From this morning’s WSJ email, The Weekend Interview with Donald Kagan:
‘Democracy May Have Had Its Day’
The Wall Street Journal editorial board appears to be attempting to provide an intellectual rationale for voter disenfranchisement.

As he looks at his Yale colleagues today, he says, “you can’t find members of the faculty who have different opinions.”

….

Democracy, wrote Mr. Kagan in “Pericles of Athens” (1991), is “one of the rarest, most delicate and fragile flowers in the jungle of human experience.” It relies on “free, autonomous and self-reliant” citizens and “extraordinary leadership” to flourish, even survive.

These kinds of citizens aren’t born—they need to be educated.

….

Taking a grim view of the Periclean era in Athens, Plato and Aristotle believed that democracy inevitably led to tyranny.