It is unfortunate that far to many Americans do not understand the political history of how our Constitution was written and evolved through amendments and SCOTUS rulings.
America needs a new Constitution. Unfortunately, the men who wrote the current Constitution decided to write it in a way that makes it extremely difficult to change. Their goal was to assure that slavery would not be ended by Constitutional change.
Lincoln managed to add the 14th Amendment but after 10 years Reconstruction ended and the Jim Crow era developed. The motivations behind current efforts at voter suppression the unwillingness to change the electoral college are a continuation of that impulse.
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Hannah Arendt had a great fear that the American democracy would not last because voters did not realize that their responsibility to take their option to vote seriously was the basis of a government that functioned for the people. Based on how few Americans vote at even at presidential elections it is clear that the support for good government and leadership is like the odds of purchasing a winning ticket in the lottery. And now Citizens United has made the buying of elections even easier so how much longer the USA will be a fragile democracy is debatable.
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Hindsight allows us the privilege of seeing the two Adamses as the Cassandras of American politics: no one listened but they were ultimately right. The election of Andrew Jackson in 1828 opened a new avenue for populist adventure that ended in the Civil War 33 years later. Our current social media infatuation with populist authenticity might ultimately land us in the same predicament.
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We are dealing with a warped Nation. We are bent by too much money in the political arena and the capriciousness of human efforts for everyone to get their dues at the cost of the Republic. The US is no longer exceptional in that personal interest supersedes National interests.
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How do we compare the populace of 1800 with that of 2020? What was the education level in 1800 before the public school movement when most people could not read or write? Small wonder college graduates of 1800 did not trust the general public's opinions of matters of state. I'd like to see a more realistic comparison of the "average person" then and now in articles like this.
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The Electoral College was supposed to be a check on the popular vote to prevent an unqualified candidate getting elected to the Presidency. However, this was before parties took over the election of Electoral College electors. As the current system is by default a corrupt practice, the Electoral College is obsolete.
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But in 2016, popular democracy worked: the more qualified candidate and the one whose policies focused on national rather than personal good won the popular vote. We were stuck with an unqualified, immature, self-serving narcissist because of a mechanism designed by those founding fathers with profound distrust of popular democracy.
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"Sound familiar? Although the current occupant of the White House is nowhere mentioned by name in this book, his prodigious shadow looms large. The trends that so distressed the Adamses in the nation’s early years have intensified to a degree they could scarcely have imagined, thanks to virulent social media, the injection of vast sums of money into American campaigns, a politicized judiciary and rising economic inequality. We can only be grateful that father and son were spared this vision of their worst fears coming true."
Huh? As I recall, a democratic vote would have produced a different result. "Their worst fears" came true specifically because of the anti-democratic hurdles that they chose to bake into the system.
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When you talk to the average voter in this country, you quickly realize that most of them are more or less ignorant about who their elected representatives are and what they stand for on important issues. The founders put in place a number of checks on populism, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the Electoral College and the election of US Senators from within the state legislatures (unfortunately now by popular vote). JQA might have been our most intelligent president but Jackson was very popular and defeated his re-election bid. However, when you compare the accomplishments of both, in particular their positions on slavery you can see that JQA was a much better man.
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Empire comes and goes throughout recorded history and collapse of the Empire has always come from within. It is true for Roman, Ottoman, Mughal, Chinese Dynasties and it will be for America in the near future regardless of the political forms- democratic, autocratic, despotic, and theocratic alike. History has proven repeatedly, nothing can stop or slow down the decline once disintegration commences.
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I think democracy could work. That is, if people didn't already belong to cults based on imaginary beings and powers. The only free people are those who don't believe in made up stuff.
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What is not mentioned in this interesting article is that John Quincy Adams and his son John Adams were only the two early presidents who did NOT own slaves! George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and Andrew Jackson were all slave owners. Indeed the Virginia Bill of Rights was written by a Virginian slaveholder, George Mason, from which slaveholder James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights. So most of our Constitution's framers were slaveholders. If the Constitution did not include the word "democracy" it did not include the word "slavery" either.
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Just a quibble, but the dates on the portraits above this review are off. The one of John Quincy Adams is closer to 1840, and the one of John Adams is closer to 1810. Different generations, different styles of art.
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"certain unalienable rights"
white men who owned land
we have slowly injected everyone else as we have changed the original intent of YOUR Founding Fathers constitution-not my father
all modern nations have made changes to their CONSTITUTIONS except the United States
we are doomed to live with the same constitution for an eternity
all other modern nations have made changes to their constitution to keep up with a modern society
It is regrettable to see how few NY Times readers know about our history.
Take, e.g. RLW
"The Adams got it right. Any country that could elect someone as incompetent and iridiculous as Donald Trump to the Presidency should definitely question the "opinion" of the populace as the best means of achieving Democracy."
John Adams thought as worse about his successor, Mr. Jefferson as RWL thinks about Trump.
To connect to a recent NY Times pick, the remarks of the departing French Ambassardor on Trump, here is what Jefferson wrote to the French charge d'affaires , Mr. Letombe:
" Mr. Adams is vain, irritable, stubborn, endowed with excessive self-love, and still suffering pique at the preferences accorded to Franklin over him at Paris"
And yet, Adam steadfastly advised, that it was the duty American citizens to support the Jefferson administration, no matter what they thought about it.
And , incidentally, much of what Jefferson thought about Adam would fit Mr. Trump
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Populists who exploit the weaknesses in US democracy usually have one thing in common -- racial polarization. Notice the commonality between Andrew Jackson and the current Narcissist in Chief? Jackson predated dog whistles, he was a white supremacist, period. Trump has mastered the wink and the nod. But both Jackson and Trump won by denigrating elites, promoting the "everyman", and demonizing the "other" (non white). Jackson was a blot on our history, but at least he never lied to get out of military service. And he would have honored John McCain too, I would think.
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The Adams came from Massachusetts, where democracy (at least for free white men) prevailed in the format of the town meeting. But this was local democracy with every participant knowing almost all of the others.
On the state (commonwealth to be exact) it was representative government by those chosen by the towns in their meetings.
In brief, the Constitution created a republic, not a democracy. And the founders wanted to place as many layers as possible between the “people” and the ultimate government (senators chosen by the state legislature).
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@John Graybeard
Constitutional scholars will tell you a democracy and a republic are the same thing -- one is from Greek and one is from Latin.
It is regrettable that the Adamses and other Founders did not have a clear vision of the current situation. If they had foreseen how badly things could go wrong they would have done more to prevent it.... or perhaps they would have just given up.
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@Richard Schumacher
U.S. Constitution - Article 5
Our constitution is dead
The Adams got it right. Any country that could elect someone as incompetent and iridiculous as Donald Trump to the Presidency should definitely question the "opinion" of the populace as the best means of achieving Democracy. (Yes, we all know that Trump, and W, actually lost the "popular" vote.) But the electoral college could be eliminated tomorrow by the "will" of the populace.
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@RLW
“As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.”
― H.L. Mencken, On Politics: A Carnival of Buncombe
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The Founders were right in not proposing a pure democracy. They had the model of ancient Greece as an example of relatively pure democracy - Greece didn't last more than a few generations before it tore itself apart.
And if you think about it, only power hungry politicians really want pure democracy today. They know that rhetoric and emotion can sway the masses even if it does trample the rights weaker members of society.
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@Amy
Greece didn't participate in a democracy. Athens did, along with her allies. Greece tore itself apart during the Peloponnesian war, which was a conflict pitting democracies against oligarchies, with democratic city states being the losers.
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“how much even in this free country the course of public events depends on the private interests and passions of individuals.”
GREED AND SELF INTEREST
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Ah, John Adams. The man who thought US presidents should be treated and addressed as royalty. The man who made possible the Sedition Act of 1798 so he could jail anyone who said anything in a public forum that he thought was derogatory against the President. Far from being appalled at the current WH occupant, I think John Adams would have found someone with very similar attitudes.
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@Michael Lindsay
Maybe. but John had Abigail to straighten him out when he needed it. He also had the honorable occupation of farming and finally renewed his friendship with Jefferson.
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What was it that Churchill said? Democracy is the worst form of government ... except for all the others.
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It's ironic that the electoral college was conceived by the American Founders to make the election of demagogues like Trump more difficult. However, this mechanism, designed as a brake against populism, has ceased to function because of the dominance of political parties and the convention of "winner take all" voting of electoral college voters in most states. A further irony is that Trump, who repeatedly declared during the 2016 election that the electoral system was rigged against him, benefited from this essentially undemocratic measure which negates the concepts of "one person, one vote" and majority rule on which modern democracies are supposedly founded.
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The correspondence between Jefferson and Adams mostly documents informally their positions and expectations. Adams was well known to have been star-struck by royalty when he was in Europe. Jefferson was far less impressed; truly believing all men are equal, with some more educated. Both recognized the importance of an education.
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@Beaconps while it's true that Jefferson espoused the view that all men are equal, his definition of "men" seems to have been rather limited.
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@Beaconps America will have a chance to celebrate the passing of both Adams and Jefferson in the not-too-distant future. July 4, 2026 is the bi-centennial of the death of both. Also, the quarter-millennial mark for U.S. independence. Can America come together for one day to mark the friendship of diametrically opposed politicians and 250 years of freedom? Probably not. Because of the fourth bit of synchronicity connecting to July 4, 2026. It is the bi-centennial of the birth of the most famous American composer of the 19th century, Stephen Foster. Though he backed Lincoln and the Republicans later in life his early minstrel compositions will stir the pot of protest. How democratic. How partisan.
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this father-son example of distrusting the "unwashed masses" is hardly unique in american history. the electoral college was created, in part, to provide a safety valve for common people electing the "wrong" candidate offering state electors the opportunity to make things right. and now we have a president that doesn't trust anyone. waiter, check please!
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@pierre But, in 2000 and 2016 the Electoral College chose the less competent candidate over the will of the masses, washed or unwashed.
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Meet the new boss, the same as the old boss. The more things change the more things stay the same. And so it goes......
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