Five people for and hundred people against might still be rough consensus (2014)

As I see it, this is one of the major problems for democracy to solve.

Today, there are more issues than ever that need solving and the average Joe either cannot keep up with them all or is not interested in many of them—or just doesn't have the time to do so therefore getting popular support for some reasonable cause that has merit can be very difficult.

For example: copyright. As Cory Doctorow has said, one of the problems in getting copyright reform is that the majority of people are not interested in the subject—or they're not au fait with its Byzantine rules, regulations and laws—that's despite the fact that most citizens would benefit from reformed copyright laws.

With so few citizens pushing for reform, politicians aren't going to spend much time on the matter. Instead, they're much more likely to enact tighter copyright law in response to the powerful and very entrenched pro-copyright lobby. And in fact this is what has actually happened over the past 30 or so years.

We see this problem in many areas of political debate, another being the Right to Repair — once this was taken for granted until corporate interests reckoned they could screw the citizenry for even more money. Whilst this movement is (fortunately) getting off the ground it should have never been necessary if the status quo had remained in place.

Same goes for privacy, government and cooperate surveillance, etc., all of which eat away at an individual citizen's autonomy. In every case, individual citizens have to band together and organize to fight just to maintain the status quo let alone gain benefit for themselves and this is both difficult and very time consuming. It's a never-ending battle and in recent decades the citizenry has been losing out to both corporate and government interests.

In modern democracies, a small organized group backed with money and self-interest can wield a great deal of power and thus influence the law at the expense of the vast majority. In effect, due to the complexities of modern-day life, democracy is not serving the populace as effectively as it once did when life was simpler and we see this disenchantment echoed in just about every recent survey.

The fact is that Democracy just isn't good at protecting its citizens proactively. How we reform it remains the big unanswered question.