I've been wondering-- there seems to be a fair number of LessWrongians who are revolted by democracy, and I've never been sure why. Would you or anyone else be interested in explaining why democracy seems like an obviously bad idea to you?
I can understand not approving of government in general, but democracies (which I'm going to tentatively define as governments where a noticeable proportion of elections have surprising enough results to be worth betting on) seem to have less awful failure modes than a lot of other sorts of governments.
The traditional critique of democracy is that it leads to what we moderns would call class warfare, demosclerosis, and political corruption (by political corruption, I mean the regulatory state, spawned by Olsonian multiplication of special interests). All of this stuff used to be called the social war, named after the Roman civil wars leading to Sulla's reforms.
To check theory against observation, compare Britain from the restoration to the mid nineteenth century, with Britain from the mid nineteenth century to the present.
Restoration Britain founded the...
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