Many horrible things have been done by democratically-elected governments. In my own country, slavery was actively promoted while we were still one of the world

Many horrible things have been done by democratically-elected governments. In my own country, slavery was actively promoted while we were still one of the world's few "democracies". And as we've seen in more modern times in Iraq and the Balkans, democracy and war-torn ethnically-divided territories do not always work well together. When I was younger, I thought of democracy as the end-all and be-all of political philosophies, since that the progressive march toward of the perfection of democracy is what was emphasized in school. As an adult, I've come to believe that a nation's true value is in to the extent it promotes the liberty and welfare of all its inhabitants, including minorities. By this metric, my country, the United States, often viewed as one of the world's "great democracies", is doing relatively poorly.