> Inertia is only that - inertia. It doesn't affect the overall trend, by definition no democratic system can withstand a popular-but-harmful idea that remains

> Inertia is only that - inertia. It doesn't affect the overall trend, by definition no democratic system can withstand a popular-but-harmful idea that remains popular over a sustained period of time (Brexit might be an example). If a system doesn't manifest that public opinion then it is no longer democratic. This is a spherical-cow version of politics that doesnt reflect reality. There are plenty of path- and timing-dependent effects that shape public opinion and policy, especially given the powerful status quo bias most people use as the core of their cognition about policy. > what you're arguing against here isn't rapid change, it's democracy as a whole. There are two senses of the word democracy that you're conflating. One is democracy as a pure platonic concept, and one is the much more universal colloquial use to refer to a polity that meets a certain threshold of being democratic. The maximal case of the former word sense would be something like direct democracy with no constitutional protections. Very few people would argue for this form of "pure" democracy, and a marginal directional move away from that end of the spectrum doesn't suggest one is opposed to a country being democratic in the colloquial sense. (The distinction of the senses is important enough that explicitly anti-democratic phrases like "tyranny [of the majority]" are often used to refer to the "pure democracy" perspective). A second assumption you're making is that the distribution of the "goodness" of a policy is completely neutral with respect to policies that the masses are whimsical about vs have sustained support for. This is quite an extraordinary claim to make so confidently. If anything, it seems more plausible to me to assume that this distribution would shift in favor of the sustained-interest policies, which is precisely what inertia optimizes for. Now obviously, it matters where you are on the inertia scale. A society going through rapid, ill-considered, constant change is going to benefit from inertia while a sclerotic, declining polity in need of bold gov't action would benefit from less. But showing that the second case is relevant and making a case for the necessary policy shifts is a far heavier lift than the oversimplified assumptions you rest your general case on.