Re: Sheep shall safely graze
That behaviour is largely due to the sheer scale of things nowadays. Democracy, if seriously tried, can work on a scale of a few hundred or even a few thousand people. One hundred thousand... not so much. 50 million, forget it. As for 320 million, as in the USA... well, we've seen how that has gone.
What happens is that, the bigger the community to be ruled, the greater the power and wealth at the disposal of the rulers. In other words, the greater the temptation to ruthless, unscrupulous people. Moreover, the bigger the scale, the more complex the organization, and the more opportunities to cheat systematically. Hence the old saying that any organization is like a cesspool: the really big chunks float to the top. The bigger the cesspool, the bigger the chunks, which is why the USA and the EU have substantially bigger chunks than the UK (although ours are quite big enough to be going on with).
Moreover, the longer and tougher the road to leadership - the higher and greasier the pole to climb - the less likely it is that anyone who is in the least bit qualified to lead effectively (or even who has the slightest interest in doing so) will manage to finish the obstacle course and win election. So naturally we get what is observed: political leaders who spend most of their time hob-nobbing with the rich and powerful, soliciting "contributions", and doing favours on a "quid pro quo" basis. In what little time they have left they quaff spirituous beverages, consult their favourite astrologers, er, sorry, "think tank wonks", and attack defenceless countries to make themselves appear tough and give their citizens something to swagger about. Plato understood this, and explained it in "The Republic". Gore Vidal made the same point in his usual pithy way: "Any American who is prepared to run for president should automatically by definition be disqualified from ever doing so".
The whole political establishment is bankrupt. It's been a very long time since anybody designed a democratic system that was actually intended to work - the Swiss did a good job of it (surprise, surprise) a few centuries ago, and it's still working for them. In other countries, monarchies based on brute force were gradually diluted to avoid revolution, slowly adopting a few "democratic" features as protective coloration. The central focus of all those systems - whether in the USA, the UK, France or elsewhere - has always been to avoid any actual democracy like the plague. Just as long as the punters keep quiet and knuckle under...
Biting the hand that feeds IT
