While the book covers an interesting topic - I've as yet only skimmed the introduction - this essay is really too bland & vague to be worth engaging.https://twitter.com/joshtpm/status/1198997473265631234 …
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It's easy to lose sight of how much of a liberal, democratic, republican (in the small-l/d/r sense) outlier the USA still was in 1861. Even the British, with a 2-party parliamentary system that was rapidly consuming the last remains of monarchical power, saw us that way.
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Americans did not invent democracy or republican self-government. But both the Founding generation & Lincoln's generation were painfully aware that previous efforts had always come to grief. Really only after the Civil War did the world accept that the American experiment worked.
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Of course, no sooner did critics of American democracy move on from "democracy is too revolutionary, doesn't work, people need a king," they started in on "democracy's day is over, modern people need 'Economic Democracy' (Communism), government by Experts, or Fascism."
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Even the Founding Fathers were skeptical that people could govern themselves, but instead of giving up, they set to work carefully designing a system to require popular self-government to be deliberative, protect the rights of the minority, & privilege fundamental rights.
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End of conversation
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