/lit/ - Literature

>>16155193
>But, modern democracy has a population problem; there are far too many people to have a truly representative or well functioning democracy. In Athens and Rome, true democratic participation was only able to be achieved by the small number of citizens who practically all knew each other personally.
I agreed more or less with the rest of your assertions, but this particular one struck me as nonsense. The advantage of a slim voting population is exponential, so much so that at the scale of even a city-state, it is negligible. How much more unity in purpose one has as compared to two, sure, but ten thousand as compared to twenty thousand? It's bean counting at that point. I say that philia, the glue of democracy, outside of the extreme circumstances of a literal handful of people, has nothing to do with their number and everything to do with factors such as ethnic, religious, ideological, linguistic, geographic, historical, cultural, and, placed last because it is the least durable, *practical* commonality.
>This is one of the reasons Aristotle supported slavery—he thought manual labour degrading and that a proper, virtuous republic impossible to sustain if the citizens never had the time to devote themselves to the public good.
Here, too, I agree with the Philosopher, but not quite with your conclusion. We have, larger than ever in the history of the American republic, a dedicated political class, termed by those of the right as the "deep state." Even beyond those cogs, there exists a press and academia who, materially speaking, are not all that different from the aristocrats of old who floated on the labor of slaves to lofty heights sufficient to contemplate important ideas. Why, then, is the American republic in worse shape institutionally, with a democratic, liberal character on the verge of suicide every four years?