Sublime

Proprietary Technology

three recent tendencies of fundamental importance; first, the tendency of small organizations to aggregate into groups of such size and importance that the public tends to regard them as semi-public services; second, the increased readiness of the public, due to the spread of literacy and democratic forms of government, to feel that it is entitled

Andrew Jackson claimed the right to govern not because he was the smartest man in the room. He based it on his bravery and cunning. Being the smartest man in the room leaves anyone vulnerable. Things are expected of him that he cannot deliver, because intelligence by itself is insufficient to govern.

As Jake Arvey, the man behind Adlai Stevenson’s political career, defined politics: “politics is the art of putting people under obligation to you.”

his 2009 article “People Power,” Matthew Continetti explains that “popular outbursts serve as a check on, and corrective to, our elites’ behavior. The people know things the elites forget or don’t want to remember.”

to intellectuals—to those whose arrogant pride in intellect assured them they were always right. But the promised utopia never emerged. Instead humanity experienced the inferno of Stalinist Russia and Mao’s China and Pol Pot’s Cambodia, and the citizens of those states were required to betray their own experience, turn against their fellow citizens

In 1919, Lippmann wrote a despairing essay in the Atlantic Monthly titled “The Basic Problem of Democracy.” Democracy’s founding ideal—that of a well-informed citizenry capable of making reasoned judgments about national problems and plans—had come into being in a much simpler time, he argued, when most concerns were local and people had direct exp

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of wh