Exclusive extract from Kevin D. Williamson's new book, The Smallest Minority. Let’s talk about democracy. If you are expecting a rousing paean to democracy here, perhaps with a little liberal nod in the direction of free speech and general toleration and other liberal-democratic pieties that you may imagine to be central to my theme here, then you are going to be disappointed. I come not to praise democracy but to bury it. And I don’t mean just the vulgar majoritarianism of the Barack Obama “I won” variety. I mean the basic, fundamental thing: the idea that public institutions approach perfection the more closely they approximate the fickle and ignorant demands of the demos, and approach glory in greater degree the more ruthlessly they subject the members of a society to the Rousseauean “general will,” that great fiction that has proved itself such a convenient enabler of savagery, that anybody should give the furry crack of a rat’s patootie what blockheads think just because the blockheads exist and walk around on real estate adjacent to our own. When libertarians gag on the name Jean-Jacques Rousseau, we cough up that of John Stuart Mill. We libertarians lean pretty heavily on Mill and his “Harm Principle,” which is usually summarized in the cliché: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.” The musty ol’ Harm Principle is Libertarianism 101: If you aren’t willing to stick...