You're right about the vulnerabilities of democracy, of course. But I think we're hoist on the petard of our principles: The degree to which you try to compensate for those vulnerabilities is the degree to which you trade democracy for tyranny. Democracy's not for the faint-of-heart: Sometimes you just have to hold your breath, cross your fingers, and hope for the best. Only authoritarian regimes offer any guarantee of security. As I've opined a lot lately, we're at a crossroads where the seductive blandishments of authoritarianism are threatening to destroy democracy. You can't have both security and freedom; it's a zero-sum game, and you only get to choose the ratio of the two.

I don't mean to imply that Liberals are anarchists who want absolute freedom. Most everybody, left or right, is in the middle where we want some amount of security to provide a solid base for freedom. To a Liberal, that usually means economic security, in which the freedom from fear of starvation and want provides a solid basis for maximum personal achievement. That philosophy has its counterpart on the Right, in the notion that you're not really free if you're afraid to walk down the streets at night; we say you're not really free if you're too poor to have any shot at getting ahead. We have similar ways of looking at things, just emphasize different values.

The question of the size of government and the size of bureaucracy is essentially the same. In the other post, which I may as well address here, you trotted out the horribles, as the lawyers say, describing all the negative consequences of bureaucracy, and you seemd to be implying that they're the cause of bureaucracy rather than its consequences; as if bureaucracies are founded to promote cronyism, for example.

I'd observe that another area where we talk at cross-purposes is in our perceptions of causality. I see bureaucracies as always being founded to do something useful, and the nature of bureaucracy pretty much dictates its path of future growth beyond its original charter. One of the primary reasons that bureaucracies grow at a higher than linear rate is one that I don't think you'd want to eliminate: Accountability and cross-checking. Bureaucracies spend money, government bureaucracies spend the people's money, and for every two people spending the money, another person is required to keep track of it. You don't want to strangle government in the bathtub as long as it's spending your money; that way lies corruption and waste. We've seen it recently in no-bid contracts in Iraq and after Katrina, emergency measures supposedly in the name of efficiency that left gaping holes in accountability through which the crooked drove truckloads of cash. As long as there's a government, you really do want a bureaucracy to track the expenditures.

I don't think anybody'd really disagree that at any given time, government is too large. But how it gets that way is through the natural process of the government trying to cater to the wishes of the people, as it's supposed to. We come full circle: How do you limit the size of government without abridging democracy and the right of the people to tell the government to do this, that, or the other thing?

To me, reducing the size of government is a null concept, because the size of government is a consequence, not a cause in itself. You can only reduce the size of government by reducing the willingness of people to use their government to achieve their ends. That's politics, and opinions differ...

"Did things start to go to hell in 1912?" That's sooooo stereotypically Conservative, "the world's going to hell in a handbasket!". But after compensating for the melodrama, there's still an interesting question: Did popular election of Senators weaken the power of States, and thus weaken Federalism? There may be something to that. The modern mode of thought is to consider only the relationship between the people and the Federal government, but if the Founders originally had Senators chosen by State legislatures, it's probably safe to say that they intended States to have their own representation at the Federal level.

It's probably moot to consider whether we could ever go back to the old system. I'd be open to it, if it ever came up. Don't forget that I think Federalism's a good idea, and I've written recently about the virtues (and drawbacks) of splitting the US into a handful of smaller and more autonomous nations. Small is beautiful.