democracy and why we shouldn’t be surprised.
Democracy was not loved by the great philosophers of classical Greece and was very grudgingly granted by the nations of Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries. It came about by slow increments which both reflected as much the elite's unwillingness to grant powers to the great uneducated and unwashed as it did an awareness of its dangers and weaknesses. Democracy is fraught with danger from the contrasting tyrannies of the over-powerful minority or the domineering majority, but most of all the fear of democracy appears most keenly in the tendency of the mass of citizens to be easily persuaded. From Plato’s Ship of Fools to Madison’s assertion that democracies tend to first give way to demagogues then to mob rule and finally to tyranny[4] or to Churchill’s observation that “The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Churchill’s patronising remark is unfortunately borne out in the multiple occasions when the turkeys have voted for an early Christmas. Not least the Brexit referendum which was followed in the days after the result by a spike in Google requests for an answer to ‘What is the EU?’[5]
Interpretations and debates around the US Constitution and federalism
'Madison had tried to protect us from as he was drafting the U.S. Constitution. The Framers of the Constitution were excellent social psychologists. They knew that democracy had an Achilles’ heel because it depended on the collective judgment of the people, and democratic communities are subject to “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions.” The key to designing a sustainable republic, therefore, was to build in mechanisms to slow things down, cool passions, require compromise, and give leaders some insulation from the mania of the moment while still holding them accountable to the people periodically, on Election Day.'
(This article appears in the May 2022 print edition with the headline “After Babel.” The Atlantic Jonathan Haidt )
The failings of democracy were well understood by the founding fathers who were prescient when they surrounded the presidency with the system of checks and balances, which attests to their expectation that Trump and men like him, will be inevitable. They were also careful to limit the extent to which a popular election would hold sway in the constitution by establishing undemocratic features such as the electoral college, no direct elections to the Senate (until 1910) as well as the highly disproportional representation in the Senate by state and not population. The founder's fear of popular elections might seem justified in light of the record of those men who have thus far been elected to America’s highest office, which contains many who were dull witted by drink or nature, lacking much obvious ability, liars, cheats and the downright villainous. That Trump has been elected twice should therefore come as no surprise. The well-known observation by H L Menkin puts it rather well. In 1920 Menkin noted:
"As democracy is perfected, the office of the President represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day, the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last, and the White House will be occupied by a complete moron."