Excerpt from Democracy After the War
The cause of democracy has suffered almost as much from its friends as from its enemies. For while the latter have held it to be either undesirable or unattainable, the former have represented it either as achieved already or as inevitable. Now, neither of these former representations is true. Effective democracy nowhere exists either in the politics or industry of any nation. The forms of political self-government, indeed, exist in Britain, France, America and elsewhere with varying measures of completeness. But nowhere does the will of the people play freely through these forms. In every country the will of certain powerful men or interests is pumped down from above into the party machinery that it may come up with the formal register of an electorate denied the knowledge and opportunity to create and exercise a will that is informed and free. Popular opinion and aspirations act at best as exceedingly imperfect checks on these abuses of political self-government. So evident has been the failure of all democratic forms hitherto devised that hostile critics have pronounced democracy incapable of realization.
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