Democracy is messy, complicated, divisive, compromised, emotional, and prone to disappointment. Most democracies suffer periods of overbearing executive domination alternating with periods of diffuse oligarchy. This does not make an authoritarian regime, unless one is convinced that democracy actually means that one’s partisan side (who are naturally smart, well bred, and morally just elites) can or should never lose. In at least two periods in U.S. history, for example, we have seen major ...
