“In my country the people can do as they like, although it often happens that they don’t like what they have done.”
London • During the Second World War, as U.S. power was eclipsing Britain’s, Harold Macmillan, a future prime minister, reportedly said, “These Americans represent the new Roman Empire and we Britons, like the Greeks of old, must teach them how to make it go.”
Today, Britain’s Brexit agonies — its two-and-a-half-year struggle to disentangle itself from the European Union — indicate that America’s Founders could teach 21st-century Britain something: Direct democracy is dangerous because public sentiments need to be refined by filtration through deliberative institutions.