Salim Ismail – Our democracy is about to collapse

I turned off after he implied Brexit was a bad thing and that people were just frightened into voting for it. It&#x27;s nonsense to suggest that the majority vote was either a bad thing or done out of fear. It happened because politicians didn&#x27;t listen to voters or do anything about their concerns and money was always the deciding factor in everything they do.<p>If politicians don&#x27;t represent the will of the people, a revolution will ensue.

I will be critical of Salims point esp. about India. During its democracy for the first 25 years of India was pretty much One party system, the real problem was Nehruvian Socialism and strong Unionism(not trade unions). India is a one nation, but many countries, and these two system ravaged the inherent strength and diversity, with concentration of power in New Delhi.<p>Post liberalized India, where ever Government has &quot;no role&quot; actually grew tremendously well, and has done well. In India&#x27;s case, the democracy is messed up at multiple levels because loyalties are more nativist rather than ideological (which is changing at least in urban India). Democracy actually got better in India in the past 20 years. The intimidation that was prevalent in 90s was not there and more and more people are voting outside their caste and religious loyalties.

The initial meaning of the Greek word &quot;idiot&quot; was reserved for persons not interested and non-participating in political process, especially elections.

missing a [video] tag.

Oh, that&#x27;s simple. Democracy &quot;works&quot; only when majority of population is well-educated and cultured, and it tends to collapse when wast majority is ignorant, brainwashed by populism and dogmas idiots.<p>From the time of ancient Greek only educated men could be able to vote. That accounts for obvious early success of democracy. It also correlates with the notion of the bell curve (there is a famous book) you like it or not.<p>The utopian idea that everyone shall be able to vote leads to things like Brexit or that unrepairable disaster modern authoritarian Russia turned into.<p>Patients shall not vote for hospital&#x27;s rules and medical procedures or staff election. Qualified well-educated doctors should. Students shall not vote for what they going to be taught (due to being not yet fully developed and brainwashed by media), this seems obvious.<p>But the idea of necessity of some sort of competent and educated &quot;aristocracy&quot; is one of the major ideas in political philosophy. The crucial thing is that members of such aristocracy must be quickly and easily replaced when fail or lost support. This, by the way, is how most of professional communities and university facilities are organized.<p>Truth is out there.)