Formal democracy renders class domination invisible by dispersing it into a naturalized consensus.

Evidence

The same processes of masking-fragmenting-uniting, commented on before, are to be found in this process of securing the legitimacy and assent of the subordinated to their subordination. Here, in the structures of political representation and of “separate powers” and of liberties and freedoms, which lie at the core of bourgeois-liberal formal democracy, both as superstructures and as lived ideologies, the operation of one class upon another in shaping and producing consent (through the selective forms of social knowledge made available) is rendered invisible: this exercise of ideological class domination is dispersed through the fragmentary agencies of a myriad of individual wills and opinions, separate powers; this fragmentation of opinion is then reorganized into an imaginary coherence in the mystical unity of “the consensus,” into which free and sovereign individuals and their wills “spontaneously” flow. In this process, that consent-to-hegemony whose premises and preconditions are constantly structuring the sum of what individuals in society think, believe, and want, is represented, in appearance, as a freely given and “natural” coming together into a consensus which legitimates the exercise of power. — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 914

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: This is the core mechanism of Hall’s consensual hegemony: how liberal-democratic structures actively construct the appearance that domination is freely willed — dense and paradigm-shifting.
• XREF: connects to: Every democratic consensus is a provisional hegemony that entails exclusion — Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, 467