Well, Maxwell is wrong in the sense that it is the fault of the system of favouring expert rule against user will. Due to mining centralisation users have lost their power, although really never exercised it in full. They only exercise it in the sense that they can stop inflation, but not much else. The far more interesting question is what better consensus systems will be capable of. In the first article on blockchains the system was described as a "constitutional microdemocracy".

http://szabo.best.vwh.net/securetitle.html

If one follows Core's line the question becomes: who if not nodes make decision in Bitcoin? Their answer - the core developers. A future system will have to address this corruption of power.