From a review of de Jouvenal's book, On Power: It's Nature and the History of Its Growth, by Jude P. Dougherty:

"One of the pitfalls of democracy is its lack of accountability. The popular will is easily manipulated. It recognizes no authority outside itself that possesses the strength to limit its excesses."

"The kings of old, the personification of power, were possessed of personality, possessed of passions good and bad. More often than not, their sense of responsibility led them to will 'the good' for their people. Power within a democracy, by contrast, resides in a faceless and impersonal bureaucracy that claims to have no existence of its own and becomes the anonymous, impersonal, passionless instrument of what is presumed to be the general will."

"Writing in France when the Roosevelt administration was barely 10 years old, de Jouvenal feared the long range danger posed by the many regulatory commissions created by that administration. He saw that agencies possessing at once legislative, executive, and judicial control could operate largely outside of public control and become tyrannical."

I thought of this this when I read that the PBS Board of Directors recently decided that no new religioius programming would be allowed on the "public" airways. It grandfathered in existing religious programming, like Mass For Shut-ins in various locations, but will not allow new overtly religious programming in its outlets. Its justification is that when it comes to religion, there's no pleasing anyone.

For more, see Fr. Barron's recent column and his argument that since PBS allows overtly anti-religious programming, its new position is unfair.