Chomsky

 

“What’s argued by people like Walter Lippmann and the whole rest of this main tradition of “democratic” thinkers in the West—that democracy requires a class of elites to manage decision-making and “manufacture” the general population’s consent for policies that are supposedly beyond their capacity to develop and decide on themselves.”

Noam Chomsky

"Chomsky points out that his insight into this was influenced by Mikhail Bakunin's suspicion and prediction of a rising class of bureaucratic functionaries, managers, and professionals (what he called the bureaucratic class, regime of savants and experts, the "worst of all" as they claim to do so in the name of the people). This class would go, as he suspected, one of two ways: either they align themselves with capitalist ruling interests and become the bureaucratic administrators of government and corporations, like the US and Germany, or they ride the wave of revolutionary fervor to seize state power, and use the state machinery to whip the population into a labor army and organize society like a barracks, or labor dormitory (such as Lenin's vanguard party of 'professional' revolutionaries, which he got more from tradition of conspiracy inspired Babeuf/Blanqui/Tkachev and by Jacobin dictatorship and terror than anything Marx said)''.