DEMOCRACY v. ANYTHING ELSE

“Democracy is the worst form of government ever devised — except for all the other ways of government that have been tried and found wanting.” Sir Winston Churchill

As Winston Churchill was something of a historian, I for one am inclined to believe this quote of his.
The recent fascist thuggery at our Capitol, with large-scale abettance by individual police officers and/or departments, along with four years of Trumpery, has reactivated the debate about democracy v. anything else. Our democratic allies were watching in dismay and with bated breath while our autocratic traditional ‘enemies’ howled in thigh-slapping delight.
And commentators here have also remarked on how delightfully (to the autocrats) hypocritical our attempts to further ‘democracy’ over the globe look now and how the autocrats will be saying how democracy produces license and puts the least capable people into the seats of power. Not to mention the airy-fairy notions of Innate Human Goodness on which such ‘nonsense’ is based. First big mistake.
Democracy is based on exactly the opposite idea: we are all equally corruptible by power, including the economic power that is wealth. And this being the case, no individual nor small group of people can or should be trusted with too much power. And even no majority based on immutable but unimportant characteristics as skin shade or which way our hormones run can or should be trusted with power over those of smaller groups based on the same political trifles. And from this comes the observation that, the realer that equal rights for all becomes, the more…