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Donald Trump and the power of the moneyed elite is ignored by Hume. Photograph: Kevin Lamarque/Reuters

If you want to understand the opportunism and shallowness of so much English commentary, look at how former Marxist-Leninists have prospered. On Radio 4s Moral Maze or in the rightwing press the same names reappear: Claire Fox, Frank Furedi, Brendan ONeill and Mick Hume. Their audience is not told they were members of the Revolutionary Communist party, which reconstituted itself as Spiked magazine, or that their careers provide a parable of modern media cynicism.

As Leninists they were the most ultra of the ultra-left, the type who would argue that sanctions against apartheid were a bourgeois compromise, or more funds for the NHS were palliatives that postponed the day of revolution. By the 1990s, they realised that socialism was a dead end. They grasped something else: if they abandoned their calls for revolution, but kept their denunciations of environmentalism, liberal elitism and help for the victims of genocide, they would never want for media work.

The BBC is by no means the ethical institution it professes to be. The majority of its serious discussions are mere entertainment. It seeks out commentators prepared to stop the fickle audience changing channels by reducing arguments to absurdity. The transformed Revolutionary Communist party would do or say anything in its search for attention. So low did its journal Living Marxism sink, it engaged in the Holocaust denial of the 1990s by claiming that pictures of the Serb concentration camps for Bosnian Muslims were manufactured by journalists spreading false accusations of war crimes against innocent militiamen. The BBC liked the talent it saw on offer and held out its clammy hand. For its part, the rightwing press realised that former far leftists willing to strip their attacks on liberalism and social democracy of any trace of leftismwere Tories in everything but name. And useful Tories at that. Torieswho could defend privilege andthe abuse of power in vaguely radical language.

Mick Hume has now produced a defence of democracy against the attacks of the establishment. As the unwitting reader may buy it by mistake, I will explain what Hume does not cover. Democracy is indeed beleaguered. Fifty three per cent of the planets population some 3.97 billion people are controlled by tyrants, absolute monarchs, military juntas and theocrats. Hume has so little interest inthe corruption and injustice they must endure, he fails to acknowledge their existence.

In Russia, the Middle East and the west, meanwhile, the global elite of wealth is producing a global argument against equality, including political equality. Look to the American and European right and you see Donald Trump, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orban and Nigel Farage lining up with the Corbynista far left to applaud Vladimir Putin. The Christian equivalents of Muslim Brotherhood preachers among their ranks admire Putin for stamping down on womens and gay rights. Agnostic members of the super-rich, by contrast, have turned on democracy because it gives the poor and the female the power to limit the wealthy. The vast increase in welfare beneficiaries and the extension of the franchise to women two constituencies that are notoriously tough for libertarians have rendered the notion of capitalist democracy into an oxymoron, the Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel explained a few years ago.

Any writer on the threats to democracy should wonder how extravagantly unequal societies can sustain an egalitarian political system. Any writer with a knowledge of historyshould know that anti-democratic theories can turn into anti-democratic practice. In North Carolina, for example, Republicans engaged in what Americans euphemistically call voter suppression to stop poor blacksreaching the polls. When these failed, they attempted to strip the newly elected Democrat governor of hispowers.

Hume has not the sense of duty to his readers or what passes for his intellect to deal with the power of the moneyed elite Donald Trump so conspicuously represents. Instead he flags himself as open to offers from the BBC and rightwing press by telling us that it is the beaten opponents of Trump and of Brexit who are the real elite, whose anti-democratic illegitimacy must be exposed and denounced. He has produced a Daily Mail-style liberals are the enemies of the people op-ed, and extended it to book length.

I should, I suppose, give him a lesson on basic political philosophy. I doubt he will understand it, but let me try. Democracies consist of competing elites. But the elite that always matters is always the elite in power. In Britains case it is the pro-Brexit elite. In the case of the United States it is the Trump presidency and the Republican Congress. Trying to write an anti-elitist defence of the elite in power is to borrow Peter Thiels word oxymoronic. Moronically oxymoronic, in fact.

Democracy comes in many forms. By one reading the pre-civil war United States was democratic when the white majority enslaved the black minority in North Carolina and across the south. Modern democracies, in their elitist decadence, include protections against the tyranny of the majority, the most essential of which is the right to argue against the rulers of the day without becoming an enemy of the people.

That Hume knows nothing of this and continues to insist opposition is elitism proves that you can take the boy out of the Marxist-Leninist party but you cannot take the Marxist-Leninist party out of the boy.

Revolting!How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What Theyre Afraid Of by Mick Hume is published by Harper Collins (6.99). To order a copy for 5.94 go tobookshop.theguardian.comor call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over 10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of 1.99

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Revolting! by Mick Hume review defence of a far-right democracy - The Guardian