January 19, 2012
A REPUBLIC, NOT A DEMOCRACY:
Do We Really Look That Peculiar?: A UK professor brings a foreigner's perspective to "peculiar" U.S. institutions and finds us wanting: a rfeview of The Founding Fathers vs. The People: Paradoxes in American Democracy By Anthony King (MICHAEL JOHNSON on 1.19.12, American Spectator)
(Harvard University Press, 242 pages, $35)
[K]ing rather sheepishly acknowledges that despite a Constitution that seems, in part, undemocratic or even anti-democratic, such as the Electoral College, and "remarkably resistant to change," the "overwhelming majority of Americans ... are reasonably content with the [political] system as a whole."He attacks our alleged conflicts and contradictions by first lecturing the U.S. reader on how other countries do it and second by what can only be described as a taunt -- claiming European institutions are generally more democratic than American ones. These claims will be hard for most Americans to digest even if they manage to swallow his rather laborious argumentation.
Being blessedly devoid of utopian delusions, the Founders left us a system the point of which is to restrain our democracy, or, as Jefferson put it: "In questions of power, let no more be heard of confidence in man but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the constitution. "
Posted by Orrin Judd at January 19, 2012 6:31 AM
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