It's Tuesday, January the 23rd, 2024.

Welcome to the Daily Article Podcast.

I'm Chris Elkins with the Denison Forum, narrating today's article written by Dr. Jim Denison.

Only seven countries in the world, Saudi Arabia, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Brunei, Afghanistan, and the Vatican do not claim to be democratic.

However, as Winston Churchill famously noted, democracy is the worst form of government,

except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.

Just ask the folks, shivering in the cold, to vote in New Hampshire's presidential primaries tonight.

Every state in the union will hold a primary election or caucus to help nominate candidates for president of the United States.

Then comes the political conventions, followed by more campaigning, followed by the elections.

More than $10 billion will be spent on political ads this year.

And that's just for the White House. In 2020, 2,371 people ran for the U.S. Congress, not to mention

the multiplied thousands who ran for state and local offices and all the money they raised and spent.

Why do we do our governance this way?

There is a right answer and a wrong answer. Choosing correctly is critical to our future as a nation.

Many who run for office believe they are the best candidate for the position that in a sense they deserve to win. Many who vote in elections

believe their views should prevail and their wishes should be championed by their government

that in a sense they deserve for their candidates to win. In other words, many of us are

political consumers who purchase what we want by running for office or voting in elections.

Our nation's governance is a means to our personal ends.

This is the wrong answer to our question.

In his essay, Equality, C.S. Lewis wrote that he believed in democracy,

because I believe in the fall of man. He continued,

...