July 24, 2025

Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time.

E. B. White (1899–1985), American humorist, In New Yorker, 3 July 1944, Jay p.386

Whose suspicion? And are they right, or do they just think they are?

In truth, the history of much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals the ways in which the governance of most western countries became more democratic [i.e., with government power vested in the majority of the elected representatives of the people]. Meanwhile the elites of each of those countries sought ways to restrain the democratic impulse by every sort of means—upper houses, poll taxes, and so on.