The author is dwelling in the world of abstract design, arguing as did the framers of the US Constitution that representative democracy is a sturdy design for living. But consider Franklin’s warning just after the drafting: a republic is not a wind-up toy that you design, enable and let run. It needs to be “kept”, and that calls for certain habits, values and frames of mind. The framers understood this fragility too.

It seems to me that the author leans to heavily on a wind-up toy argument. “Hey, representative democracy works better in theory so let us forgive its faults in practice since it makes for, despite those faults, the best of all possible worlds by definition.”

Because they are composed of fallible human beings political elites are capable of being corrupted in many ways.   If things start to go wrong they are likely to break along the fault line of, well, faction, as the political elites that are inherently part of a representative system take their own various kinds of self-interest into account, and game the system accordingly.  That is why no representative system will be stable without the presence of certain specific human virtues such as restraint and public-mindedness.  Of course since the stock of such virtues can never be stable no representative system can truly be stable over the long run, and we are back to Franklin’s conundrum.

So it is entirely possible–indeed inevitable over the longer run–that representative democracy will falter and not deliver on its theoretical promise of the best possible governance. And when that happens it is likely that the public will be justifiably angry.

One can argue–and the author does–that the public’s best and perhaps only recourse is the ballot box, and they can always turn out their local representatives. But just as political systems can be brilliantly designed the corruption of such systems can also be ingenious and diabolical.  In such instances I doubt that a call for a return to status quo representative democratic institutions, as the author has done, will do the trick.

No one is saying nation states ought to revert to direct democracy. But from time to time though the tree of representative government needs to be nourished by the blood of those would would corrupt it–even if they are not, strictly speaking, tyrants.