Majority rules OK?
It was the second world war Allies, according to John Dunn, who converted ‘democracy’ into a slogan. Their object was innocent enough. They wanted to identify themselves by a word which signified everything that the Axis powers were not. Yet a word that could embrace both Stalin’s Russia and Roosevelt’s United States must have seemed rather elastic even at the time. Honest thinkers have had more difficulty in deciding what it means. At one extreme, it has its literal meaning: a system of government by the people. At the other, it has no meaning at all: just a hurrah word for whatever political arrangements the speaker admires, as in the