If Leo Strauss is right America is the acme of the modern experiment, or the triumph of Machiavelli’s anti-philosophy. In this case modern democracy, despite its advantages and innovations, its wealth and power, its dynamism and freedom, remains subject to the classical critique that democracy is only one step better than tyranny.
Modern democracy, however, is not democracy; it is an aristotelian 'mixed regime' in the post-pre-idustrial era, but also a mass society. We are faced with the conjunction of mass society and technology, a problem the founding fathers did not face. The contrast is epitomized in constitutional provisions like the electoral college, an institution which seems to have become not only obsolete and quaint, but even problematic. Are we not capable of counting each voter's vote in real time? But obviously technology introduces technocratic opportunities to cheat far more suave than anything previous - to say nothing of other considerations.
The problem of knowledge, or information, or mental manipulation, has become extreme. A party which can not only fix the vote, but corrupt the thinking of the majority, sabotages the basic formula which made America work: a system, supported by a minimum of public morality, which enforced public collision and resolution of real interests. The new knowledge-technology situation seems, with the election of determined men supporting, and supported by, a mass ideology, to have brought us to a crisis.
Such considerations lead us to wonder if the American experiment is not coming to its close.
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