The question is, what is the welfare of the people? We are taught that the people were always oppressed by a power mad elite before the democratic revolutions, but history being written by the victors lacks objectivity. There were certainly bad monarchs, but not nearly all monarchs were bad. There were some principled revolutionaries, but there were also those who saw an opportunity to increase their own power and manipulated the populace into joining their cause while not giving one whit about the "welfare of the people". While we wave the flag and sing about freedom we in the west live in some of the most heavily regulated societies ever known. These so-called representative governments have more control over the day-to-day functioning of the citizens than a power mad king of the past could have dreamed of. The voting public is distracted by television, sports, social media, and all manner of entertainments. People align themselves unthinkingly within the false left/right narrative and the oligarchy continues. There is a case to be made for representative governments, but we who have grown up in them while being fed on the myths of the glorious revolutionaries and the tyrannical kings would do well to look at things from a more detached position.
