Too Simple, Too Complex

"Paradoxically, while hardly anyone questions that the self-styled 'advanced industrial democracies' really are democracies, fewer still care to argue that 'the people' actually rule in any one of them, or that it would be a good idea if it did. For in societies where managerial rule is widely practiced, democracy appears as inherently crude and hence unsuited to the task of governing complex and rapidly changing societies. At the same time in those quarters, it is often declared that democracy demands such a high level of political sophistication from citizens as to make it doubtful that it can be mastered by Third World peoples. Thus democracy is too simple for complex societies and too complex for simple ones."

--Sheldon Wolin, "Fugitive Democracy"