The Crisis of Democracy was authored by the Tri-Lateral Commission who were elite liberal intellectual internationals from the US, Europe, and Japan in the early 1970's. In it, they argued that there is an excess of Democracy and need to find ways of pushing back against the new wave of public opinion from the lower formerly disenfranchised classes. In their view (very similar to that of Socrates in The Republic) is that these lower classes are unfit to make rational decisions about society that will effect all of us (not just them) and therefore should be politically/socially disenfranchised because they are bound to make all sorts wrong decisions that any sensible person/society understands that the higher classes are best fit to make all of these decisions. In The Crisis of Democracy, they made an argument that there is becoming a serious problem with over-education amongst the populace that was newly occurring (in the early 1970's onward). Their reasoning was now that more people are getting Undergrad. level degrees, as well as Masters level, ect. that these lower classes that in truth do not possess the same high level intellect/education that the higher classes (i.e. the elite Liberal intellectuals and possibly some elite intellectuals on the right as well but that point is unclear in their writing)) and that the *lower classes* should in no way be given the false impression that they (even though they are becoming notably more educated) are as qualified to make serious decisions (i.e. engage in the political process) that the elites are (i.e. the Elites should be making the rules, so to speak).  Thus, the *"Crisis of Democracy" is that political activism is leading to *too many* people being involved in the political process and this needs to be pushed back against in order to maintain a more stable, healthy, productive system.

I would also highly recommend reading the Crisis of Democracy as well as it is in many ways a softer modern day parallel to the type of thinking seen in Plato's Republic. Here is a link to the Crisis of Democracy: http://trilateral.org/download/doc/crisis ofdemocracy.pdf

What do you think?  Do our modern societies tend to suffer from an *Excess in Democracy* or is there *Too Little Democracy*?