,” apart from occasional choices among leaders representing authentic power. That is the political arena. The general population must be excluded entirely from the economic arena, where what happens in the society is largely determined. Here the public is to have no role, according to prevailing democratic theory.

Page 52:

Madison soon learn differently, as the “opulent minority” proceeded to use their newfound power much as Adam Smith had predicted a few years earlier. They were intent on pursuing what Smith called the “vile maxim” of the masters, “All for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” By 1792 Madison warned that the rising developmental capitalist state was “substituting the motive of private interest in place of public duty,” leading to a “a real domination of the few under an apparent liberty of the many.” He deplored “the daring depravity of the times,” as private powers “become the pretorian band of the government—at once its tools and its tyrant, bribed by its largesses, and overawing it by clamors and combinations.” They cast over society the shadow that we call “politics,” as John Dewey later commented. One of the major twentieth century philosophers and a leading figure of North American liberalism, Dewey emphasized that democracy has little content when big business rules the life of the country through its control of “the means of production, exchange, publicity, transportation and communication, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda.” He held further that in a free and democratic society, workers must be “the masters of their own industrial fate,” not tools rented by the employers, ideas that can be traced back to classical liberalism and the Enlightenment, and have constantly reappeared in popular struggle in the United States and elsewhere.

There have been many changes in the past 200 years, but Madison’s words of warning have only become more appropriate, taking new meaning with the establishment of great private tyrannies that were granted extraordinary powers early in this century, primarily by the courts. The theories devised to justify these “collectivist legal entities,” as they are sometimes called by legal historians, are based on ideas that also underlie fascism and Bolshevism: that organic entities have rights over and above those of persons. They receive ample “largesses” from the states they largely dominate, remaining both “tools and tyrants,” in Maidson’s phrase. And they have gained substantial control over the domestic and international economy as well as the informational and doctrinal systems, bringing to mind another of Madison’s concerns: that “a popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy, or perhaps both.”

Let’s now look at the doctrines that have been crafted to impose the modern forms of political democracy. They are expressed quite accurately in an important manual of the public relations industry by one of its leading figures, Edward Bernays. He opens by observing that “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society.” To carry out this essential task, “the intelligent minorities must make use of propaganda continuously and systematically,” because they alone “understand the mental processes and social patterns of the masses” and can “pull the wires which control the public mind.” Therefore, our “society has consented to permit free competition to be organized by leadership and propaganda,” another case of “consent without consent.” Propaganda provides the leadership with a mechanism “to mold the mind of the masses” so that “they will throw their newly gained strength in the desired direction.” The leadership can “regiment the public mind every bit as much as an army regiments the bodies of its soldiers.” This process of “engineering consent” is the very “essence of the democratic process,” Bernays wrote shortly before he was honored for his contributions by the American Psychological Association in 1949.