As the Athens tourist board seldom mentions, their fair city was not just the cradle but also the mausoleum of democracy. The ancients defined “rule by the people” with a literalism that has mostly not endured: direct votes in mass gatherings, issue-by-issue, eyeball-to-eyeball. When the US founders balked at the D-word (it is not in the constitution) it was because the meaning was still the Greek one. The indirect vote that now governs their republic and much of the world is as far from that as modern architecture is from the Doric order.
That democracy comes in degrees, that less of it can be more: the west rose on these principles. To survive, it might have to heed them again.
No global trend is better documented than the crisis of democracy. It has a case study in US president Donald Trump, who suggests that he might not recognise a defeat in the November election. To go by the vast trove of data sifted by scholars at Cambridge university, he is not so unusual. Public qualms about democracy are growing worldwide. An absolute majority of Americans are dissatisfied with it. In what has become a literary genre, cheering titles include The Road to Unfreedom and How Democracy Ends.