Resentment of economic inequality gets redirected against democracy itself.

Evidence

Pseudoconservatives sense an element of untruth in the idea of `their’ democratic government, and realize that they do not really determine their fate as social beings by going to the polls. … Resentment of this state of affairs, however, is not directed against the dangerous contradiction between economic inequality and formal political equality but against the democratic form as such. … Instead of trying to give to this form its adequate content, they want to do away with the form of democracy itself and to bring about the direct control of those whom they deem the most powerful anyway. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 443

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: A complete causal account of political misdirection: the real contradiction between economic inequality and formal political equality is the target that never gets named, while the democratic form itself absorbs the grievance.
• SEED: Essay angle: how anti-democratic movements recruit from a legitimate, accurate diagnosis of democracy’s partial reality, then misroute the anger toward the ballot box rather than the boardroom.
• XREF: Connects to Frankfurt School critiques of instrumental reason and, further afield, to theories of authoritarian populism fed by real democratic deficits. — connects to: Tahrir protesters cited economic concerns more than democracy as their motivation — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 239; Democracy’s classic perversion is the poor governing against the rich — Charles Tilly, Regimes and Repertoires, 76