Election Entertainment

   The oldest pattern in human history — conquest, comfort, collapse — may be running its course again, this time in Washington There is an old proverb, worn smooth by centuries of use in a dozen languages, that too many cooks spoil the broth. A companion saying, less quotable but truer, holds that there is never enough agreement to decide, but always enough to delay. And beneath both sits a harder observation, one that historians have been rediscovering in every collapsed empire from Rome to the Qing: when everyone is responsible, no one is responsible. Committees do not lose wars or empires. They simply fail to notice, in any timely manner, that they are losing them. This is not an argument against democracy so much as an argument about democracy's purpose. Shared rule buys legitimacy, flexibility, and the capacity to correct course without bloodshed — real advantages, and rare ones in the historical record. But it has always carried a cost: diffuse respons...