I think representative government is a failure
But, as Churchill said in a speech to the House of Commons, “Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
The problem is giving every person capable of drawing breath a vote. We need less people involved. Not more. Leave statecraft to people with ability. Not every moron with a pulse.
The problem is, who decides who is entitled to vote and on what basis they are entitled to vote? There is no method of voter qualification that would be seen to be both consistent and fair. You could, for example, use IQ, academic qualifications, occupation, income, or property ownership. All of these will ultimately be arbitrary, unreliable, inconsistent, and unfair. In Britain when we had a property qualification for voters a particular problem was that most of our armed forces were ineligible to vote. In the end, the only fair and consistent system is one in which every adult citizen can vote.
I think the elite should be the only ones running things. The nobility, so to speak.
Again, the question is how you define the “elite” or “nobility”. Are we talking about people with exceptional intelligence, a high level of education, a distinguished professional career, high income and/or assets, or a hereditary class?
In Britain we still have a remnant of government by the nobility in the form of the House of Lords. However, a few years ago most of the hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords. This was necessary largely because it no longer seemed defensible for people to be able to inherit membership of the upper house of legislature. A particular problem was the distribution of party membership: most hereditary peers were Conservatives, a small, but still disproportionate, number were Liberal Democrats, and only a handful were Labour. But perhaps the fundamental problem with hereditary peers was that there was no guarantee that they had any aptitude for governing or legislating.
David Lloyd George famously described the House of Lords as “500 men, ordinary men, chosen accidentally from among the unemployed”. Nancy Mitford brilliantly satirised the House of Lords in
The Pursuit of Love, showing its members to be politically incompetent and given to falling asleep in the chamber. (Her father, the 2nd Lord Redesdale, was a barely literate bigot. He became a peer because his father, a distinguished diplomat, politician, public servant, and writer, had been ennobled, and his older brother, the heir to the peerage, was killed in action at Loos.)
