Democracy Awakening

So far as we know, the 20-year-old who plowed his car into the crowd at Charlottesville wasn’t acting on orders from his führer or from anyone else. He acted on an impulse: the urge to kill and destroy. Rather than chase after Nazis or other phantoms of history, those concerned with the future of democracy should fix their attention on that young m

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You defeat a despot at the ballot box and work to create political affiliations and movements to undermine their destructive goals or else the problem gets worse. You cannot kill ideas. We should have learned this during the War on Terror and yet the faulty notion continues to proliferate.

And the constitutional architecture they crafted was based on a rational system of checks and balances to guard against the possibility, in the words of Alexander Hamilton, of “a man unprincipled in private life” and “bold in his temper” one day arising who might “mount the hobby horse of popularity” and “flatter and fall in with all the non sense

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So it was not just a case of simple ingratitude when Brutus and the others turned on the man who had given them a second chance. It was partly that. It was partly motivated by self-interest and disgruntlement, driven by the assassins’ sense of dignitas. But they were also defending one view of liberty and one view of the importance of Republican tr

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