Let’s be brutally honest here. The ideals of governance laid out in the U.S. Constitution simply don’t work for a lot of people — maybe even the vast majority of them. This country was founded by Anglo-Saxon Protestants who fully understood the necessity of order, self-control and personal responsibility in a free nation. Take any one of those three things away, and you’ve got a challenging environment for governance based on the ideals of personal freedom, liberty and limited government. Take all three of them away, and you’ve got a disaster on your hands.
Instead of a sweet land of liberty, we’ve morphed into a depraved land of libertines.
I think Heinlein had the right idea in Starship Troopers: Only those who served honorably in the military had the franchise.
The Framers realized virtue alone in a democratic republic was inadequate to secure the blessings of liberty across a continent. It is why the constitution of 1787 divided power among the people, the states, and the federal government they created.
Agree.
Just don’t see any way to fix the situation in a way that, A. preserves the American ideal of self-rule by the people, and, B. prevents those same people from making stupid decisions for all of us.
The only possible solution that does both is to change the way of thinking of the people, and that’s a very difficult row to hoe indeed.
And, as I said, the way of thinking of the people is moving in the wrong direction at the moment, and the rate of movement in that direction continues to increase.
The brutal truth is that our society had immense moral capital built up thru the 60s. We have been spending that capital down ever since, and we’re nearing the bottom of the barrel.
The not-making-stupid-decisions part could be handled by choosing leaders by a different method. But then we wouldn’t be America anymore, and anyway we’re still back to the problem that there IS no known way of consistently choosing leaders who won’t make stupid decisions.