"Maybe we expect too much from democracy. The economist Joseph Schumpeter, one of the great modern thinkers to address the question, certainly thought so. Eighteenth-century optimists believed that there was such a thing as the common good, that people could determine it for themselves, and that they would then elect representatives to carry out their will. This “classical theory of democracy,” as Schumpeter argued in 1942, was more a quasi-religious expression of hope than an actual description of how democracies worked. There is no such thing as the common good, he delighted in pointing out. And even if there were, ordinary citizens, including the more educated among them, would be too irrational in their desires and too easily fooled to know what it might be. In theory democratic citizens raise and decide issues. In practice, “the issues that shape their fate are normally decided for them.”"