Popular sovereignty is a fiction masking interest-group rule

Evidence

Such analysis tells a story of interest and pressure groups, AIPACs, neodynastic families, class interest, and much else of the same that determine not only policies but the very form of government. … In that system, there was no need whatever for an ideological doctrine of progress whose function is in part to justify what in the long run of human history are radical changes and continuous but highly disruptive reengineering projects of the social and economic orders. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 408

Categorization

• XREF: Echoes the interest-group accounts of American democracy in The Defeat of the Spanish Armada’s anti-progress arguments and standard political-science critiques of popular sovereignty. — connects to: Majority rule depends on citizens committing to the common good over self-interest — Jürgen Habermas, A New Structural Transformation of the…, 24