The pretensions of the political elite

Sep 19, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

---

Kaieteur News – The conceit of the political class, especially its provincial offspring in Guyana, is the belief that the people are always wrong. Not sometimes, not occasionally, but always—perpetually mistaken, irredeemably benighted, and in need of correction by those self-anointed as the custodians of truth.

This conceit views the people as a crude mob, guided by instinct and appetite, incapable of sound judgment unless it coincides with the “enlightened” view of the elites. It is an old fable, retold in every democracy that degenerates into oligarchy, where the ballot is tolerated only if it sanctifies the designs of those who have already claimed the seat of power in their imaginations.

This presumption is not merely undemocratic; it is despotic in its marrow. Democracy rests on the axiom that the people, in their collective wisdom or folly, are sovereign. They may err, they may stumble, they may choose poorly, but their choice is legitimate because it is theirs.

To say otherwise is to discard the very premise of popular government and replace it with a clerical order of politicians, self-appointed high priests who alone possess the discernment to know right from wrong, progress from regression, justice from injustice. They posture as tribunes of the people while regarding the people as children who must be scolded, corrected, and if need be, punished.

Guyana has repeatedly paid the price of this arrogance. Every election cycle provides the same ritual. Ballots are counted, results declared, and the losing faction, unable to conceive of error in their own programme, declares the people mistaken. Worse, they declare the people’s choices the product of racism, clannishness, tribal backwardness. The electorate becomes not merely wrong but morally corrupt, guilty of some primordial sin that disqualifies their vote from legitimacy. It is a convenient fiction for those who cannot accept the humiliation of defeat, a story that translates democracy into mob rule.

The consequences are not academic. They are measured in the injuries of the beaten, the robbed, the stripped, in businesses burned to ash and livelihoods scattered like debris in the wake of riots. These are not accidents of passion or the collateral damage of democracy. They are the fruits of an elite contempt for democracy itself, the decision that the people’s voice may be disregarded when it does not harmonize with the chorus of the powerful. Looting and disorder become the substitute for persuasion, and intimidation the coin of political exchange. All of it carried out under the tattered banner of “democratic rights.”

The irony, of course, is that those who make the loudest claims to democracy are often its most eager assassins. In their mouths, the word is a costume—useful for performance, discarded in practice. They stand before microphones, hands on Constitutions, professing faith in the sovereignty of the people, even as they dismiss the people as ignorant villagers whose minds are clouded by insecurity and prejudice. It is a condescension so complete it cannot recognize itself. The people are wrong because they are the people. Only the elites – even the dog poor elites – can be right.

History mocks this conceit. The same arguments have been made in every country where oligarchs tremble before the verdict of the ballot. In the United States, in Europe, in Africa, the refrain is the same: the people have been duped, misled, corrupted by passions and fears. Yet the truth is simpler and more unflattering to the elites—they have failed to persuade. Their vision, so luminous in their own eyes, has not kindled light in the eyes of those they presume to lead. Rather than accept responsibility, they indict the electorate. The sermon is always the same: the boat gone over the falls because the passengers rowed in the wrong direction. Never mind that the captain refused to read the river.

What passes for political leadership in such conditions is less leadership than tantrum. Elections become exercises not in governance but in blame. The result is paralysis, a democracy hollowed of meaning, a republic in which the citizens are spectators at their own disenfranchisement. They are asked to vote, but only for the choices already deemed acceptable. If they stray, they are punished—first with slander, then with violence.

The villain in this story is not the people, and never was. It is the political class, those who claim to believe in democracy but recoil from its verdicts. Their allegiance is not to the people but to their own sense of entitlement, their belief that Guyana is theirs to govern by divine right, and that any deviation from their script is heresy. They mistake their ambition for destiny, their loss for injustice, their contempt for wisdom.

Democracy, if it is to mean anything at all, requires respect for the will of the people—not only when it flatters, but also when it offends. The alternative is not government by consent but by coercion, rule by the few masquerading as the many. To deny the people’s right to be wrong is to deny them the right to be free. And in that denial lies the seed of tyranny, watered daily by the tears of those who mistake themselves for gods.

---

• Democracy, political class, political elite, pretensions

---