There's a whole lot of hand-wringing -- or, to use a technical poli-sci term, kvetching -- going on about the "broken" state of democracy, as CNN calls it. You see it in the United States, where health-care reform is mired in bipartisan name-calling, and in Canada, where Stephen Harper now prorogues Parliament whenever he doesn't want to deal with something. People howl but to no effect; that's why they say it's broken.

My take on this is that the system has not broken down. It was built broken. It was designed that way. It's functioning according to the original plan. Democracy was never the intention. Thwarting democracy was.