Bourgeois dictatorship.

Eugene Burdick’s novel The Ninth Wave describes an election campaign based on public demagogy and secret bargaining. And, somewhere in V.S. Naipaul’s India, an aging aristocrat gives his amused opinion of the democratic process. It is about choosing the less unscrupulous of the candidates. We know that party politics are a murky business, were money and power and privilege are the prizes. We know that elections are organized by salesmen. We know that the media have a huge influence on commodity choice. What we often forget, however, is that democracy is the rule of the propertied class.
A citizen of Athens, in the golden age of Pericles, owned land and slave labor. Twenty-five centuries later, citizenship has been extended to the propertyless. Workers, women and ethnic minorities have obtained the right to vote and to be elected. But the propertied class has kept the control of property. They still own the banks and the land and all the other means of production (persuasion). And this gives control of what is said and what is left unsaid, of what is done and what is left undone and, ultimately, of life and death on planet Earth.
The American republic of 1787 was founded on the edge of a continent whose native population could be driven off or killed. Land was up for grabbing. The French republic of 1792 was founded on the edge of a continent whose aristocracy and clergy could be driven off or killed. Land was up for grabbing. The natives of America could be managed by private enterprise and private gunmen, until the civil war, when the military took charge and emptied the last native territories. In France, expropriation was centralized was centralized from the very start. The republic had replaced the monarch and the royal domains became the property of the state, as did those of the church and of all aristocrats who fled abroad. The sale of ecclesiastic property in particular saved the revolutionary government from bankruptcy during the years of upheaval when tax collecting was difficult. It also helped the installation of a new propertied class loyal to the republic and to its institutions.
The American citizens stole the land themselves, gun in hand. In France, the new land owners had bought property stolen by the state. In the United-States, this only became the rule after the civil war. This original difference in the relationship between the state and the propertied class was a major factor in the subsequent evolution of the republics, up to their final convergence. The American republic was constructed by members of the propertied class at their convenience. The first French republic took hold of power and constructed a new propertied class, in place of the previous feudal hierarchy.
Members of the American ruling class saw themselves as masters of the republic. Members of the French ruling class saw themselves as servants of the republic. But the role of the state has evolved with time, on both sides of the Atlantic. Total war and state control of the economy has brought them closer. As the state concentrated power in the United States, so the propertied class concentrated wealth in France. The two countries are now the mirror image of each other.