Perhaps it’s just always been true that democracy in a very fragile thing. All too easy to be turned into something very undemocratic, into oligarchy and autocracy.

I always remember what I read in college by a Frenchman (de Tocqueville) who visited in the early days of an independent United States. He worried about the American experiment in democracy: An electoral majority could trample everyone else’s lives if it chose. Democracy could an autocracy that could do what it wants, hampered only by fighting within itself, oblivious to the populace as a whole. This would be the diametric opposite of the democracy core principle: everyone has an equal say in what is to happen and it’s corollary: everyone’s needs and beliefs are equal.

I believe we are at this crossroads.