I can’t support or reject the complaints of Elie Abadie in his open letter to Tom Friedman in The Algemeiner but I did find this passage interesting:
I have lived in several “democratic countries,†including the United States, and have seen the rampant corruption of democratically elected political leaders, their self-interest placed above the interest of the electorate, their broken promises and their egotistical selfishness; what’s good for the electorate is not good for them.
which you may notice aligns pretty closely with how I see government in the United States right now.
His intention with the passage is to praise monarchism. As the Founders knew well there is no guarantee of a benevolent monarchy. Monarchies can be benevolent or malevolent and destructive and—the key point—you don’t get to choose under which you might live.
I don’t believe that “multi-party democracy” or what I would refer to as “liberal democracy” is inherently corrupt but ours has become so over time. IMO the best way to keep government honest is to limit its powers (and be willing to accept the limitations that carries) and keep it relatively small, close, open, and visible. I don’t think that bureaucracies, whether they operate under liberal democracies, dictatorships, or monarchies are inherently corrupt but I do believe that they function in certain ways which have been well known for a century and which have little or nothing to do either with the governments they serve or with their notional jobs.
Republican Rome had the office of Dictator, which had a much different meaning then than it does today. As far as I’m aware, no other government has been able to strike a balance between authority in a crisis and the risk of enduring malevolence.