> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. For direct democracies with significant elect

> I haven't heard of such a thing in democracies, that's rather fundamentally the opposite of what they're about. For direct democracies with significant electoral control over what goes on, sure. For the thing that most "democratic" countries have, I disagree. > Perhaps you're confused about the distinction between government and bureaucracy? "Government" as understood in modern Western "democracies" is a combination of the bureaucracy and a certain number of elected officials. You really haven't heard of elected officials putting their elected desires ahead of their nominal constituents'? For the rest, as far as I can tell the main business of governing is in fact done by the bureaucracy in most Western countries, and bureaucratic departments tend to prioritize achievement of the goals they were set (often by themselves), without regard to how others would prioritize those goals. This is neither unheard of, unexpected, nor unusual. Everyone I've met who has thought about the problem at all, regardless of political persuasion, understands that this is a fundamental hazard of bureaucracy that needs to be addressed somehow. There are strong disagreements on how best to address it, of course. > the idea that democracy doesn't help terribly much I think is deeply ignorant of when and why it fails I think we agree on when and why it fails. The question is when it stops being democratic and along what dimensions. For example, I consider the various statewide legislation passed recently in some states that forbids democratically-voted-for municipal wifi to be a failure of democracy in precisely the way you describe, and one that would be avoided by more-local devolution of power. Now the problems you mention with discrimination are very real, and I have no problem with strongly centralized civil rights protections that are therefore uniformly applied to all citizens regardless of jurisdiction. There are certainly various other issues like this, where either there are significant externalities or a historical failure of local governance that ought to be the purview of more central government bodies. This need for case-by-case analysis does mean that there are no easy solutions here, and I'm not claiming that there are. But I _am_ claiming that due to repeated failures in the current system, whether they were avoidable or not, there is fairly widespread perception that the central government is not to be trusted. And I don't think this perception really "dates back to Reagan" so much as that Reagan _expressed_ this rising perception. That is, Reagan was a consequence of the perception, not a cause of it.