In our current political culture, democracy is often hailed with uncountable accolades for its genius across a wide range of situations (though this praise often withers away when people don’t like someone who was elected). However, at the time of our founding, democracy was referred to only in a pejorative way. Each founding father could have pointed to the ancient world’s democracies and pontificated on the tyranny of the masses’ unrefined (ignorant, thoughtless, or excessively selfish) will and the factionalization of the public. Democracy could also be seen as a necessary evil, a way to understand the will of the people, without being considered a good way to govern. Such views of democracy have declined over time, and now it is praised and viewed as the default system of governance.

The problems of the unrefined will and factionalization are prominently displayed in the current state of the Democratic primaries. From the first debate on, the supposedly informed voters who are most likely to watch have been subjected to non-stop pandering, petty insults, and bickering meant to energize a hodge-podge of demographic and ideological groups for candidates trying to eke out a narrow plurality. Reaching a consensus is irrelevant in a democracy. What matters more is who can buy the most ads, or make the most promises to a public in which simplistic instinct and prejudice are sometimes much too rampant.

The commonsensical belief in affordable health care, minimizing student debt, and racial equality are contorted into Medicare for All, cancellation of student debt, and reparations. There is clearly a need for something to be done, but policies resulting from fickle passions are rarely effective.

In contentious times, democracy’s advocates often point to the “miracle of aggregation,” the idea that the choices of uninformed voters are essentially random and thus don’t affect election results in any particular direction, meaning elections are decided by the more-informed. Although this can be true when the issues at hand are unemotional, many uninformed voters are animated by a particular issue that affects them personally. How can we blame them? Most Americans do not have the time to inform themselves on which candidate has the most effective policies or to weigh their various flaws. We all want to make our lives better, but we are all victims of fanaticism and fallacies.

People who acknowledge democracy’s flaws often fall back on the famous notion espoused by Winston Churchill: “democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” This notion, though, fails to apply to the everyday lives of Americans. From local government to the lengthy faculty meeting, the unrefined will of the majority of those who actually attend triumphs over or subverts the original agendas put forward. Our ever-shortening attention spans have created a chaotic environment where fads and a shallow rationalism dominate while experience, history, and tradition are laughed at. In situations where populists have to convince only a small number of people to vote for them or their ideas, the baby is often thrown out with the bath water.

Instead of using democracy as a way to find solutions, we should use it more as a way to find problems: to identify the long-term issues we care most about. Elected officials and leaders of organizations should be insulated from the short-term buffeting of public opinion and should be in office for long enough to effectively implement necessary but unpopular decisions. For some organizations, this would be achieved most effectively by appointed leaders; it would be undemocratic but effective. And as citizens, we need to focus more on the problems and less on the solutions. There should still be democracy in our American system, but its current ubiquity has troubling consequences. A longer-term approach to fixing our nation's problems would set the stage for difficult but vital changes to our system.