Matthew Parris Matthew Parris

You can’t trust the will of the people

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Abraham Lincoln’s ringing declaration echoes down the years. His 1863 Gettysburg Address, delivered 160 years ago this Sunday, gave us ‘Government of the people, by the people, for the people’: a clear and simple formulation, it has come to be seen as the very definition of democracy.

But Lincoln was wrong: wrong then and wrong now.

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