With the Labour party reduced to a cult in honour of the vain and incompetent Jeremy Corbyn, the Tory party is currently ruling the roost. Perhaps the Old Oligarch, a fifth-century BC Athenian hostile to democracy — we do not know his real name — can help out.
The Old Oligarch’s fascinating pamphlet took the view that dêmokratia — Athens’ radical, citizen-centred direct democracy — was fine if you were poor, ignorant and worthless, but what sensible person would want to live in a city controlled by such people? Only the ‘best people’, he argued, ‘who are disciplined, obedient to the laws and have a strict regard for what is respectable’, could be relied upon to produce a secure, well-governed state.
But that was his point: the Athenian poor and worthless were not the best people, and therefore needed direct democracy to serve their own worthless interests.
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