In Carlyle's time, you had to be really clever to successfully predict that democracy wouldn't work. Some were that clever, but I digress.
By 2007, you still had to be pretty smart, but there were other options. Could have read old books with these smarty-pants in them, or read them by proxy through Moldbug. I suspect direct experience managing a democratically-run organization would also have sufficed; come to think, indeed Foseti is my go-to man for detailed accounts of how it actually runs.
Now, however, democracy has completely, utterly failed in the most obvious ways possible. The sophistry is down, and the emperor's nakedness is shining free for anyone who cares to look.
Case 1: Belgium.
No successful elections or voting for more than a year, and it made no difference. If you could piss out the water fast enough, you could drink enough homeopathic medicine to accumulate a chemically relevant dose. Voting, however, basically doesn't do anything even when you add up every vote.
This is exactly the experiment I designed to test democracy. Elect nobody one cycle and see what happens, to find out how much the voting matters. It's kind of embarrassing how long it took me to recognize that Belgium had run my experiment. Thanks Belgians! You guys are swell.
Case 2: Tea Party. (Via a Kalim Kassan retweet.)
I know whence my psychology came to reject democracy. Were it in my power, I would end all state-funded education tomorrow, and damn the resulting chaos, because it would be worth it. This will almost certainly never happen, regardless of my actions, and even if it does, it will still be regardless of my actions. (E.g. Greece's formal education may end soon, but it won't be because anyone wanted it to happen, even though I'm sure some Grecians do.)
The standard demotist response is that I'm not a majority.
The Tea Party was a majority. They in fact elected people to parliament and everything. The Tea Party did everything you're supposed to do, they crossed the ts and such.
It did nothing. Their candidates vote like regular republicans.
Ha ha, oops.
If the Tea Party candidates have managed to enact anything the Tea Partiers wanted enacted, I guarantee it will be rolled back or circumvented within five years.
Of course, for exactly the same reasons that causes democracy to not-work, the only people who've noticed that democracy has shat itself are reactionaries and fellow travellers, to which it is about as surprising as sunset, and warrants as much comment. (At any rate, this is my excuse for not noticing the Belgium experiment right away.) Aside from that, nobody cares to look. The emperor can prance about naked as much as he likes. He's the fucking emperor.
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Also, and more important, every advanced democracy is hopelessly insolvent. Even Germany (debt at 86% GDP) and still slowly rising. They'll be lucky to make it to the next crisis.
Voting is one of the fundamental definitions of democracy.
As they haven't yet gone under, sovereign finances could theoretically be fixed. They are physically capable of cutting spending until it is below income, at which point their decline would simply stop. (Socially impossible, but not physically.)
Getting voting to work isn't even physically possible.
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