Logically, DEMOCRACY opposes tyranny, but in fact it leads to it. That is to say: since its reaction is sentimental – otherwise it would be centripetal and would tend towards theocracy, the only guarantee of a realistic liberty – it is merely an extreme which, by its unrealistic negation of authority and competence, inevitably calls forth another extreme and a new authoritarian reaction, one which this time is authoritarian and tyrannical in its very principle. The democratic illusion appears above all in the following traits: in DEMOCRACY, truth amounts to the belief of the majority; it is the latter which practically speaking “creates” the truth; DEMOCRACY itself is true only insofar as, and as long as, the majority believes in it, and thus it carries in its breast the germs of its suicide. Authority, which one is obliged to tolerate on pain of anarchy, lives at the mercy of the electors, hence the impossibly of real government. The ideal of “liberty” makes a prisoner of the government, a prisoner constantly obliged to follow the interests of various pressure groups; the electoral campaigns themselves prove that the aspirants to authority must dupe the electors, and the means of this dupery are so vulgar and stupid and constitute such a degradation of the people that this alone should suffice to reduce the myth of modern DEMOCRACY to naught. This does not necessarily mean that no form of DEMOCRACY is possible; but then it is primarily a question of communities of limited size – especially nomadic ones – and also of an inwardly aristocratic and theocratic DEMOCRACY, and not of a secular egalitarianism imposed upon large sedentary populations. We may also stress the following: it can happen that a man is intelligent and competent, or that a minority is; but it cannot happen that the majority is intelligent and competent, or “more intelligent” or “more competent.” The adage vox populi vox Dei has no meaning except in a religious framework which confers a function of “medium” on the crowds; they then express themselves not by thought but by intuition and under the influence of Heaven, unless it is a matter of the competence pertaining to every sane-minded, God-fearing man, so that the feeling of the majority coincides in any case with what may be called “the good.” It is clear that a people as a collective vehicle of religion possesses a positive character – all religions testify to this – and is thus instinctively right in the face of pernicious and impious exceptions. A people is what it is, both in good and evil; it has not the virtues of the “centre,” but it may have those of the “totality,” on condition that the “centre” determine it. Besides, the word “people” itself admits of two meanings: it denotes either the majority, as distinguished from the intellectual and aristocratic elite, or the total or integral collectivity, comprising the majority and the elite at one and the same time; in this last sense, it is self-evident that the government – apart from its celestial origin – derives from the “people” itself and that the chivalric and sacerdotal elite are an expression of the popular genius. (GTUFS: TransfMan, Reflections on Ideological Sentimentalism)
In early ages, the “people” possessed in a large measure the naturally aristocratic character that flows from religion; as for the lower orders – made up of men who seek neither to control themselves nor a fortiori to rise above themselves – they could not determine . . . It is only DEMOCRACY that seeks, on the one hand, to assimilate the plebs to the people and, on the other hand, to reduce the latter to the former; it ennobles what is base and debases what is noble. (GTUFS: ChristIslam, On the Margin of Liturgical Improvisations)
Democracy is practically the tyranny of the majority; the white majority, in America, had no interest in the existence of the red minority, and therefore the army, which in certain cases should have defended the rights of the Indians – rights solemnly guaranteed by treaties – defended the interests of the whites contrary to these agreements. He who says DEMOCRACY, says demagogy; in such a climate a popular de facto criminality becomes a government de jure criminality, at least when the victim is situated outside the collectivity included in a given democratic legality. (GTUFS: HaveCenter, Message of a Vestimentary Art)