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The Democratic Chimera
| Article
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15938 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1989 |
2,732 Words |
| Author
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Forrest McDonald
Forrest McDonald is professor of history at the University of
Alabama and author of Novus Ordo Seclorum. |
THE DEMOCRATIC IMPERATIVE
Exporting the American Revolution
Gregory A. Fossedal
New York: Basic Books, 1989
293 pp. $19.95
The United States is not now and never has been a democracy, if by democracy is meant a polity in which the citizens are governed only by laws to which they gave given their consent, directly or through their duly elected representatives. The framers of the Constitution, indeed, saw their task as checking the "excesses of democracy" that had been evident in America since the Declaration of Independence. To that end, they provided that senators (representing states, not people) should be elected by the state legislatures, that presidential electors be likewise chosen, and that the choice of judges be even further removed from the electorate. Members of the House of Representatives alone were to be elected by the voters, and the voters consisted almost exclusively of free, white, adult, property-owning, and (usually) Christian males--or roughly one-fifth of the population. The protection of liberty lay not in elections or even in bills of rights; the guarantor of liberty was the strict regulation and limitation of the powers the federal government could exercise, no matter what the will of the people might be.
It is true that American government has been democratized to a considerable extent during the present century, at least in form: The franchise has been extended to encompass almost the entire population over the age of eighteen, senators are elected by the voters in each state, presidential elections are more or less popularity contests, and state legislatures have been reapportioned to reflect the one-man-one-vote principle enunciated by the Supreme Court rather than the original principle by which legislators represented areas, not numbers of people. Nobody who can see and think, however, is fooled into believing that these cosmetic changes have brought government more closely in tune with the popular will. For one thing, the rules are so rigged that the incumbent almost invariably wins re-election as long as he chooses to run; the turnover rate in the U.S. House of Representatives is lower than that in Britain's House of Lords. For another, the volume of legislation enacted by every session of Congress is so huge that members cannot even read the bills on which they vote, which turns the idea of consent into pure pretense. Beyond that, practically all the actual business of government is carried out by career civil servants and judges, none of them elected by or responsible to the people. And finally,
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