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This is a fair point, but the largest issue (IMO) wasn't directly related to communication time...rather it has been the risk of Tyranny of the Majority. Even

This is a fair point, but the largest issue (IMO) wasn't directly related to communication time...rather it has been the risk of Tyranny of the Majority. Even in the relatively recent founding history of the United States, the Federalist Papers discuss and try to address a variety of issues which can lead to this outcome. And ultimately, I think this is what we see with the Brexit outcome and the current Trump campaign in the US. These aren't "new" concepts...throughout history we can see similar outcomes for similar events with similar reasons. You raise an excellent point though, which is with the ease of communication in the modern era, why don't we have a more informed public? This is something I have thought about trying to tackle with a side dev project...but the issue is complex and difficult to address directly. Side note, I believe the Roman Empire was a Republic, not a Direct Democracy :)

akiselev 10y ago
Nit pick: the Roman Empire was founded after the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar overthrew the senate.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Nit pick: the Roman Empire was founded after the Roman Republic, when Julius Caesar overthrew the senate. Nit pick: the Roman Empire, in one sense, was founded while Rome was still ruled by the Republic; in this sense, the Empire is the metropole-periphery arrangement with Rome proper ruling as the metropole and the various provinces as peripheries. In the other sense (the sense of the Empire as a form of government within the Rome rather than the relation between Rome and the provinces), the Roman Empire was founded when Caesar Augustus was granted a variety of lifetime powers by the Senate. In either sense, it was not founded by (or during the life of) Julius Caesar.