National legislation put an end to that. But no national legislation has yet regularized the parties’ primary systems. I’m not commenting on whether such legislation would or would not be constitutional; the point is that it has not happened yet, and there has never been any vigorous political movement for such a reform either.
Kasich isn’t the only one…
Pretty funny clip, but if you want the payoff start at 4:00.
“A lot”? Really?
“A true democracy” at a national scale? Now the latter part, making the choice of representation more transparent and more fully democratic … sure … but “true democracy” was explicitly rejected by the founders of this country and for good reasons. Wiki actually has a fairly good succinct summary of the thinking.
Practically speaking I think only a very few actually do not want a representational democracy with built in checks and balances, not a “true democracy.” The differing opinions seem to me to be about how best to implement that representation transparently and fairly.
What matters is that the U.S. is or at least should be a democratic republic, as opposed to an aristocratic republic, like the old Venetian Republic – or the states of the antebellum South – or what the whole U.S. has been gradually turning into since 1980.
Those are not good reasons. They are reasons compelling only to persons of the properties class.
That is a good reason. But this:
is not only a bad reason but historically false and dishonest. And so, for that matter, is Madison’s assertion that democracies have been “as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” None of which deaths ever had much to with the mob grabbing the property of the rich, either. That was not the history of the Athenian republic, the Roman Republic, the Dutch Republic, the English Commonwealth, the Swiss Confederation, the cities of northern Italy, or any other historical example of which the FFs could have been thinking.
You are using a right-wing 21st century definition. You are allowed to do that, but this definition is not prevalent among the larger community of English speakers.
Here is how it looked to the drafters of the US Constitution:
“Speech of James Wilson*”
The Essential Federalist and Anti-Federalist Papers:
If James Wilson was alive today, he might detect a fourth category, the constitutional monarchy.
“Representative democracy” and “democracy” are synonyms today, as they have been since the eighteenth century except, and recently, among American conservatives.
In Wilson’s terms, today, Russia is a monarchy, China is an aristocracy, and the United States is, still, “a republic or democracy.”
Well, yeah, sure.
Certainly it was. Nevertheless, there are “a lot” of people who argue that the founders were wrong. (I’ll also note that this reference to the “Founders” as some monolithic bloc that disagreed on nothing grates on my last nerve. They disagreed on everything. Everything that the U.S. is based on was a compromise.)
Many – not all – of the framers of the Constitution hoped to keep the vote out of the hands of those without substantial property. One way they tried to do this was to conflate direct democracy, which had a poor track record and is obviously impractical except in the smallest communities, with normal representative democracy. Note the use, by Hamilton, in #3466, of the phrases “pure democracy” and “ancient democracies” as opposed to just plain democracy, which people would have taken to be representative democracy.
At the time of the US Constitutional convention, Pennsylvania already had something close* to universal male suffrage. People in other states could see how things were going in that direction.
- Googling, I can’t find if black men were then allowed to vote in Pennsylvania. It may have varied by locality.
It has nothing to do with some right-wing definition. I’m a student of history, and the last and only ‘true democracy’ was in ancient Athens, where it was workable because of a relatively small population, and even then you’d have to consider it a special form of representative democracy, with extremely short term limits. In theory, though, every citizen would serve over time.
The internet (or at least remote networking) would make it barely possible today, though there would be a multitude of obstacles and costs simply in getting the system up and running.
I have a lot of trouble defining China as an aristocracy as well, because (at least post-Plato/neoplatonism) aristocracy is by definition based on familial inheritance. As far as I know, there have been no General Secretaries who were even related to each other.
I was just going by James Wilson’s definition. Since Plato didn’t speak English, I wouldn’t look to him to find out what an English word means.
I think Wilson would say that aristocracies and monarchies today are less often hereditary than in his day.
As for China, it is led by the standing committee of the Politburo. The standing committee names it’s successors as members retire. And it names one of its members for a single ten year term as general secretary. This arrangement was set up after Mao’s death because of dissatisfaction with the previous system, where there was a supreme monarch answerable to no one. Xi Jinping is acting more and more like a monarch, and I hope he does leave power at the end of his term.
You realize that ‘democracy’ (the term) derives from the Greek, right? (‘Demokratos’) Btw, post-neoplatonism would start roughly around the fall of the Roman Empire.
“Aristocracy” is a Greek word – that is, a word of Greek origin, which does not necessarily means it has to mean exactly the same thing in English as Plato or Aristotle would have meant by it, but it does mean they should be taken into account.
Compare postmodernism, and despair.
Bill O’Reilly may be the only person more racist than Donald Trump:
Hey, you ancients! Get off my lawn!
Damn ancients…
The problem is you are equating only “direct democracy” with “true democracy” while I think both direct and representative democracy is “true democracy” if they are established on the principle of mass participation, with the goal of maximizing popular involvement. That said, while I’m not some Zinnite-SJW 'tard who dismisses all the Founders as cisheteropatriarchal racist genocidal imperialist warmongers or whatever, I don’t see why their particularistic views and prejudices (which often were aristocratic) in a drastically different America of some 4 million people in a primarily agrarian-commercial society that was overwhelmingly of British descent and Protestant should be automatically applicable to the drastically different America of to-day.
I just saw this pop up on the AP and thought it was worth posting: [
](http://elections.ap.org/content/ivanka-and-eric-trump-wont-be-voting-their-father-ny-0):smack:
Hilarious!
Let’s go to the quarry and throw stuff down there!
Wow. That’s something else.
I’m sorry, the quarry went down the rabbit-hole.
Which thing has got to be, for all practical purposes at this point, just as old as the original.
See “1920s-Style Death Ray,” and despair.