Machiavelli and Democracy

These two different dispositions are found in every city: that the people are everywhere anxious not to be dominated or oppressed by the nobles, and the nobles are out to dominate and oppress the people. These opposed ambitions bring about one of three results; a principality, a free city, or anarchy.
When the nobles see that they cannot withstand the people, they start to increase the standing of one of their own numbers, and make him a prince in order to be able to achieve their own ends under his cloak. Similarly, the people start to increase one of their own and make him a prince in order to be protected by his own authority.
Machiavelli, The Prince

One might imagine the progressive increase of the people's power will inevitably lead to true democracy, but Machiavelli makes the important if obvious point:

The people are more honest in their intentions than the nobles, as the latter want to oppress the people, whereas the people only want not to be oppressed.
The nobles have more foresight and are more astute; they always act in time to safeguard their interests, and take sides with whom they expect to win.

And so ideally - for the nobles - the people think they are in power, as in a democracy, but the nobles, or aristocrats of worldly power, ensure that it is they who covertly maintain power, by secretly manipulating the democratic process, placing in power one of their whom the people imagine to be one of their own, and so "achieve their own ends under his cloak." A particularly crude example being the ecstatic foisting of the declared messianic figure of Barack Obama on the people as this wonderful antidote to that pleasingly obvious villain George Bush and his gang. Or prior to him for instance Tony Blair.

Naturally, a political or revolutionary body calling themselves "the People," or the Will of the People or some such- even if the people are unaware of this wonderful fact, need not be, and generally are not, in truth anything of the kind, but a new nobility of power, or, perhaps more likely, a tangential offshoot of some sector of the existing nobility. See the work of Anthony Sutton.
And while since the times of Machiavelli the people clearly did greatly grow in power, the tension between them and those who would oppress them is a perennial fact, of which the movements towards absolutism of the moment are obvious symptoms.

Follow-up post.