Even in this bastion of deliberation and direct democracy, a nasty suspicion had taken hold: that the levers of power are not controlled by the people.
The same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from government were now commended for facilitating government "Of the people, by the people, for the people."
For good reason, they are growing as disenchanted with democracy as the people of Oxford, Massachusetts, did.
A little more than a year after America rebelled against political elites by electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, its government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before.
If we want to address the root causes of populism, we need to start by taking an honest accounting of the ways in which power has slipped out of the people's hands, and think more honestly about the ways in which we can-and cannot-put the people back in control.
In her book Corruption in America, the legal scholar Zephyr Teachout notes that the institutions of the United States were explicitly designed to counter the myriad ways in which people might seek to sway political decisions for their own personal gain.
As the examples of Egypt, Thailand, and other countries have demonstrated again and again, a political elite with less and less backing from the people ultimately has to resort to more and more repressive steps to hold on to its power; in the end, any serious attempt to sacrifice democracy in order to safeguard liberty is likely to culminate in an end to the rule of law as well as the rule of the people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america-is-not-a-democracy/550931/
The same institutions that had once been designed to exclude the people from government were now commended for facilitating government "Of the people, by the people, for the people."
For good reason, they are growing as disenchanted with democracy as the people of Oxford, Massachusetts, did.
A little more than a year after America rebelled against political elites by electing a self-proclaimed champion of the people, its government is more deeply in the pockets of lobbyists and billionaires than ever before.
If we want to address the root causes of populism, we need to start by taking an honest accounting of the ways in which power has slipped out of the people's hands, and think more honestly about the ways in which we can-and cannot-put the people back in control.
In her book Corruption in America, the legal scholar Zephyr Teachout notes that the institutions of the United States were explicitly designed to counter the myriad ways in which people might seek to sway political decisions for their own personal gain.
As the examples of Egypt, Thailand, and other countries have demonstrated again and again, a political elite with less and less backing from the people ultimately has to resort to more and more repressive steps to hold on to its power; in the end, any serious attempt to sacrifice democracy in order to safeguard liberty is likely to culminate in an end to the rule of law as well as the rule of the people.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/03/america-is-not-a-democracy/550931/
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