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By Pat Buchanan | Syndicated Columnist

You all start with the premise that democracy is some good. I dont think its worth a damn. Churchill is right. The only thing to be said for democracy is that there is nothing else thats any better. ...

People say, If the Congress were more representative of the people it would be better. I say Congress is too damn representative. Its just as stupid as the people are, just as uneducated, just as dumb, just as selfish.

This dismissal of democracy, cited by historian H.W. Brands in The General vs. the President: MacArthur and Truman at the Brink of Nuclear War, is attributed to that great populist Secretary of State Dean Acheson.

Few would air such views today, as democracy has been divinized.

Indeed, for allegedly hacking the Clinton campaign and attacking our democracy, Vladimir Putin has been condemned to the ninth circle of hell. Dick Cheney and John McCain have equated Moscows mucking around in our sacred democratic rituals to an act of war.

Yet democracy seems everywhere to be losing its luster.

Among its idealized features is the New England town meeting. There, citizens argued, debated, decided questions of common concern.

Town hall meetings today recall a time when folks came out to mock miscreants locked in stocks in the village square. Congressmen returning to their districts in Holy Week were shouted down as a spectator sport. A Trump rally in Berkeley was busted up by a mob. The university there has now canceled an appearance by Ann Coulter.

Charles Murray, whose books challenge conventional wisdom about the equality of civilizations, and Heather Mac Donald, who has documented the case that hostility to cops is rooted in statistical ignorance, have both had their speeches violently disrupted on elite campuses.

In Washington, our two-party system is in gridlock. Comity and collegiality are vanishing. Across Europe, centrist parties shrink as splinter parties arise and illiberal democracies take power.

Russia and China, which have embraced autocratic capitalism, have attracted admirers and emulators by the seeming success of their strongman rule.

Democracy is increasingly seen as a means to an end, not an end in itself. If democracy doesnt deliver, dispense with it.

Democracys reputation also suffers from the corruption and incompetence of some of its celebrated champions.

The South African regime of Jacob Zuma, of Nelson Mandelas ANC, faces a clamor for his resignation. Brazils Dilma Rousseff was impeached in August. South Korean President Park Geun-hye has been removed and jailed for corruption. Venezuelas Hugo Chavez was elected president four times.

In Federalist No. 2, John Jay called us a band of brethren and one united people who shared the same ancestors, language, religion, principles, manners, customs.

Seventy years later, the brethren went to war with one another, though they seem to have had more in common in 1861 than we do today.

Forty percent of Americans now trace their ancestral roots to Latin America, Asia and Africa. The Christian component of the nation shrinks, as the numbers of Muslims, Hindu, atheists, agnostics grow. We have two major languages now. Scores of other languages are taught in schools.

Not only do we disagree on God, gays and guns, but on politics and ideology, morality and faith, right and wrong. One-half of America sees the other as a basket of deplorables racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic ... bigots.

How, outside an external attack that unites us, like 9/11, do we find unity among people who dislike each other so much and regard each others ideas and ideals as hateful and repellent?

Democracy requires common ground on which all can stand, but that ground is sinking beneath our feet, and democracy may be going down the sinkhole with it.

Where liberals see as an ever-more splendid diversity of colors, creeds, ethnicities, ideologies, beliefs and lifestyles, the Right sees the disintegration of a country, a nation, a people, and its replacement with a Tower of Babel.

Visions in conflict that democracy cannot reconcile.

Patrick J. Buchanan is the author of a new book, out in May, Nixons White House Wars: The Battles That Made and Broke a President and Divided America Forever.

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PAT BUCHANAN: Has democracy found itself in a death spiral? - The Northwest Florida Daily News