|
|
|
|
|
|
Resources |
|
|
|
The Democratic Chimera
| Article
# : |
15938 |
|
|
Section : |
BOOK WORLD
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1989 |
2,732 Words |
| Author
: |
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
... (1990 of 16493 Characters)
Read Full Article
|
|
