Roger Partridge: The Hole in Democracy Elections Do Not Fix

The American satirist P. J. O’Rourke spent the late 1980s watching the United States Congress at work. He ended the book he wrote about it, Parliament of Whores (1991), with this: “Every government is a parliament of whores. The trouble is, in a democracy, the whores are us.”

James Madison feared what a majority faction might do to a minority. But what restrains a majority when the people who will pay for its decisions have not been born?