Remember when the Left was the champion of the Little Guy?  When they hated the “undemocratic” Electoral College and passed the 17th Amendment to force the direct election of Senators?  When Andrew Jackson effectively invented the modern Democratic Party by throwing open the doors of the White House to the people and defying Supreme Court orders?

Well, that was then and this is now, because here comes Kurt Andersen in New York Magazine to tell us that the problem with democracy is… you guessed it:

So now we have a country absolutely teeming with irregular passions and artful misrepresentations, whipped up to an unprecedented pitch and volume by the fundamentally new means of 24/7 cable and the hyperdemocratic web. And instead of a calm club of like-minded wise men (and women) in Washington compromising and legislating, we have a Republican Establishment almost entirely unwilling to defy or at least gracefully ignore its angriest, most intemperate and frenzied faction—the way Reagan did with his right wing in the eighties and the way Obama is doing with his unhappy left wing now.

Just as the founders feared, American democracy has gotten way too democratic. (more…)