In order for any country to be ruled by a special elite group of select people, that are not held accountable to all the relevant laws that are propagated to the people in whole, and to get away with such, necessitates strategic initiatives to protect and to augment the power of those elite people, against the population in whole. First, quite obviously, those in power, are quick to make sure that the guns and policing force of the state are under their sure hands; for those with the guns at their beck and call, need not be overly worry about certain upsetting legislative acts so passed, or inconvenient judicial decisions so reached, if the implementation of any of these, are effectively stymied by the strength of the policing arm of the state.
So too, before it even gets to the point, where the people rise up in unity, to assert their unalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; those repressive governments, make it their point to infiltrate into the people's business by placing agents within their groups, to monitor and then report all actionable information back to those corrupt rulers, as well as to threaten or to compromise such as is possible, or to provide bribes or their equivalency to those that lust for money, or, on the other hand, to assert immense pressure to fire those that are especially annoying from their jobs; while also, again and again, using every psychological strategy proven to be effective, to negate, to raise suspicions of, and to seed dissent within the ranks of those that are trying to unite under one grand purpose for the betterment of the people, as a whole.
That is to say, no group that is uniting for the betterment of the people is a group that has not already been infiltrated by dastardly agents of the state to do everything within their power to see that the group ends up not being effective in its stated mission. Such an attack upon groups is done on a multi-front basis, of which one of the objectives is to successfully foment controversy and argument between the top leaders of these groups, so that, they effectively undercut one another; while another effective strategy, is to make sure that disparate elements that do not normally unite, become aware of that salient fact, by appealing to known historic racial stereotypes, to each person's country of origin, to their difference in language, or creed, or economic status, or their historical place in the pecking order.
All of this is of vital importance for those that are the rulers of the country, because being outnumbered, they know that they can never maintain their status in a country that is truly open and democratic, unless they fix the system to serve their purposes and divide those that can be divided, while bribing those that can be bribed, and compromising all those that can be compromised, so that each person sees themselves as individuals, and never as a group united under the flag of a noble purpose.
This thus signifies that the only way that the people can truly have a government of, by, and for the people is for those people to be truthful and transparent one with another, in which, they stay focused upon their overriding objective and further that they have the courage to maintain the course, no matter the cost, because doing what is right, can never be bought, for it is above all, priceless.