Exclusive extract from Kevin D. Williamson's new book, The Smallest Minority. Let’s talk about democracy. If you are expecting a rousing paean to democracy here, perhaps with a little liberal nod in the direction of free speech and general toleration and other liberal-democratic pieties that you may imagine to be central to my theme here, then you are going to be disappointed. I come not to praise democracy but to bury it. And I don’t mean just the vulgar majoritarianism of the Barack Obama “I won” variety. I mean the basic, fundamental thing: the idea that public institutions approach perfection the more closely they approximate the fickle and ignorant demands of the demos, and approach glory in greater degree the more ruthlessly they subject the members of a society to the Rousseauean “general will,” that...