Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose. The good work which our philological department has done in the corruption of human language makes if unnecessary to warn you that they must never be allowed to give this word a clear and definable meaning. They won't. It will never occur to them that Democracy is properly the name of a political system, even of a system of voting, and that this has only the most remote and tenuous connection with what you are trying to sell them. Nor, of course, must they ever be allowed to raise Aristotle's question: whether 'democratic behaviour means the behaviour the democracies like or the behaviour that will preserve a democracy. For if they did, it could hardly fail to occur to them that these need not be the same.
You are to use the word purely as an incantation; if you like, purely for its selling power. It is a name they venerate.
C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape letters (1942), 197
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