Alexis de Tocqueville in Democracy in America admired our tendency to treat one another as equals, but worried people here might eventually become so self-satisfied that they’d allow themselves to be taken over by “a network of petty, complicated rules.” Said rules would be administered by a bureaucratic sector whose only issue with democracy is that everyone feels equally entitled to participate. The Americans de Tocqueville met believed in the literal etymology derived from Greek, demos + kratein, “the people” and “rule” — as Carl Sandburg put it, “The People, Yes.” A new model, described by academics Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels as “more persuasive to political scientists,” envisions democracy as leadership selection, in which the uninformed electorate abandons unrealistic dreams of actual governance and merely appraises those qualified to rule.

Socrates whined about all this in his “Parable of the Ship,” when he told Adeimantus it made no sense to hand a vessel to sailors, “every one… of opinion that he has a right to steer, though he has never learned the art of navigation.” Every idiot an expert! This vision of democracy was naturally commandeered by the New Yorker after Trump:

Democracy pitched self-rule and flipping off kings when Nazism, Communism, and Islamic fundamentalism were geopolitical opponents. Now the primary threat to democratic rule is another recently-bastardized term: populism. This has necessitated another full Orwellian inversion. The people rule is re-cast as The people sit, and while leaders like the positive marketing connotations of democracy, they increasingly can do without the messy specifics of constitutional governance — and hope we’ll learn to do the same.

Tracking Orwellian Change: Previous Entries

Deep State and Working Class

Transparency