An entertaining and timely piece from the New Yorker:
THE CASE AGAINST
DEMOCRACY: If most voters are uninformed, who should make decisions about the
public’s welfare? By Caleb Crain
“Roughly a third of
American voters think that the Marxist slogan “From each according to his
ability to each according to his need” appears in the Constitution. About as
many are incapable of naming even one of the three branches of the United
States government. Fewer than a quarter know who their senators are, and only
half are aware that their state has two of them.
Democracy is other
people, and the ignorance of the many has long galled the few, especially the
few who consider themselves intellectuals….
It would be much
safer, Plato thought, to entrust power to carefully educated guardians….
A more practical
suggestion came from J. S. Mill, in the nineteenth century: give extra votes to
citizens with university degrees or intellectually demanding jobs.”
E.B. Whites’ classic description of democracy published in
the year 1943:
http://www.newyorker.com/books/double-take/e-b-white-on-the-meaning-of-democracy
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”
“Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.”