Why the Founding Fathers Created Representative Government

…instead of direct democracy:

Exhibit A:

Exhibit B:

We don’t want the levers of government in the hands of people like this. So we elect representatives who sort of buff off the raw edge of stupidity and craziness so often found in chemical purity in direct democracy and enact laws that are only sort of crazy and stupid.

Some despair of democracy when it really dawns on them that half the population has an IQ that is below average. People in this mood of reaction stand in grave danger of becoming Platonists and hoping for the Best and Brightest to make everything a utopia, as the government so successfully did during the 60s in the US and during the 30s in the Soviet Union. But the sensible approach to the overwhelming averageness of us average people is not to place faith in a platonic Ideal of the Elite, but to learn from the wisdom articulated by the Prophet Chesterton:

I was brought up a Liberal, and have always believed in democracy, in the elementary liberal doctrine of a self-governing humanity. If any one finds the phrase vague or threadbare, I can only pause for a moment to explain that the principle of democracy, as I mean it, can be stated in two propositions. The first is this: that the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose.

This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one’s own love-letters or blowing one’s own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. I am not here arguing the truth of any of these conceptions; I know that some moderns are asking to have their wives chosen by scientists, and they may soon be asking, for all I know, to have their noses blown by nurses. I merely say that mankind does recognize these universal human functions, and that democracy classes government among them. In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves–the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.

Democracy, properly practiced, is the application of the doctrine of original sin to politics. It says that all are fallen, so nobody can be trusted with too much power. Representative government adds, “including the mob” and places a check on “the wisdom of the voters”.