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If this kind of government appears to me to be useful and rational, I am nevertheless constrained to admit that it is expensive.
Alexis de Tocqueville • Democracy in America, Volume I and II (Optimized for Kindle)
The republican form of government is now almost universal, existing imperfectly at best, just as the United States fails to be totally faithful to its founders. But just as La Rochefoucauld said that “hypocrisy is a tribute vice pays to virtue,” even amid the universal imperfection most of the world would claim to be a republic, ironically even
... See moreGeorge Friedman • The Storm Before the Calm: America's Discord, the Coming Crisis of the 2020s, and the Triumph Beyond
The oldest conflict in American politics is the one between individualism and centralism. Reagan changed the terms by inverting them: the descendants of Jefferson’s yeoman farmers, with their desire for independence, became sturdy car-company executives and investment bankers yearning to breathe free of big government. The heirs of Hamilton’s
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
The libertarians were different. They slipped more easily into the American stream. In their insistence on freedom they could claim to be descendants of Locke, Jefferson, and the classical liberal tradition. Some of them interpreted the Constitution as a libertarian document for individual and states rights under a limited federal government, not
... See moreGeorge Packer • Last Best Hope: America in Crisis and Renewal
In his 1922 opus, Public Opinion, Lippmann poses a straightforward question: Can citizens achieve a basic knowledge of public affairs and then make reasonable choices about what to do? If the answer is no, then the entire democratic project is at best a folly.
Zac Gershberg • The Paradox of Democracy
Democracy
Sarah Wong • 40 cards
Democrats need to be talking nonstop about the Public as the necessary foundation of the Private. Undermining, weakening, or eliminating the Public would be a disaster for the Private as well, destroying the sanctity and safety of American private life and the basis of most businesses. Conservatives never mention this fundamental truth of American
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