It's this very competition for the vote of one's constituency that corrupts the politicians before they've set foot in office.
Very good analysis but I wonder how you would see it if you were able to abandon this belief that democracy is a thing at all, in the first place. It would seem to me much more likely that the oligarchy that supported, fomented and financed the overthrow of the reigning european monarchs didn't then turn around and relinquish that power to some sort of utopic representative government of the people. Wouldn't it be more likely that they never did relinquish this power and that the "democracy" we have come to know is nothing but a charade to manufacture consent and to throw the unsuspecitng public's support behind a representative that has already been chosen for his allegiance to the real power structure? I have a hard time believing that any popular/populist movement could ever gain enough momentum, and clout, to actually storm the royal palaces and guillotine the regents and then form an effective government. I'ts much more likely that these regents posed the only effective counter balance to forces that were always there scheming for total power and that that these powers are gradually revealed in the slow corruption of intermediary political structures betwen monarchy and tyranny. Even if a good democratic government could temporarily serve as a counterpoise to the hidden forces of evil and chaos, it would still prove ineffective in the long term, as a system that has to pander to both the real power strucures and the proletariat would essentially be filtering the rulers for hypocracy and even worse, psychopathy. In short, it seems we have a much better chance of getting a good ruler via succession than we do through voting, because the latter selects for psychopathy and leaves us with elected officials that have no power to actually effect any positive change.
I think what you are saying is very likely. It seems to be the case that democracy has always been a philosophical object of interest, but as an idea, the outlay of democracy has always coincided with active revolutionary movements with financing and clear intent behind them. In the section of mine that you've quoted, I'd claim I'm being charitable to the idea of democracy as given, or as though it were an authentic reality. So, in effect, it's a priori reasoning about the idea of democracy, where the a posteriori reasoning about democracy probably reveals that such a thing has not developed organically in any meaningful way at any time in history. The notion itself that monarchical governments and existing power structures gave themselves over, or were forced (in a word) to relinquish to democracy appears to be a part of the justifying narrative of democracy itself.
Democracy, like pure libertarianism, is the stuff of philosophy.
On a related note, I did a post recently pertaining to the fact that slavery never ended, but has simply grown in the sophistication of its methods with time. I think this coincides tightly with the popularization of democratic ideals. A slave class which believes in democracy ceases to see the world in terms of slavery, save for the most brutish kind, lubricating their slide into more subtle sorts.
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