One of my favorite Churchill quotes is, "The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter." You're position isn't all that

One of my favorite Churchill quotes is, "The best argument against democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter." You're position isn't all that strange, and it does cut right to the heart of the issue. Do we really want to live in a democratic society? Part of the problem with addressing this question is that we've generally agreed the answer is, 'Yes'. Even if we're not always willing to fully live that way. No one wants to be labelled as undemocratic, non-westerners get their countries bombed when they get that label. Another problem with this question is that the other systems of governance we've tried have mostly been worse. When you start trying to figure out how some people can have more say than others based on their merit you inevitably end up picking winners based on something other than general merit. Who gets to be more important than the rest? How do you hold them accountable as a class if they're the only ones that can ever hold the reigns of power? I appreciate your honesty about this, but your opinion also scares me. Because there is no way to achieve your perfect world without privileging the rights of some over the rights of others. I also don't like your comparison of decision making in business to that of decision making in government. In business it is easier to determine good outcomes. If more money is made, we made the right decision. Government involves morality, and outcomes cannot be measured with amoral assumptions of correctness. One person's good outcome in government is another person's bad outcome relative to morality. You're probably right when you say that the elite are better at holding the reigns of power than the rest of us. It's a very monarchist thing to say, but it's probably right in many contexts. And like monarchies it's something that I believe we should fight to change. John Dewey recognized this, and made it his prime motivator for compulsory education in the United States. To train citizens for a functioning democracy. Democracy to me isn't some state that we sit in and relish. It's something we focus on improving through constant education of ourselves and by teaching those around us.