Democracy as Acedia / Sloth

"There is undoubted danger in looking upon politics as a deeply interesting game, a never-ending cricket match between Blue and Yellow. . . . Neither experience nor probability affords any ground for thinking that there may be an infinity of legislative innovation, at once safe and beneficent. On the contrary, it would be a safer conjecture that the possibilities of reform are strictly limited. The possibilities of heat, it is said, reach 2,000 degrees of the Centigrade thermometer; the possibilities of cold extent to about 300 degrees below its zero; but all organic life in the world is only possible through the accident that temperature in its ranges between a maximum of 120 degrees and a minimum of a few degrees below zero of the Centigrade. For all we know, a similarly narrow limitation may hold of legislative changes in the structure of human society. We can no more argue that, because some past reforms have succeeded, all reforms will succeed, than we can argue that, because the human body can bear a certain amount of heat, it can bear an indefinite amount."
--Sir Henry Maine, Popular Government

And a nation that is constantly tossed between the reforms of two opposing parties, when each of these reforms are large and sweeping, must be subject to much bad legislation. The nation will thrash about like an animal with a disease, doing much but accomplishing little, until whatever innate tendencies lie within the government, ignored by both parties, ruin it.

And so one of democracy's ostensible advantages is in reality a serious flaw: democracy is interesting.  It distracts us.  And as Pascal loved to point out, diversion is what ruins life.

171. Misery.--The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries. For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death."--Pascal, Pensees.

Thus, perhaps the worst is the fact that democracy distracts people from themselves, from their families, from their communities, and from their local governments.

Good can actually be accomplished at those levels--at the national level, in a modern democratic state, really, damage can usually only be limited. But by pulling people in as it does, democracy distracts them from the more important things. Democratic government is the best and thus the worst diversion because it appears to be worthwhile.

"Grassroots organizing," modern god of politicians, tends simply to be a method of making the grassroots ignore their roots, and subordinate themselves entirely to a larger, national cause--thereby rendering them pawns controlled, again, by the party spirit.

If you want to make something good occur in this world, I judge, the more you must appear indifferent to it to your politically-minded friends.