In this election year, a reminder.
“Democracy is not so much a new form of political life as a dissolution and disorganization of the old forms. It is simply a resolution of government into the hands of the people, a taking down of that which has before it existed, and a recommitment of it to its original source, but it is by no means the substitution of anything else in its place.”
Henry James, 1852, quoted in Lewis Mumford’s Interpretations and Forecasts, p. 10