What kind of democracy is america

Thought outruns performance. So Montesquieu anticipates the democracy of to-day, Hume anticipates the French Revolution, and Franklin the modern age of administration in government.

Franklin finds the theory of the state made up, and he devotes himself to the next problem, — its administration. At times, from the close of the seventeenth to the close of the eighteenth, century, the theory of the state was set forth. It was arrived at by successive processes in the evolution of democracy.

Its elements are the individual, and that aggregate of individuals which we call the community: the one, and the many, and the many includes that one. The history of that definition is a portion of the history of the evolution of democracy. Rome evolved the idea of a legal body called a corporation; itself a fiction, but a useful legal convention. It was a legal device capable of civil application; it was a discovery in politics.

Communal and individual interests were at war in all that region north of the Roman world. Communal interests were there subordinate to individual interests. Between the Roman and the Teuton was the Celt, who adjusted himself to the military form of the Roman state and laid the foundations of feudalism. He divided the land into counties, and rudely began that communal organization which has survived in our local and county government.

It was the Celt who first applied the Roman military idea in local government. He was the first to apply the administrative principles in the modern state, and his experience, chiefly military, bred in him slight respect for the form of government in the state.

A king is as dear to him by any other name; but he prefers the other name. His idea of the administration of government is military: the citizen is first a soldier. The rude and individualistic Teuton saw in the Roman corporation not merely a legal fiction; it was a civil opportunity. Why not view that burdensome but necessary relation between individual and individual, between one and many in the state, as a compact? Why not conceive of the state as a civil resultant of these two factors, — make the many a corporation, a state-man, and yet not diminish the rights of individuals, the states-men?

Between these legal parties a contract could be made, or could be conceived as made. By the terms of this contract civil rights should be guaranteed; the soldier should first be a citizen. Rome gave the world order without liberty. The Celt administers government with occasional sacrifice of order to license. The Teuton conserves liberty and order. Democracy in America is the resultant of Roman, Celtic, and Teutonic ideas. It is a civil composite.

Its evolution is recorded in a series of political adjustments. Political adjustment is the administration of government. It is that of which Franklin frequently speaks. It is a practical affair. It is the other half of the apple of civil discord, as the theory of the state was for ages the first half.

Democracy in America is but slightly original. It was latent in European life long before the colonization of America. But the adjustment of local and general interests in the state has developed before our eyes in this country, and therefore it seems new and peculiarly our own. Each wrought in sincerity; but the seed was before flower or fruit. In the search after the genesis of government in America, there is no doubt that justice has not been done to English and to Dutch influence.

It is time present that is hard to see. No new theory of the state distinguishes the political philosophy of our century. Philosophically, it has been a century with a backward look. It has explored the past to as great a distance as it has anticipated the future.

It has set in order the genesis of our civil institutions, and has resolved us all into heirs-at-law. We have applied the past while working in the present. The style of the tool changes; but frost and rain and earth are, and weeds grow in spite of botany. But the apple on the tree is larger, fairer, and pleasanter to the taste than the wild apple; the flower on the stalk is the history of generations of gardeners. Flower and fruit are come from fruit and flower, and the changes during that time register an evolution hastened by intelligent culture.

The free man is a part of the system. At one time he was of opinion that he was at the centre of the universe, but a bit of glass and the fall of a Newtonian apple dislodged him. He has his place in nature, not in the worst rank. But he is a means of adjustment rather than a creator.

Democracy in America is another chapter in the history of that adjustment. There is no break in the continuity. Roman, Celt, Teuton, American, comes each in his time. No American colony broke wholly with the past. The necessity for unrestricted labor compelled a democracy.

Had the vast area now comprised within the United States been occupied, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, by a wealth-accumulating people, however civilized, who permitted European conquest, the conquerors would not have set up a democracy.

The story of Mexico and Peru would have been repeated of the Mississippi Valley. Had gold or silver abounded in New England, Pennsylvania, or Virginia, the evolution of democracy on the Atlantic seaboard would have been retarded for centuries. Had the mechanical devices familiar now in lumbering, in mining, in manufacturing, and in agriculture been familiar to the world at the opening of the seventeenth century, democracy in America would still be a matter of political speculation.

It was the necessity for labor that dethroned the king, and enthroned the people, in America. But the king is not dead. He never dies. We believe that we have crowned ourselves. We are Celtic yet. But our democracy is not wholly of our own having.

It is our political weather. It does not give universal satisfaction. We have had it long enough to tire of some of its virtues, and, if not acquainted with some of its vices, to be suspicious of their existence. The foundation of democracy is the necessity for free labor. If that ceases or is circumscribed, democracy will cease or will be circumscribed. Yes, the United States is a democracy, since we, the people, hold the ultimate political power.

This is where our history education might add some confusion. We are commonly taught that democracy is a product of ancient Greece. The city-state of Athens is credited with implementing a system of government of and by the people, whereby eligible citizens would congregate to make decisions.

That system of government, better understood today as direct democracy , lives on in the United States in the form of ballot initiatives and referenda.

Some states and localities afford their citizens the right to use these measures to directly enact, change, or repeal laws themselves. More commonly, we exercise our political power in a different way: by voting in elections to choose our representatives. These scholars understood representative democracy — the American variety — to be democracy all the same.

The United States is a republic because our elected representatives exercise political power. American constitutional design can best be understood as an effort to establish a sober form of democracy. It did so by embracing representation, the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the protection of individual rights—all concepts that were unknown in the ancient world where democracy had earned its poor reputation. In a large and diverse society, populist passions are likely to dissipate, as no single group can easily dominate.

Yet while dependent on the people, the Constitution did not embrace simple majoritarian democracy. The states, with unequal populations, got equal representation in the Senate.

The Electoral College also gave the states weight as states in selecting the president. But the centrality of states, a concession to political reality, was balanced by the House of Representatives, where the principle of representation by population prevailed, and which would make up the overwhelming number of electoral votes when selecting a president.

The American experiment, as advanced by Hamilton and Madison, sought to redeem the cause of popular government against its checkered history. Given the success of the experiment by the standards of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, we would come to use the term democracy as a stand-in for representative democracy, as distinct from direct democracy.

Consider that President Abraham Lincoln, facing a civil war, which he termed the great test of popular government, used constitutional republic and democracy synonymously, eloquently casting the American experiment as government of the people, by the people, and for the people. The Fourteenth recognized that all persons born in the U. The Fifteenth secured the vote for Black men.

Subsequent amendments, the Nineteenth, Twenty-Fourth, and Twenty-Sixth, granted women the right to vote, prohibited poll taxes in national elections, and lowered the voting age to Progress has been slow— and s ometimes halted, as is evident from current efforts to limit voting rights —and the country has struggled to become the democratic republic first set in motion two centuries ago.

At the same time, it has also sought to find the right republican constraints on the evolving body of citizens, so that majority rule—but not factious tempers—can prevail. Perhaps the most significant stumbling block has been the states themselves. Today, California is roughly 78 times larger than Wyoming. This sort of disparity has deeply shaped the Senate, which gives a minority of the population a disproportionate influence on national policy choices.

Similarly, in the Electoral College, small states get a disproportionate say on who becomes president.