Whatever is good about democracy rests upon a simple assumption. It is that ordinary people are capable of managing their ordinary affairs, as individuals, as families, as members of a neighbourhood or a parish, as local businesses, and as citizens of a village or town. If they are not permitted to do so, they have been reduced to what the Greeks called barbarism. If they are unwilling to do so, they have reduced themselves to what the Greeks called idiocy.

Anthony Esolen in Out of the Ashes