The device that lets millions rule without ever gathering: the idea that a few chosen people can stand in for the many, speak and act in their name, and so make self-government possible at the scale of a nation — even as it never quite settles whether the few truly speak for the many or only claim to.
A nation of millions cannot crowd into one square to make its laws. So it does something stranger. It picks a few hundred people, sends them away to a capital, and lets them speak and vote in everyone's name. That trick — having the many be present through the few — is what makes self-government possible beyond a small town. It is also the source of a permanent suspicion. The representative is not the represented. Whether your member of the legislature truly stands for you, or merely rules with your distant consent, is a question no election fully answers. The cry that founded modern politics, no taxation without representation, named the stakes exactly: to be bound by laws you had no voice in choosing is to be ruled, not to rule.