[A] pure democracy, by which I mean a society consisting of a small number of citizens, who assemble and administer the government in person, can admit of no cure for the mischiefs of faction. A common passion or interest will, in almost every case, be felt by the majority of the whole; a communication and concert result from the form of government itself; 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, Federalist No. 10
Out of Babel Books 
Why can’t we all just NOT get along? A single party state is rarely a winner for those living under it. Only by communicating our different opinions can we form a consensus moving forwards. Democracy often seems to fail the individual, but hopefully we’re not done with it yet.
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Madison is not advocating for a single party state here. He is advocating for a Constitutional Republic, in which structural limits are placed upon the power of the mob AND the representatives AND the executive AND the judiciary. The idea is that no one can be trusted to do the right thing, not even “the people.”
A pure democracy, which he is describing here, is essentially mob rule. Mob rule does not tend to tolerate communicating our different opinions. Mobs very quickly form a consensus and then immediately enforce it, such as getting the idea that someone is the enemy and hanging them that same day. If you want a space in which people can communicate their different opinions, you must have structures in place that restrain the mob from shouting down the minority or from being able to make new laws any day of the week outlawing this or that opinion or group of people.
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There a town in Greenland I think that has a pure democracy.
It is telling that there are people do not know how US politics work when the “news” media and anyone who echoes their sentiment go on about how we need to protect our democracy, 🙄
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It works best on a very small scale, like a town, though even there it is usually more of an oligarchy. But it really, really doesn’t scale well.
James Lindsay has done some wonderful work explaining the phrase “our democracy” as it is used by Marxists and by people who share their assumptions. Their basic idea is that, until everyone is perfectly equal in all respects (economic, status, ability to have children, IQ, etc), it’s not really a “democracy” because some people have an advantage over others. Thus, they see anything that threatens their Marxist utopian ideal as a threat to “our democracy.” That’s how they can call the results of an election, say, “a dark day for democracy.”
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I wonder if people know their supporting Marxism.
A while back I posted my review for The Devil and Karl Marx. It still buff me as to why people still buy into this ideology.
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I’ve never read that book! I ought to, but it scares me. I have a hard time with reading about abusive situations for kids, which I understand comes into it.
Yeah, I doubt they know. I think a lot of people just accept the assumptions that inequality is inherently bad, and that poverty is caused by “the rich.” I grew up in an environment where those assumptions were very common, and I still have to consciously resist them.
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