Plato thought democracy held the seeds of its own destruction. Hard to argue with him. It's hard to pick a time when the US was more democratic than it is now though.
It was never intended to be a true democracy and there have never been true democracies that scale up. The New England town meeting is the closest thing to real democracy in the modern world and they don't have any real power. Maybe technological changes will enable true democracy, but I doubt it.
It's not really clear to me what a true democracy means since it's unlikely that best leader/best lawgivers correspond to most likely to be elected. In a small community electability is somewhat of a proxy for skill in governance but that's not true as the size of the electorate scales and the skill that elections select for becomes more weighted to marketability and salesmanship. Those are important skills for leaders to have but they are probably not the most important.
Agreed. And it's interesting that (collectively) we like to believe it was.
> there have never been true democracies that scale up
I'd put modern Switzerland forward as an example of a democracy that has scaled, perhaps to the extent a fair democracy can be scaled. It's a country of 8.5 million people, speaking several languages, split into 26 cantons, and further into local municipalities. There's a tradition of defaulting to local rule. Cantons are the size of counties in the U.S. but are more powerful in some ways than U.S. states - they collect taxes, administer health care, etc. If you don't like something you can lobby the representatives of your canton personally. You may have even gone to school with the people serving there. And the people have the power, at every layer of government, to petition for a referendum to add or delete any law or amendment. The politicians respect that the people can veto them. [0]
Political scaling is an interesting topic. Leopold Khor wrote a book called "The Breakdown of Nations" which talks about how bad the scale of the modern nation-state is, the brainwashing required to sustain such an unnatural construct, the bullying that inevitably ensues given such a concentration of power, and, like you said, the loss of anything resembling a representative democracy, an inevitable slide towards authoritarianism. [1]
You will not, so long as the Senate exists, with the Supreme Court an additional firewall. This Constitution was written for slaveholders, giving them permanent power in the creation and structuring of the Senate. It was designed to serve the 0.1%, and does so admirably.
? Madison et al. are quite explicit that non-proportional representation in the Senate was a deeply regrettable compromise that could potentially create extraordinary difficulties down the line. The only thing keeping it from being completely unjustifiable was that the alternative was remaining under the articles of confederation, which was already in the process of breaking down (hence the need for a constitutional convention in the first place). Far from being a concession to slave states, which were growing rapidly at the time and consequently favored proportional representation, the Connecticut Compromise was a concession to small states, mostly in the North (indeed the name of the compromise is a hint here). See Federalist 62 to see just how disappointed Madison et al. were to be forced to accept this compromise by political necessity.
To be clear, slavery and its legacy has had a profoundly malign influence on American politics and its constitution, but non proportional representation in the Senate is not an example of it.
Yes he believed society should be frozen in time & change prevented. He grew up from a well to do family & saw relatives ruined by tumult. But that reaction he had, to feel that society- a quite inequitable one in his time- should be held frozen in place, guarded carefully against change by citizens only of high metal, is a grossly stasist & crass way to run a planet, to dictate terms to the rest of humanity from.
Regardless of his view of the ideal form of government (Strauss, among others, has a much different interpretation) his criticisms of democracy and other types of regime hold up and were taken seriously by the men who set up America's original government (which of course looks nothing like the modern one... for reasons good and bad).
