It is important to note the little known historical rules for government.
1) Government must eventually give the people what they want, no matter what they want. A good example of this is China, that regularly, at about 200 year intervals, would be invaded and conquered. But a hundred years after that, the invaders “would be Chinese, and do things the Chinese way”, having given up on their former culture.
2) A ratio determines whether a government or political system will survive or fail. This is the ratio of what the government promises vs. what it delivers. No matter how much it promises, if it delivers on those promises, it will likely survive. But if it does not deliver on its promises, it will likely fail.
The first axiom to this rule is that it does not matter as much *what* government promises, than that it delivers.
The second axiom is that political disagreement is more important to this than is agreement. Disagreement forces promise fulfillment, but if both sides agree to not deliver on promises, it jeopardizes the entire political system.
3) Democracy is the most successful political system in the world *not* because it offers freedom and liberty, which are admirable side effects, important to its proper function, but because democracy offers *efficiency*. And this *efficiency* can be seen by everyone from uneducated rural peasants, to royals.
This *efficiency* is best seen, however, at lower levels of function. At higher levels, the value of representational republicanism comes in to play, to maintain efficiency through managerial specialization.
4) Republican democracy has many enemies, however, within and without, and they often work together. To start with, both barbarism and criminal mobs are dependent on inefficiency, poverty and ignorance to maintain their power; and both realize what they want is thwarted by honesty, prosperity, and education.
Its second group of enemies are royalists and elitists, both of whom crave not just to be elevated above most others, but also that those others be diminished and deprived of what they want, to further enlarge the gap. Likewise, they strongly feel that such superiority and inferiority are hereditary. So their descent are also destined for elitism, and everyone else’s descent condemned to poverty and deprivation.
It should be noted that such people are so neurotic that they imagine their elitism to be a burden they are shouldering, in *support* of the “happy, carefree” lives of everyone else, those they think of as peasants or slaves.
The third threat to republican-democracy can best be described by the large number of people who are individually criminal or mentally ill. Anti-social people. The criminal create a terrible financial burden, and the mentally ill strive to force their delusions on society through manipulation of the law.
It is not the extreme cases of mental illness that are as problematic as those who are near normal, who can make persuasive arguments as to why society should embrace their abnormal worldview.
END TIMES PING LIST PING TO
ORIGINAL POST
AND POST #4
among other good ones.