A Presentation: The Merits of Representative Democracy

Hey all,

I hope you all are having a terrific holiday.

As I emailed you a couple weeks ago, I think it’s really important for us to go back to the basics. Frankly, the country needs a civics lesson, myself included. That’s part of the reason why I started this group to begin with, but it’s only become clearer to me over the last year.

So as promised, I will be giving a series of presentations after the New Year addressing the basics of American government. I think a good understanding of our system of government (and where it came from) will help inform what’s truly at stake in our current struggle and direct our energies to solving our problems.

The first presentation will address the merits of representative democracy. I’ll briefly discuss the three main forms of government (democracy, autocracy and oligarchy), our separation from Great Britain in 1776, and the replacement of the Articles of Confederation with the adoption of the US Constitution, before discussing the particulars and merits of our constitutional system.

Sources I will draw from include Common Sense by Thomas Paine, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, and the Federalist Papers. Of course, all of those relate in one way or another to the work of the big Enlightenment figures (Locke, Hume, Hobbes, etc.).

An hour or so will be dedicated to the presentation. And then I’ll open it up for a conversation.

Hope many of you can make it on the 23rd. If you can’t, please email me. I will try and schedule another presentation for those who cannot make this one.

Happy New Years!

--Danny