200+ Academic Citations

Bad
Democracy
The Framers of the US Constitution
distrusted democracies. Commenting on
the dangers of assemblies, James Madison
famously opined that “had every Athenian
citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian
assembly would still have been a mob.” He
felt that governments needed some shelter
from the impetuous passions and partisan
anger of the people. Without protections,
he felt, democracies were “as short in their
lives, as they have been violent in their
deaths.”

As such, the word ‘democracy’ is absent in

both the Constitution and the Declaration
of Independence. Though the former opens
with the phrase “We the People” it quickly
enumerates the numerous ways in which
the citizens are removed from the inner
stuffing of government (indirect and
infrequent elections, secret committtees,
life-time terms for justices, etc.) Ironically,
Constitutions, by their very nature, are anti-
democratic. 
The Framers’ concern with a government
run by the people found its roots with
Aristotle who viewed democracy as one of
the three most corrupt forms of
government (along with tyrany and
oligarchy). A collector of 153 ancient
consitutions, Aristotle concluded that
democracies are prone to mob rule,
demagoguery, and capture by the wealthy.

Historical events support Aristotle’s claims.

Hitler, Mussolini, Fujimoro, Hugo Chavez
etc. were elected into office in free and fair
elections. And Socrates was famously put to
death by the people for speaking out
against the democratic leaders of his time.

In the US, the embrace of democracy

continues to soar despite a series of
misteps. In the 1820s, a vast increase in
citizen participation and suffrage combined
with more direct elections of Presidents. As
a result, populist firebrand and war hero
Andrew Jackson won office and tumult
ensued. And since the 1820s, slander,
boastful campaigning and attack ads have
become the norm.

More recently, referendum mania in

California quickly drove the state bankrupt.
Right to Work laws, which gut union power,
are more likely to pass when the debate and
decisionmaking is opened more broadly to
union membership. And increased
‘democratic’ transparency of legislatures (a
phenomenon of the 1970s) has led to 
capture, a soaring rise in lobbying, and a
further explosion in campaign finance and
attack ads.

To the extent that they drew on classical

governments for inspiration or illustration,
the Founders much preferred republican
Rome (or even timocratic Sparta) to
Athenian democracy. Their hero
Montesquieu whose book the Spirit of the
Laws revolutionized political philosophy. It
focused on the separation of powers, where
the most important separation was not
between the executive, legislative or
judicial branches, but from the people
themselves.

Montesquieu wrote “The people should not

enter the government except to choose
their representatives.” He came to these
conclusions based on history, writing “A
great vice in most ancient republics was
that the people had the right to make
resolutions for action, resolutions which
required some execution, which altogether
exceeds the people’s capacity.”

Like others, he noted that to this problem of

overt democracy is our seemingly blinkered
embrace of the wisdom of crowds and good
will of ‘the people.’

By James D’Angelo – March 22, 2022

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    

Citations
Below, we collect citations showing the evolution of
the peception of democracy – from something to be
avoided and even abhorred, to a panacea form of
government. At the same time, our understanding of
the benefits of a republic has diminished. This can be
seen in the wild changes of fortune between the two
words.

1
Real liberty is neither found in despotism
or the extremes of democracy, but in moderate
governments.

Alexander Hamilton 1787

Constitutional Convention

2
Aristotle suggested that when you have
voting and you have elections, you don’t end up
with the rule of the middle class or the rule of
the poor, you end up with the rule of the rich.

Loren J. Samons II 2016

Boston University Rhett Talks

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 3
We are faced with a stark choice,
democracy or ecological survival.

Mathew Humphrey 2007

Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory
(Climate)

Rauch & La Raja 2019 - Too Much Democracy 4

Is Bad for Democracy

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 5
Paradoxically, democratic fundamentalism
– the insistence that the remedy for whatever
ails democracy must always be more democracy
– is dangerously undemocratic.

Jonathan Rauch & Ray La Raja 2019

Too Much Democracy Is Bad for Democracy

6
[The authors of the Constitution] regarded
the prospect of rule by the people as
tantamount to anarchy.

Virginia DeJohn Anderson 2019

The Problem of Democracy (New York Times)

7
A Reuters analysis released last week
shows that state court justices who are elected
uphold more than twice as many death
sentences as justices who are appointed.

Equal Justice Initiative 2014

Elected Judges Uphold More Death Sentences

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Equal Justice Initiative 2014 - Elected Judges 8

9
The democratic idealists of practically all
schools of thought have managed to remain
remarkably oblivious to the obvious facts.

Reinhold Niebuhr, 1944

The Children of Light and the Children of
Darkness

1
Democracy has never been and never can
be so durable as Aristocracy or Monarchy. But
while it lasts it is more bloody than either.

John Adams 1814

Letter to John Taylor

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 1
In Yugoslavia, democracy became the tool
of mass murder. In Rwanda, a Western-backed
multiparty election separated out the tribes and
contributed to genocide.

Stephen S. Rosenfeld 1997

Democracy: The Down Side

Google Ngram 2021 - Democracy vs. Republic 1

The Google Ngram Viewer or Google Books Ngram Viewer is an online search engine that charts the

frequencies of any set of search strings using a yearly count of n-grams found in sources printed

between 1500 and 2019.

1
One reason why democracy tends to
produce decent outcomes is that educated, elite
political insiders tend to control the political
parties and the bureaucracy. To a significant
extent, these elites prevent the people from
simply getting what they want.

Jason Brennan 2016

What History Teaches Us About Demagogues

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 1
Small-d democratic-citizen participation
has led to profoundly regressive outcomes.

Annie Lowrey 2022

Four Years Among the NIMBYs

1
Expansion of the number of voters, in
effect, tended to empower rather than diminish
factional influence precisely because the
electorate became so vast that only those who
had the time, money, and interest to organize it
could gain power.

Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen 2019

Renovating Democracy


Bartels & Achen 2016 - Democracy for Realists 1

1
In short, since each successive fiscal fix at
the ballot box was short-term and piecemeal,
direct democracy (via referendums and
initiatives) deepened the dysfunction of state
government instead of improving the situation.

Nathan Gardels & Nicolas Berggruen 2019

Renovating Democracy

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 1
Of course, every student of political
science knows that the American system of
government codified in the United States
Constitution is not actually a “democracy” as
that term was defined in the eighteenth century.
In fact, most of the American Founders
considered “pure” democracy like that practiced
in ancient Athens – where the people ruled
themselves directly through votes in a popular
assembly – to be a particularly unstable and
dangerous form of government.

Loren J. Samons II 2007

What’s Wrong with Democracy?

1
Rather than being the curb on elites that
they were supposed to be, ballot initiatives
(direct democracy) have become a tool of
special interests, with lobbyists and extremists
bankrolling laws that are often bewildering in
their complexity and obscure in their
ramifications.

Economist 2011
The Perils of Extreme Democracy


Bruce Thornton 2014 - Democracy’s Dangers 2
and Discontents

2
Our chief danger arises from the
democratic parts of our constitutions. It is a
maxim which I hold incontrovertible, that the
powers of government exercised by the people
swallows up the other branches. None of the
constitutions have provided sufficient checks
against the democracy.

Edmund Randolph 1787

Constitutional Convention

NOTE: As Michael Klarman writes “The delegates

assembled at the Philadelphia convention in
May of 1787 mostly agreed with this assessment
of Governor Edmund Randolph.”

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 2
Making and enjoying money was never
enough for Fred Koch, as it would not be enough
for the son he groomed to be his successor. He
had to have things his way. In 1958, after his
victory against Universal Oil, Fred co-led a
referendum drive to alter the state constitution
in order to make it harder for unions to take root
in Kansas. Fred was a passionate advocate of so-
called right-to-work laws.

Nancy MacLean 2017

Charles Koch, the Cato Institute, and the
Makings of a Right-Wing Empire

NOTE: The Kochs have long used increases in

democracy as a weapon to destroy unions and
secure legislative advantages. In this single 1958
example there are two uses of such increases. 1.
The Kochs put forth a referendum on unions.
Often viewed as democratic time bombs (and
with a long history of abysmal failure),
referendums and initiatives are decided
democratically. They allow the people to decide
legislative proposals in a special vote and bypass
the legislature entirely. Scholars now understand
that referendums are elitist tools - they are
expensive to set up and because the succeeding
public discourse is controlled via expensive TV
ads, they lower the bar of understanding and
engagement. Once the 1958 referendum was
approved for a public vote, the Kochs flooded
the airwaves with biased and misleading ads. 2.
The very concept of right-to-work is a seizmic
increase in democracy with respect to union
decision making. It is akin to a referendum,
except even more insidious and surefure with
respect to destroying unions. The key
component of right-to-work legislation is the
individual choice that each union member has to
pay dues, which - from everything we know
about collective action - assures that no dues
will be collected. In a similar fashion if
individuals were able to choose whether or not
to pay taxes, there would be no government and
full anarchy. Individually no one wants to pay
dues, and the very thought that others will shirk
leads to shirking en masse. These are just two of
the many ways the Kochs have undermined
government by employing increases in
democratic choice.


 Economist 2011 - The Perils of Extreme 2
Democracy

2
How and why money should be so
powerful in a democracy where each person has
a vote and most voters, by definition, are not in
the 1 percent has remained a mystery.

Joseph Stiglitz 2012

The Price of Inequality

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 2
The great body of the people are without
virtue and are not governed by any internal
restraints of conscience.

Rufus King 1787

Constitutional Convention

2
Historians who wrote about democracy
into the middle of the 19th century almost never
said anything good about it, including the
Athenians themselves, who said almost nothing
good whatsoever about their own form of
government. And yet, we were holding it up as a
model.

Loren J. Samons II 2016

Pericles of Athens and the Dangers of
Democracy

2
When you start looking at the history of
Athenian democracy, you find all kinds of
terrible problems. Athenian democracy didn’t
even last for 200 years. And in those 200 years, it
suffered two oligarchic revolutions.

Loren J. Samons II 2016

Pericles of Athens and the Dangers of
Democracy


 Pericles of Athens and the Dangers o

Loren J. Samons II 2016 - What is Wrong with 2

Democracy?

2
The evils we experience flow from the
excess of democracy. The people do not want
virtue, but are the dupes of pretended patriots.
In Massts. it had been fully confirmed by
experience that they are daily misled into the
most baneful measures and opinions by the
false reports circulated by designing men, and
which no one on the spot can refute.

Rep Elbridge Gerry 1787

Constitutional Convention

3
It is admitted that you cannot have a good
executive upon a democratic plan.

Alexander Hamilton 1787

Constitutional Convention

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 3
But, in the United States, the majority,
which often has the tastes and instincts of a
despot, still lacks the most advanced
instruments of tyranny.

Alexis De Tocqueville 1835

Democracy in America

3
Because of the asymmetry of time and
resources, elections are dominated by the
organized and the moneyed who are then
chosen to govern. Elections even favor the rise
of aristocracy.

Ganesh Sitaraman 2019

Renovating Democracy

3
But the people are gradually ripening in
their opinions of government — they begin to be
tired of an excess of democracy — and what
even is the Virginia plan, but pork still, with a
little change of the sauce.

Alexander Hamilton 1787

Constitutional Convention

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 Yascha Mounk 2018 - Is More Democracy 3
Better Democracy?

3
It must ever be remembered that the Mob
is a Part of the People, and I begin to fear the
most influential Part. The Mob has established
every Monarchy upon Earth – The Mob has
ultimately over thrown every free Republick…
The Mob must ever be in the Power of
Government – Government never in the Power
of the Mob.

John Adams 1795

Letter to John Quincy Adams

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 3
Liberal democracy, as it has developed in
recent decades, shares a number of alarming
features with communism. Both are utopian and
look forward to “an end of history” where their
systems will prevail as a permanent status quo.
Both are historicist and insist that history is
inevitably moving in their directions. Both
therefore require that all social institutions—
family, churches, private associations—must
conform to liberal-democratic rules in their
internal functioning. Because that is not so at
present, both are devoted to social
engineering to bring about this
transformation. And because such engineering
is naturally resisted, albeit slowly and in a
confused way, both are engaged in a never-
ending struggle against enemies of society
(superstition, tradition, the past, intolerance,
racism, xenophobia, bigotry, etc., etc.) In short,
like Marxism before it, liberal democracy is
becoming an all-encompassing ideology that,
behind a veil of tolerance, brooks little or no
disagreement.

John O’Sullivan 2019

Foreword - Demon in Democracy

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 3
The aristocratic body [the Senate], should
be as independent & as firm as the democratic
[the House]. If the members of it are to revert to
a dependence on the democratic choice, the
democratic scale will preponderate. All the
guards contrived by America have not restrained
the Senatorial branches of the Legislatures from
a servile complaisance to the democratic. If the
2d. branch is to be dependent we are better
without it. To make it independent, it should be
for life. It will then do wrong, it will be said... The
mode of appointing the 2d. branch tended he
was sure to defeat the object of it. What is this
object? to check the precipitation,
changeableness, and excesses of the first
branch. Every man of observation had seen in
the democratic branches of the State
Legislatures, precipitation — in Congress
changeableness in every department excesses
agst. personal liberty private property &
personal safety.

Gouverneur Morris 1787

Constitutional Convention

NOTE: At the time Morris viewed the Senate as

the aristocratic body, because it would not be
subject to election by the general public. Instead
it would be chosen by the state legisalures.
Interestingly, Morris is also the author of the
preamble of the Constitution, which begins with
the celebrated words “We the People.”

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 3
The defenders of every kind of regime
claim that it is a democracy, and fear that they
might have to stop using the word if it were tied
down to any one meaning.

George Orwell 1946

Meaningless Words

Jason Brennan 2016 - Against Democracy 3

4
When a term has become so universally
sanctified as “democracy” now is, I begin to
wonder whether it means anything, in meaning
too many things.

T.S. Eliot 1940

Democracy in Translation

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 4
Today, a new form of government is
sweeping across America: the initiative
campaign, available in half the states and
hundreds of cities. Where once most state laws
were passed by legislatures, now voters decide
directly on such explosive issues as medical
marijuana, affirmative action, casino gambling,
assisted suicide, and human rights through a
new form of “direct democracy,” the very form
of government the Founders feared most. The
initiative process, ostensibly driven by public
opinion, is, in reality, manipulated by moneyed
interests, often funded by out-of-state
millionaires pursuing their own agendas on a
new frontier of American politics operating
virtually without public scrutiny.

David Broder 2000

Democracy Derailed - Initiative Campaigns
and the Power of Money

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 4
According to Tocqueville, the “greatest
complaint against democratic government... is
not... its weakness, but rather its irresistible
strength. What I find most repulsive in America
is not the extreme freedom reigning there but
the shortage of guarantees against tyranny”
(DIM, 252). The tyranny to which Tocqueville
refers is not the tyranny of aristocracy,
monarchy, or oligarchy, but the tyranny of the
majority, a tyranny of the people.

Khalil M. Habib 2011

Machiavelli and Tocqueville on Majority
Tyranny

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 4
A pure democracy…can admit of no cure
for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion
or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by a
majority of the whole… and there is nothing to
check the inducements to sacrifice the weaker
party, or an obnoxious individual. Hence it is,
that such democracies have ever been
spectacles of turbulence and contention; have
ever been found incompatible with personal
security, or the rights of property; and have, in
general, been as short in their lives, as they have
been violent in their deaths.

James Madison 1788

Federalist 10

Note:

“For all the veneration of the ‘people,’ [to the

Framers] the word ‘democracy’ retained an
unequivocally negative connotation.” - Jill
Lepore 2018

In the Federalist papers, ‘democracy’ was used

as something to contrast their government to.
Not once do they claim they are constructing a
democracy and they often make reference to
how democracies are easily captured by special
interests and demagogues and lead to their own
forms of tyranny.


 4
Trial judges hand out more prison and jail
time to defendants just before they come up for
reelection...“No other nation in the world [elects
judges],” said former U.S. Supreme Court Justice
Sandra Day O’Conner, “because they realize
you’re not going to get fair and impartial judges
that way.”

Gary Hunter 2009

Elected Judges More Punitive Just Before
Elections

Gus D’Angelo 2008 - Nightmare of Ballot 4

Initiatives

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 4
Nothing but a permanent body can check
the imprudence of democracy. Their turbulent
and uncontrouling disposition requires checks.

Alexander Hamilton 1787

Constitutional Convention

4
The democratic idealists of practically all
schools of thought have managed to remain
remarkably oblivious to the obvious facts.

Reinhold Niebuhr 1944

The Children of Light and the Children of
Darkness

4
After all, direct democracy had been
“practised in the free states of antiquity; and
was the cause of innumerable evils. “To avoid
these evils,” [Noah Webster] asserted [in 1787] ,
“the moderns have invented the doctrine of
representation, which seems to be the
perfection of human government. The Romans’
ignorance of that doctrine “exposed their
government to frequent convulsions, and to
capricious measures,” and much the same could
be said for the Greeks ¬– for “pure democracy”
is utterly “inconsistent with the peace of society,
and the rights of freemen.”

Paul Rahe 1992

Republics Ancient and Modern
[referencing the Constitutional Convention]

Bertrand Russell 1953 - What Is Democracy? 4

5
Democracy does not mean and cannot
mean that the people actually rule in any
obvious sense of the terms ‘people’ and ‘rule.’
Democracy means only that the people have the
opportunity of accepting or refusing the men
who are to rule them.

Joseph Schumpeter 1942

Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy

5
The people should have as little to do as
may be about the government. They lack
information and are constantly liable to be
misled.

Rep Roger Sherman 1787

Constitutional Convention

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 5
Remember Democracy never lasts long. It
soon wastes exhausts and murders itself. There
never was a Democracy yet, that did not commit
suicide.

John Adams 1814

Letter to John Taylor

Is There Something Wrong With …

New York Times 2018 - Is There Something 5

Wrong With Democracy?
Note: The journalists Max Fisher and Amanda Taub dive into this
quesiton without once acknowleding the rich history of scholars
who questions democracy in general and its tendency toward
demagoguery. Like many journalists they assume (or sell the
notion that) democracy is purely good.

5
Hitler and Mussolini each came to power
through democracy.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment?


 5
James Madison, the father of the
Constitution, thought that “the people could not
be trusted to intelligently rule themselves” (p.
4). Klarman urges that committed to this belief,
the framers undertook a kind of coup, and it was
anything but a democratic one. The framers
believed in “the natural aristocracy of virtue,
talent, and education – men like themselves” (p.
600). They were affirmatively hostile to
democracy (p. 606). Their invocation of popular
sovereignty was strategic, not sincere.

Cass Sunstein 2016

Were the Framers Democrats?

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 5
After Annapolis, Madison went home to
Virginia and resumed his course of study. In April
of 1787, he drafted an essay called “Vices of the
Political System of the United States.” It took the
form of a list of eleven deficiencies, beginning
with “1. Failure of the States to comply with the
Constitutional requisitions… 2. Encroachments
by the States on the federal authority… 3.
Violations of the law of nations and of treaties.”
And it closed with a list of causes for these vices,
which he located primarily “in the people
themselves.” By this last he meant the danger
that a majority posed to a minority: “In
republican Government the majority however
composed, ultimately give the law. Whenever
therefore an apparent interest or common
passion unites a majority what is to restrain
them from unjust violations of the rights and
interests of the minority, or of individuals?”

Jill Lepore 2018

These Truths


 5
Mounting evidence suggests that
elections, even “free and fair” ones, do not
elevate to office individuals who are especially
responsive to the political aspirations and
expectations of their constituents. Moreover,
democratic governments seem decreasingly
adept at preventing society’s wealthiest
members from wielding excessive influence over
law and policy making.

John P. McCormick 2011

Machiavellian Democracy

0:00

Dennis Dalton 2014 - Plato’s Antipathy for 5

Democracy


 5
The vote has not always served as the
defining feature of democracy. As strange as it
may seem to moderns, Aristotle considered
election to be an oligarchic or aristocratic
element in government. As Aristotle noticed,
even in regimes with no property qualifications
for citizenship or office, wealthier citizens tend
to dominate elected positions.

Loren J. Samons II 2007

What’s Wrong with Democracy?

6
The Greeks... did not see voting itself as a
defining quality of demokratia.

Loren J. Samons II 2007

What’s Wrong with Democracy?

6
In Bosnia democracy legitimized the worst
war crimes in Europe since the Nazi era.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment?

6
Sudan’s newly elected democracy led
immediately to anarchy, which in turn led to the
most brutal tyranny in Sudan’s postcolonial
history...democracy can be not only risky but
disastrous.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment? 
 Andrew Sullivan 2016 - America Has Never 6
Been So Ripe for Tyranny

6
Socrates seemed pretty clear on one
sobering point: that “tyranny is probably
established out of no other regime than
democracy.”

Andrew Sullivan 2016

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny

6
Plato had planted a gnawing worry in my
mind a few decades ago about the intrinsic
danger of late-democratic life. It was
increasingly hard not to see in Plato’s vision a
murky reflection of our own hyperdemocratic
times and in Trump a demagogic, tyrannical
character plucked directly out of one of the first
books about politics ever written

Andrew Sullivan 2016

America Has Never Been So Ripe for Tyranny

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 6
The very fact that we retreat to moral
arguments – and often moral arguments only –
to justify democracy indicates that for many
parts of the world the historical and social
arguments supporting democracy are just not
there.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment?

6
Hobbes, who lived through the debacle of
parliamentary rule under Cromwell, published
his translation of Thucydides in order, he said, to
demonstrate how democracy, among other
factors, was responsible for Athens’s decline.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment?

6
As if poverty was not miserable enough in
itself, the effect of democracy adds insult to this
injury. In low-income countries, democracy
made the society more dangerous.

Paul Collier 2009

Wars, Guns and Votes

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 6
Most people, including most Americans,
would be surprised to learn that the word
“democracy” does not appear in the Declaration
of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of
the United States of America (1789). They would
also be shocked to learn the reason for this
absence in the Founding documents of the
U.S.A. Contrary to what propaganda has led the
public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers
were skeptical and anxious about democracy.
They were aware of the evils that accompany a
tyranny of the majority. The Framers of the
Constitution went to great lengths to ensure
that the federal government was not based on
the mere will of the majority and that it,
therefore, was not democratic.

Steve H. Hanke
Democracy or Liberty?


Lee Drutman 2016 - Protect the Separation of 7
Powers

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 7
First, I want to suggest that we cannot
understand how our democratic institutions are
designed and how they function without
recognizing that a uniquely American cultural
sensibility and understanding of democracy –
one that I view as excessively romantic,
particularly in the forms it takes todayinforms a
good deal of the ways we design and reform our
democratic institutions. This uniquely romantic
conception of democracy has, I believe,
perversely contributed to the decline of our
formal political institutions. This will be one of
my themes: the dangers of democratic
romanticism.

Richard H. Pildes 2013

Romantacizing Democracy

7
He observed that the general object was to
provide a cure for the evils under which the U.S.
laboured; that in tracing these evils to their
origin every man had found it in the turbulence
and follies of democracy: that some check
therefore was to be sought for agst. this
tendency of our Governments: and that a good
Senate seemed most likely to answer the
purpose... He was for offering such a check as to
keep up the balance, and to restrain, if possible,
the fury of democracy... The object of this 2d.
branch is to controul the democratic branch of
the Natl. Legislature.

James Madison Notes 1787

Constitutional Convention 
 7
The Constitution was designed to further
the cause of liberty, not of democracy. To do
that, the Constitution protected individuals’
rights from the government, as well as from
their fellow citizens. To that end, the
Constitution laid down clear, unequivocal, and
enforceable rules to protect individuals’ rights,
which strictly limited government’s scope and
scale.

Steve H. Hanke
Democracy or Liberty?

7
“Democracy” and “liberty” are not
interchangeable words.

Steve H. Hanke
Democracy or Liberty?


 The demise of unions may be the result of 7
increased democracy

The demise of unions may be the result of 7

increased democracy

7
Invoking the word “democracy” requires
great caution. It can easily result in elected
tyranny.

Steve H. Hanke
Democracy or Liberty?

7
Hamilton’s besetting fear was that
American democracy would be spoiled by
demagogues who would mouth populist
shibboleths to conceal their despotism.

Ron Chernow 2004

Alexander Hamilton

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 7
There is no compelling evidence that
democracy of any sort will necessarily promote
good environmental outcomes (Neumayer
2002), or that rising living standards will
inevitably deliver a sustainable environment
(Dinda 2004). On the contrary, there is evidence
to suggest that in the initial phases at least,
‘democratisation could indirectly promote
environmental degradation through its effect on
national income’ (Li and Reuveny 2006, p. 953).
In other words, even the best of all outcomes –
rising living standards and an outbreak of
democracy –may have unsustainable
environmental consequences that may prove to
be their undoing in the longer-term.

Mark Beeson 2010

The Coming of Environmental
Authoritarianism (Climate)

Rachel E. Barkow 2019 - Prisoners of Politics 8

(incarceration)


 8
Few people would want to establish air
pollutant limits or workplace safety conditions
by popu lar vote. Instead, most people prefer to
trust experts with specialized knowledge to set
policies based on studies of what maximizes
public safety and an analysis of the costs and
benefits of different courses of action. This is
now the well-established path for just about
every public health and safety area in American
life because we recognize that the typical voter
lacks the requisite data and knowledge to make
the best decisions in these areas. We understand
that we would get inferior outcomes if instead
we relied upon the emotional preferences of the
body politic or politicians’ intuitive guesses
about what is likely to work.

Rachel E. Barkow 2019

Prisoners of Politics

8
The dispiriting reality may be that
authoritarian regimes – unattractive as they may
be – may even prove more capable of
responding to the complex political and
environmental pressures in the region than
some of its democracies.

Mark Beeson 2010

The Coming of Environmental
Authoritarianism (Climate)


 8
Alexander Hamilton, a distinguished
lawyer, took on many famous cases out of
principle. After the Revolutionary War began,
the state of New York enacted harsh measures
against Loyalists and British subjects. These
included the Confiscation Act (1779), the
Citation Act (1782), and the Trespass Act (1783).
All involved the taking of property. In Hamilton’s
view, these acts illustrated the inherent
difference between democracy and the law.
Even though the acts were widely popular, they
flouted fundamental principles of property law.
Hamilton carried his views into action and
successfully defended — in the face of enormous
public hostility — those who had property taken
under those three New York State statutes.

Steve H. Hanke
Democracy or Liberty?


 8
In 1986 Museveni’s army captured the
Ugandan capital of Kampala without looting a
single shop; Museveni postponed elections and
saw that they took place in a manner that
ensured his victory. “I happen to be one of those
people who do not believe in multi-party
democracy,” Museveni has written. “In fact, I am
totally opposed to it as far as Africa today is
concerned.... If one forms a multi-party system
in Uganda, a party cannot win elections unless it
finds a way of dividing the ninety-four percent of
the electorate [that consists of peasants], and
this is where the main problem comes up:
tribalism, religion, or regionalism becomes the
basis for intense partisanship.” In other words,
in a society that has not reached the level of
development Toqueville described, a multi-
party system merely hardens and
institutionalizes established ethnic and regional
divisions. Look at Armenia and Azerbaijan,
where democratic processes brought
nationalists to power upon the demise of the
Soviet Union: each leader furthered his
country’s slide into war.

Robert Kaplan 1997

Was Democracy Just a Moment?


 8
Almost 90 percent of state judges face
some kind of popular election. Thirty-eight
states put all of their judges up before the
voters. It has been a long-established practice
for parties and lawyers to donate to the judges
who will later hear their cases, but recently the
size of such donations has increased
dramatically. Spending on judicial campaigns
has doubled in the past decade, exceeding $200
million. That figure does not include the millions
spent on outside advertising. An Ohio Supreme
Court justice confessed, “I never felt so much
like a hooker down by the bus station…as I did
in a judicial race. Everyone interested in
contributing has very specific interests. They
mean to be buying a vote.” Today, judicial
elections reduce state judges’ willingness to
apply the law or protect rights in the face of
public opposition or special interests. Recent
studies demonstrate that elected judges face
more political pressure and reach legal results
more in keeping with local public opinion than
appointed judges do. Other studies have found
that elected judges disproportionately rule in
favor of their campaign contributors.

Jed Handelsman Shugerman 2012

The People’s Courts

Note: Shugerman’s book is just one of many that

investigate the endless problems of the
increased use of elections to pick judges.
Previously all judges were appointed by
legislatures, governors and other political actors,
shielding them from special interests and the
wrath of the public.


 8
The paradox that has resulted is an
obvious one. It is easily stated. Recent history
suggests that when large numbers of Americans
become dissatisfied with the workings of their
government they call for more democracy. The
more they call for more democracy, the more of
it they get. And the more of it they get the more
dissatisfied they become with the workings of
their government. And the more they become
dissatisfied with the workings of their
government, the more they call for more
democracy... And so it goes, the cycle endlessly
repeating itself.

Anthony King 1997

Running Scared


 8
The debate about the merits of
representative and direct democracy goes back
to ancient times. To simplify a little, the
Athenians favoured pure democracy (“people
rule”, though in fact oligarchs often had the last
word); the Romans chose a republic, as a
“public thing”, where representatives could
make trade-offs for the common good and were
accountable for the sum of their achievements.
America’s Founding Fathers, especially James
Madison and Alexander Hamilton, backed the
Romans. Indeed, in their guise of “Publius” (a
Roman) in the “Federalist Papers”, Madison and
Hamilton warn against the dangerous
“passions” of the mob and the threat of
“minority factions” (ie. special interests) seizing
the democratic process. Proper democracy is far
more than a perpetual ballot process. It must
include deliberation, mature institutions and
checks and balances such as those in the
American constitution. Ironically, California
imported direct democracy almost a century
ago as a “safety valve” in case government
should become corrupt. The process began to
malfunction only relatively recently. With
Proposition 13, it stopped being a valve and
instead became almost the entire engine.

Economist 2011
The Perils of Extreme Democracy


 8
It is necessary to say that people are
deluded and that the task of leadership is to un-
delude them.

James Traub 2016

It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the
Ignorant Masses


 8
Hostility Toward Democracy

Because the Framers blamed relief legislation

on “democratic licentiousness,” they designed
the federal government to be insulated from the
populist politics that had produced such
measures in the states. Thus, they opted for
huge districts for congressional representatives,
and indirect elections and lengthy terms in
office for both senators and presidents. They
also rejected, for federal legislators, instruction,
mandatory rotation, and recall. In addition, they
created a powerful executive armed with a veto
power that could be used to block any populist
economic measures that might somehow sneak
through a legislature designed to squelch them.
To the extent that the Framers were thinking
about judicial review at all, they mostly
conceived of it as another potential check on
such relief legislation.

Indeed, most of the delegates to the

Philadelphia convention would have preferred a
constitution that shielded the federal
government even more from populist pressures.
Yet their choices were constrained by the role
that popularly elected state ratifying
conventions would play in deciding whether to
approve the Constitution. To the limited extent
that the Framers cared about public opinion, it
was mainly because of this constraining
influence of the ratifying process. It is this
consideration that possibly explains their
rejection of Madison’s proposal for a national
veto on state legislation, which was replaced
with explicit constraints on state relief measures

to be enforced by judges under the Supremacy
Clause. The delegates, also for this reason,
agreed on significantly shorter terms in office for
congressmen, senators, and presidents than
most of them would have liked. Likewise, even
though most of the Framers favored property
qualifications for voting and officeholding, they
did not impose any in the Constitution, partly
because they understood that doing so would
jeopardize ratification in states that had already
reduced such property qualifications more than
the Framers were inclined to do.

Michael J. Klarman 2016

The Framers’ Coup

Kathleen Bruhn 2020 - Too Much Democracy? 9


 9
Carter Braxton, a Virginia political leader
and signer of the Declaration of Independence,
worried that these state constitutions would be
“fraught with all the tumult and riot incident to
simple democracy.” In the mid- 1780s, some of
the worst fears of these political leaders were
realized

Michael J. Klarman 2016

The Framers’ Coup

9
It is in vain to Say that Democracy is less
vain, less proud, less selfish, less ambitious or
less avaricious than Aristocracy or Monarchy. It
is not true in Fact and no where appears in
history. Those Passions are the same in all Men
under all forms of Simple Government, and
when unchecked, produce the same Effects of
Fraud Violence and Cruelty.

John Adams 1814

Letter to John Taylor


 9
In the dialogues of Plato, the founding
father of Greek Philosophy – Socrates – is
portrayed as hugely pessimistic about the whole
business of democracy. In Book Six of The
Republic, Plato describes Socrates falling into
conversation with a character called
Adeimantus and trying to get him to see the
flaws of democracy by comparing a society to a
ship. If you were heading out on a journey by
sea, asks Socrates, who would you ideally want
deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just
anyone or people educated in the rules and
demands of seafaring? The latter of course, says
Adeimantus, so why then, responds Socrates, do
we keep thinking that any old person should be
fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?

Anonymous 2016
Why Socrates Hated Democracy

9
All in all, Rosenbluth and Shapiro argue,
the efforts to increase voters’ direct control over
political parties “turn out to be the political
equivalent of bloodletting. Either they have no
impact on the malady they are meant to address
or—more often—they make it worse. Rebuilding
well-functioning democracies means reversing
this trend.”

Yascha Mounk 2018

Is More Democracy Always Better Democracy?


 9
The real-world result of democratization
can be to reduce representativeness.

Jonathan Rauch & Ray La Raja 2019

Too Much Democracy Is Bad for Democracy

What Were the Founders Saying …

John Kaminsky - What Were the Founders 9

Saying About Fears of "Too Much" Democracy?

9
Democracy was supposed to be the great
American gift to the post-Cold War world. So it
comes as no mean embarrassment that less
than a decade later many find that democracy is
not what it was cracked up to be. In many
places, democracy is less the solution than the
problem: the new problem of the illiberal
content of democracy – people choosing bad
things like racism and selfish power.

Stephen S. Rosenfeld 1997

Democracy: The Down Side

 9
Soft despotism gives people the illusion
that they are in control, when in fact they have
very little influence over their government...Soft
despotism is a term coined by Alexis de
Tocqueville describing the state into which a
country overrun by “a network of small
complicated rules” might degrade. Soft
despotism is different from despotism (also
called ‘hard despotism’) in the sense that it is
not obvious to the people.

Wikipedia 2021
Soft Despotism

9
Mr. Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek
International, defines constitutional liberalism
as the “bundle of freedoms” that include the
rule of law, the rights of free speech and religion
and the protection of minorities. Such freedoms,
he writes, require the limitation of power,
although democracy can sometimes mean the
accumulation of it by an electorate that is little
more than a mob. An example is his native India,
where Hindu politicians pursue the “rhetoric of
hatred,” which has led to “the ethnic cleansing
of tens of thousands” simply because it appeals
to so many anti-Muslim voters.

Robert Kaplan 2003

Here’s your vote; liberty can wait


 1
Democracy’s mixed record in producing
liberty is Zakaria’s theme. He writes about Karl
Lueger, the rabid anti-Semite who in 1895 was
elected mayor of Vienna. The unelected
Habsburg emperor, Franz Joseph I, refused to
honor the election, an anti-democratic measure
that furthered the cause of historic liberalism
rather than impeded it. As the author shows, the
rise of fascism in the first half of the 20th century
was inextricable from the expansion of the
democratic franchise: Hitler rose to power
through a free and fair democratic election.

Robert Kaplan 2003

Here’s your vote; liberty can wait

John Adams 1814 - Letter to John Taylor. 1

Adams was perhaps history’s most ardent critic
of democracy.


 1
Democracy for Realists assails the
romantic folk-theory at the heart of
contemporary thinking about democratic
politics and government, and offers a
provocative alternative view grounded in the
actual human nature of democratic citizens.
Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels deploy a
wealth of social-scientific evidence, including
ingenious original analyses of topics ranging
from abortion politics and budget deficits to the
Great Depression and shark attacks, to show
that the familiar ideal of thoughtful citizens
steering the ship of state from the voting booth
is fundamentally misguided. They demonstrate
that voters―even those who are well informed
and politically engaged―mostly choose parties
and candidates on the basis of social identities
and partisan loyalties, not political issues. They
also show that voters adjust their policy views
and even their perceptions of basic matters of
fact to match those loyalties. When parties are
roughly evenly matched, elections often turn on
irrelevant or misleading considerations such as
economic spurts or downturns beyond the
incumbents' control; the outcomes are
essentially random. Thus, voters do not control
the course of public policy, even indirectly.

Christopher Achen & Larry Bartels 2016

Democracy for Realists


 1
Democracy is on the rise everywhere and
has come to fruition in America, [Tocqueville]
states. It does not need to be promoted and it
cannot be opposed. Tocqueville believes that
both the promoters and the opponents do more
harm than good, and especially the promoters
because they are more in harmony with
democratic times, hence more seductive than
the reactionaries. Democracy must fi rst be
analyzed and assessed for its strengths and
weaknesses, and then it can be usefully praised
with a view to confi rming the former and
counteracting the latter.

Harvey Mansfield 2010

Tocqueville: A Very Short Introduction

1
The best argument against Democracy is a
five-minute conversation with the average voter.

Aphorism sometimes attributed to Winston

Churchill 1955
Quora


 1
I cannot believe that God has for several
centuries been pushing two or three hundred
million men toward equality just to make them
wind up under a Tiberian or Claudian
despotism. Verily, that wouldn’t be worth the
trouble. Why He is drawing us toward
democracy, I do not know; but embarked on a
vessel that I did not build, I am at least trying to
use it to gain the nearest port.

Alexis De Tocqueville 1835

Letter to Louis de Kergorlay, January 1835.
Selected Letters, p. 94.

1
You are a Conservative member of
Congress [and like] John Adams you fear the
mob because you know as he knew that a mob
is not able to protect Liberty not even its own
and you’re amazed at the wisdom that he and
other framers had in establishing a slow
deliberative governing process.

Bob Inglis 2017

Conservative Climate Courage.

Note: Bob Inglis was a revered Republican

congressman and a presidential hopeful, until he
started talking about doing something about
climate change. Big oil (Tea Party) destroyed him
in the primaries by running many negative ads
that had nothing to do with climate. The mob
(the people, his constituents) turned against
him. This terrifying message reverberates still
through all modern day Republican primaries -
“make a move on climate change you moderate
Republican and big oil - by using the anger of the
people - will gun you down!”


Winston Churchill 1


 1
For these reasons, the majority’s
government is as likely to be poorly
administered as the majority is likely to be
willful and undisciplined; it will often be lacking
in apparent purpose and sustained effort,
inexpert, and wasteful. One may suppose that
democratic government will rarely be effective,
efficient, or economical, even if it does not
always produce tyranny. The majority itself will
want to ignore its own laws and policies when
inconvenienced by them or to change them
hurriedly to suit its convenience and change
them again according to newer convenience.
This means that democracy’s elected
representatives, however feckless, will always
find much to do. Democratic government will
have an appearance of restive, almost anarchic,
activity; one will easily remark a superficial
legislative and administrative instability which is
especially worrisome because it reflects and
aggravates democracy’s tendency to regard the
formalities of government as mere
inconveniences.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America


 1
I loathed and feared that dictatorship
because of its policies, and also for personal
reasons: especially because of the things that it
did to many of my New Guinea friends, and
because of its soldiers almost killing me. I was
therefore surprised to find that that dictatorship
set up a comprehensive and effective national
park system in Indonesian New Guinea. I arrived
in Indonesian New Guinea after years of
experience in the democracy of Papua New
Guinea, and I expected to find environmental
policies much more advanced under the
virtuous democracy than under the evil
dictatorship. Instead, I had to acknowledge that
the reverse was true.

Jared Diamond 2005

Collapse


 1
Curry criticizes citizen-participation
processes for allowing special-interest views to
dominate the decision making: “A number of
aspiring CP participant groups were clearly not
acting in a representative capacity, or even
perceiving themselves to be, and some had an
openly declared intent to pursue vested
interests.” Because citizen participants are not
paid for their time, committees may be
dominated by strongly partisan participants
whose livelihood or values are strongly affected
by the decisions being made, or by those who
live comfortably enough to allow them to
participate regularly. Smith and McDonough
provide distressing evidence from their study of
53 focus groups that citizen participants
recognized inequality in the representation and
resented what they saw as an unfair public
participatory process. Citizens were not at all
satisfied with the process: “...some of the
meetings I quit going to because they were
loaded and they were orchestrated, so why
attend when you knew the outcome was gonna
be what they wanted....”

Renee Irvin & John Stansbury

Citizen Participation in Decision Making: Is It
Worth the Effort?


 1
“Public” opinion takes opinion out of
private society and places it in broad daylight, to
use one of Tocqueville’s favorite phrases. Public
and private are blurred together, and it becomes
clear that democracy is government by public
opinion. Private opinion – in the sense of what
might be reserved to oneself against what most
people think – tends to disappear; it proves to
have required an aristocratic social state in
which independent nobles had the standing to
say what they pleased. This shows us why
Tocqueville puts little trust in the power of
representative institutions to hold out against
the people’s desires: public opinion makes the
people’s representatives conform to their
desires regardless of the apparent latitude that
representative offices with constitutional terms
might seem to afford. He would have seen the
public opinion polls of our day as vivid
confirmation, with the aid of science, of the
trend he saw already in his day.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America


Humphrey 2007 Ecological Politics Against 1
Democracy (Climate)


 1
Can democracy deliver the policies that
greens want to see? If it cannot, how should
environmentalists respond? Should they
stoically accept defeat or reject democracy and
look for an alternative form of government?
Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory
examines the reasons why some despair at the
prospects for an ecological form of democracy,
and challenges the recent ‘deliberative turn’ in
environmental political thought. Deliberative
democracy has become popular for those
seeking a reconciliation of these two forms of
politics. Demand for equal access to a public
forum in which the best argument will prevail
appears to offer a way of incorporating
environmental interests into the democratic
process. This book argues that deliberative
theory [overt democracy], far from being
friendly to the environmental movement,
shackles the ability of those seeking radical
change to make their voices heard in the most
effective manner.

Mathew Humphrey 2007

Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory -
The Challenge to the Deliberative Ideal
(Climate)


 1
Environmentally friendly policies can be
justifiably imposed upon a population that
‘would do something quite different if it was
merely left to its own immediate desires and
devices’ (Ophuls, 1977: 227): currently left to
these devices, the American people ‘have so far
evinced little willingness to make even minor
sacrifices... for the sake of environmental goals’
(Ophuls, 1977: 197). Laura Westra makes a
similar argument in relation to the collapse of
Canadian cod fisheries, which is taken to
illustrate a wider point that we cannot hope to
‘manage’ nature when powerful economic and
political interests are supported by ‘uneducated
democratic preferences and values’(Westra,
1998: 95). More generally reducing our
‘ecological footprint’ means ‘individual and
aggregate restraints the like of which have not
been seen in most of the northwestern world.
For this reason, it is doubtful that persons will
freely embrace the choices that would severely
curtail their usual freedoms and rights... even in
the interests of long-term health and self-
preservation’ (Westra, 1998: 198). Thus we will
require a ‘top-down’ regulatory regime to take
on ‘the role of the “wise man” of Aristotelian
doctrine’ as well as ‘bottom-up’ shifts in values
(Westra, 1998: 199). Ophuls also believes that in
certain circumstances (of which ecological crisis
is an example) ‘democracy must give way to
elite rule’ (1977: 159) as critical decisions have
to be made by competent people.

Mathew Humphrey 2007

Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory - 
 The Challenge to the Deliberative Ideal
(Climate)

1
For Plato, democracy—the rule of the
masses—and oligarchy—the rule of the rich—
were dangerous because these were forms of
government motivated by self-interest, lacking a
higher purpose. They were also unstable, almost
always degrading into the worst kind of regime,
tyranny.

Fareed Zakaria 2020

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Walter Lippman 1927 - Bryan and the Dogma of 1

Majority Rule


 1
There is nothing in the teachings of Jesus
or St. Francis which justifies us in thinking that
the opinions of fifty-one percent of a group are
better than the opinions of forty-nine percent.
The mystical doctrine of equality ignores the
standards of the world and recognizes each soul
as unique; the principle of majority rule is a
device for establishing standards of action in
this world by the crude and obvious device of
adding up voters.

Walter Lippman 1927

Bryan and the Dogma of Majority Rule

1
The rule of the majority is the rule of force.
For while nobody can seriously maintain that
the greatest number must have the greatest
wisdom or the greatest virtue, there is no
denying that under modern social conditions
they are likely to have the most power.

Walter Lippman 1927

Men of Destiny


 1
The apologists of democracy have done
their best to dissemble the true nature of
majority rule. They have argued that by some
mysterious process the opinion to which a
majority subscribes is true and righteous. They
have even attempted to endow the sovereign
majority with the inspiration of an infallible
church and of kings by the grace of God.

Walter Lippman 1927

Bryan and the Dogma of Majority Rule

1
Yet the historic record plainly shows that
the progress of democracy has consisted in an
increasing participation of an increasing number
of people in the management of institutions
they neither created nor willed. And the record
shows, too, that new numbers were allowed to
participate when they were powerful enough to
force their way in; they were enfranchised not
because “society” sought the benefits of their
wisdom, and not because “society” wished
them to have power; they were enfranchised
because they had power, and giving them the
vote was the least disturbing way of letting them
exercise their power. For the principle of
majority rule is the mildest form in which the
force of numbers can be exercised. It is a pacific
substitute for civil war in which the opposing
armies are counted and the victory is awarded
to the larger before any blood is shed.

Walter Lippman 1926

Bryan and the Dogma of Majority Rule 
 How Much Democracy is Too M…
M…

Attorney George Kieffer and Swiss 1

Parliamentarian Andreas Gross

1
It would be as unnatural to refer the choice
of a proper character for chief magistrate [the
president] to the people, as it would be to refer a
trial of colors to a blind man.

George Mason 1787

Constitutional Convention


 1
Earnest and able democratic citizens will
often lack the time to choose representatives
wisely... Moreover, well-meaning but untutored,
unsure, or merely busy, citizens can easily be led
astray by political partisans; and in a
democracy, they tend to be swayed by partisans
who advocate the unlimited expansion of
popular power. Democratic citizens will
constantly be urged, and tempted, to press for
increasing the power of the majority without
being able to assure its wisdom or justice.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America

1
In a footnote to his discussion of majority
tyranny [Tocqueville’s primary critique of
democracy], Tocqueville gives two examples of
it: in Baltimore, two journalists who opposed
the War of 1812 were killed by a mob of
supporters of the war; and in Philadelphia, black
freedmen were invariably too intimidated to
exercise their right to vote.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America


 1
In the narrower sense, Tocqueville looks at
what the [democratic] unfettered will of the
American people – in effect, the white or “Anglo-
American” majority – had thus far wrought, for
good and ill, including the most egregious
examples of its tyranny: virtual extermination of
the Indians and enslavement of blacks.
Tocqueville calls this [democratic] tyranny, and
he shows its effects on the tyrant as well as on
its victims. In the broader sense, one can see
more clearly how the seed of tyranny, “the right
and the ability to do everything,” germinates
especially in modern peoples. Modern
philosophy posits that there are in principle no
limits on human will – for that is one meaning of
the sovereignty of the people – and the political
forms of modern democracy are inadequate to
contain a people’s willfulness.

Harvey Mansfield & Delba Winthrop 2000

Tocqueville: Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s Fear With Democra…

Democra…


Brandon Turner 2017 - Tocqueville’s Fear With 1
Democracy: Soft Despotism

1
Mankind will in time discover that
unbridled majorities are as tyrannical and cruel
as unlimited despots.

John Adams 1793

Comments on the French Revolution

1
But I consider it right as a citizen to set the
welfare of the state above the popularity of an
orator. Indeed, I am given to understand – and
so perhaps are you – that the orators of past
generations, always praised but not always
imitated by those who address you, adopted
this very standard and principle of
statesmanship. I refer to the famous Aristides, to
Nicias, to my own namesake, and to Pericles.
But ever since this breed of orators appeared
who ply you with such questions as “What
would you like? What shall I propose? How can I
oblige you?” the interests of the state have been
frittered away for a momentary popularity.The
natural consequences follow, and the orators
profit by your disgrace.

Demosthenes 322 BC
Third Olynthiac


 1
We must realize that it is very hard to save
a civilization when its hour has come to fall
beneath the power of demagogues. For the
demagogue has been the great strangler of
civilization. Both Greek and Roman civilizations
fell at the hands of this loathsome creature who
brought from Macaulay the remark that “in
every century the vilest examples of human
nature have been among the demagogues.” But
a man is not a demagogue simply because he
stands up and shouts at the crowd.There are
times when this can be a hallowed office.The
real demagogy of the demagogue is in his mind
and is rooted in his irresponsibility towards the
ideas that he handles—ideas not of his own
creation, but which he has only taken over from
their true creators. Demagogy is a form of
intellectual degeneration.

José Ortega y Gasset 1962

History as a System


 1
In theory, democracy is a bulwark against
socially harmful policies. In practice, however,
democracies frequently adopt and maintain
policies that are damaging. How can this
paradox be explained? The influence of special
interests and voter ignorance are two leading
explanations...The central idea is that voters are
worse than ignorant; they are, in a word,
irrational – and they vote accordingly. Despite
their lack of knowledge, voters are not humble
agnostics; instead, they confidently embrace a
long list of misconceptions.

Bryan Caplan 2007

The Myth of the Rational Voter


 1
Jacksonian-era reforms have bequeathed
us the world’s only elected judges and
prosecutors. Indeed, we elect more than
5oo,ooo legislative and executive figures, vastly
more than any other country per capita (one
elected official for every 485 persons): we elect
insurance commissioners, drainage
commissioners, hospital boards, community
college boards, local school boards, and on and
on. Furthermore, we lack independent
institutions to oversee the election process,
such as specialized electoral courts,
independent boundary-drawing commissions,
and independent agencies – institutions
common in most democratic countries. This
leaves partisan, elected, and mostly local
officials in control of much of the regulation and
administration of the electoral process out of a
perverse belief that doing so makes the process
more democratically accountable to “us.”

Richard H. Pildes 2013

Romantacizing Democracy

John F. Kennedy 1940 - Why England Slept 1

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 1
The political stability of Costa Rica… is in
part due to the fact that the country has
“closed” party lists, which insure that legislators
get reëlected only if they stay close to the Party’s
platform. Many other Latin American countries,
by contrast, have “open” party lists, which allow
legislators to take their case directly to the
voters—thus giving them an incentive to
command media coverage, or to demand local
pork in return for supporting the government.

Yascha Mounk 2018

Is More Democracy Always Better Democracy?

1
The experience with many referendums on
fundamentally important public issues in
California suggests that either voters are not
very competent to make such choices in their
own interest or they are manipulated into
making choices they would not make if they
were adequately well informed (Gerber et al.
2001). While supposedly attempting to
accomplish very different things, they have
voted de facto to end California participation in
national party nominating conventions and to
sentence to a minimum of twenty years in
prison certain of those who commit trivial
crimes (petty felonies, such as stealing a carton
of cigarettes or a single slice of pizza).

Russell Hardin 2007

The Economics of Transparency in Politics

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 1
A good deal of traditional democratic
theory leads us to expect more from national
elections than they can possibly provide. We
expect elections to reveal the “will” or the
preferences of a majority on a set of issues. This
is one thing elections rarely do, except in an
almost trivial fashion.

Robert A. Dahl 1956

A Preface to Democratic Theory

1
The direct primary represented an
unprecedented attempt to impose the folk
theory of democracy on the nominating process.
In

Achen and Bartels 2016

Democracy for Realists

1
Critics of the magistrates are also
responsible. Their argument is, “The people
ought to decide”: the people accept that
invitation readily; and thus the authority of all
the magistrates is undermined.

Aristotle 400BC
The Politics

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 1
Many of my colleagues in the newspaper
business have leaped to the conclusion that all
public affairs, not directly connected with
national defense, must be conducted in the
open… I disagree. I think that much of the
important business in a Republican form of
government will be carried on behind closed
doors. I see few dangers in that. I see many
advantages. For it is only behind closed doors …
that most politicians – yea, even statesmen –
honestly express their views and try to get at the
meat of the question. I don't mean to imply that
legislative voting should not be in the open, nor
that the public should be denied the right to app
ear before all committees, nor that any legislator
should be excused from explaining why he voted
as he did. But I do mean that… in the National
Capitol, the White House, and various
Washington departments no sound policy is
decided upon without frank exchange of views.
And a frank exchange of views is rarely reached
with the public and the press looking over the
shoulders of the policy makers. The Government
of Athens was an absolute and complete
democracy, with all deliberations carried on in a
goldfish howl of open debate. But Athens
became smothered with oratory, paralyzed with
demagoguery, and finally wound up with such
an unstable mobocracy that nearly every able
Athenian was banished from the land.

Jenkin Lloyd Jones 1957

The Executive’s Right of Privacy

Note: remarks of Jenkin LIoyd Jones, formerly

President of the American Society of Newspaper
Editors, quoted in Rogers, Constitutional Law:

 The Papers of the Executive Branch, 44 A.B.A.J.
941, 942 (1958)

Jenkin Lloyd Jones 1957 on the failure of Greek 1

transparency

Note: remarks of Jenkin LIoyd Jones, formerly President of the

American Society of Newspaper Editors, quoted in Rogers,
Constitutional Law: The Papers of the Executive Branch, 44
A.B.A.J. 941, 942 (1958)

1
They will be simple democracies, of all
governments the worst, and will end as all other
democracies have, in despotism.

Charles Carroll 1776

American Cicero

1
Some will find that at bottom I do not like
democracy.

Alexis De Tocqueville 1835

Democracy in America

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 1
In 1998, state trial court judges sentenced
nearly one million U.S. residents to over two
million years behind bars. In 39 states these trial
court judges are elected. The “near consensus
among legal scholars” says in one study is that
the process of electing judges is “...insidious in
its potential for compromising judicial
independence.”

Gary Hunter 2009

Elected Judges More Punitive Just Before
Elections

1
The net effect of democracy on growth
performance cross-nationally over the last five
decades is negative or null.

John Gerring, Philip Bond 2005

Democracy and Economic Growth

1
The majority... often has the tastes and
instincts of a despot.

Alexis de Tocqueville 1835

Democracy in America


 Why Socrates Hated Democracy

School of Life 2016 - Why Socrates Hated 1

Democracy

1
Aristotle tells us, the well ordered regimes
are monarchy, aristocracy and what he calls
polity, rule of the one, the few, and the many,
and on the corrupt side are tyranny, oligarchy
and democracy.

Steven Smith (Yale) 2006

Intro to Political Philosophy

1
What bothers Socrates most about our
democracy is a certain kind of instability, its
tendency to be pulled between extremes of
anarchy, between lawlessness and tyranny.

Steven Smith (Yale) 2006

Intro to Political Philosophy


 1
Demagogues have been a problem for
democracy for 25 centuries, at least since the
populist Cleon persuaded his fellow Athenians
to slaughter every man in the city of Mytilene as
punishment for a failed revolt. Of that particular
demagogue, Aristotle wrote: “He was the first
who shouted on the public platform, who used
abusive language, and who spoke with his cloak
girt around him, while all the others used to
speak in proper dress and manner.”

Philip Freeman 2016

What History Teaches Us About Demagogues

1
Theoretically the United States is a
republic, for the Constitution is essentially a
republican instrument, but in practice our
government has been growing more and more
democratic. This evolution, which most of us
regard either with favor or complacency, has
been almost wholly deterimental to the quality
of our government and consequently injurious
to the development of civilization.

A. Washington Pezet 1924

The New Despotism


A. Washington Pezet 1924 - The New Despotism 1

1
The really great men who wrote the
Constitution were keenly alive to the perils of
this theoretical democracy. They had had
experience with it in those turbulent years
between 1776 and 1787. And in the Constitution
they drew up, they sought to avoid anything
that smacked of the nebulous vagaries of
democracy. In the words of one of them, Mr.
Randolph of Virginia, the purpose of the
Constitution “was to provide a cure” for evils
whose origin could be traced to “the tribulations
and follies of democracy…”

A. Washington Pezet 1924

Constitution Versus Declaration

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 1
It is quixotically assumed that human
nature in masses is something altogether
different from human nature in those individual
human units which make up human masses;
that whereas an individual king may be selfish,
stupid, and ignorant, a mass of selfish, stupid,
and ignorant individuals will by some miracle be
converted into an unselfish, intelligent, and
well-informed public opinion.

It is all myth-making and delusion! There is no

“The People.” It is an invention of the politicians
and of the new demagogues who speak through
their newspapers. There is but a mass of people,
– that is, a mass of utterly present-minded and
inevitably selfish individuals. What moves them
“is not thought but emotion. And what sets
emotion going is self-interest.” Today, as of yore,
this mass is governed by the courtiers and
sycophants who hem about the majesty of the
sovereign, whether we call him king or people.

A. Washington Pezet 1924

The New Despotism


 1
From the perspective of the
antidemocratic tradition, today’s idealization of
democracy is itself remarkable. This tradition
began with the history of the world’s first
democracy, ancient Athens. The failures and
excesses of the Athenians, particularly their
oppressive imperial rule over other Greek cities,
and their near-destruction after the
Peloponnesian War with Sparta, seemingly
validated the dangers of radical popular rule.
This criticism set the tone for subsequent
political philosophers, giving point to historian
J. S. McClelland’s observation, “It could almost
be said that political theorizing was invented to
show that democracy, the rule of men by
themselves, necessarily turns into rule by the
mob.”

Bruce Thornton 2014

Democracy’s Dangers and Discontents

1
With the advent of Andrew Jackson there
began the steady encroachment of democratic
practices. Today, in spite of our republican
Constitution, we are subject to all those ills of
democracy which the Founders foresaw and
sought to avoid in the government they created.

A. Washington Pezet 1924

Constitution Versus Declaration

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 1
Demagogues play to popular prejudices
and misinformation. There’s little democracies
can do to stop them, other than grant elites
significant control over the process. Education,
information, and political deliberation haven’t
done (and won’t do) the trick.

Jason Brennan 2016

What History Teaches Us About Demagogues

Jeffery Rosen 2018 - America Is Living James 1

Madison’s Nightmare


 1
James madison traveled to Philadelphia in
1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the
year before the Constitutional Convention
reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of
failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by
Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in
drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of
those “ancient and modern confederacies,”
which he believed had succumbed to rule by
demagogues and mobs.

Jeffery Rosen 2018

America Is Living James Madison’s Nightmare

1
Many supporters of democracy decry the
power of elites. They should be careful what
they wish for. Donald Trump is what happens
when we the people get what we want.

Jason Brennan 2016

What History Teaches Us About Demagogues

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But like any broad transformation,
democracy has its dark sides. Yet we rarely
speak about them. To do so would be to
provoke instant criticism that you are “out of
sync” with the times. But this means that we
never really stop to understand these times.
Silenced by fears of being branded
“antidemocratic” we have no way to understand
what might be troubling about the ever-
increasing democratization of our lives.

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