What Worlds Have They to Conquer?: A Higher Ed Dystopia
Responses
Collapse of the Self-Governing Ethos
In response to: Can the American People Be Trusted to Govern Themselves?
A few months after the Federalists had secured the votes of nine state conventions to ratify the Constitution, James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson on the subject of future congressional action on a promised bill of rights. Madison proved ambivalent in his letter of October 17, 1788. Although he favored a bill of rights as an additional safeguard of “public liberty & individual rights,” a standard that could help keep rulers under the law, he worried that any formal declaration of rights amended to the Constitution might also be interpreted as conferring on the federal government powers not constitutionally granted to…
More Responses
The question posed in Joseph Postell’s Liberty Forum essay—“Can the American people be trusted to govern themselves?”—sounds strange, at least at first, to a student of empirical political science, especially of comparative politics. It sounds strange because it suggests that America’s experiment in self-government might have failed or might be failing or faltering in some…
Joseph Postell’s Liberty Forum essay intervenes in a multifaceted debate about whether Congress or the presidency best embodies the American people governing itself. A third possibility also entertained is that self-government emerges from a creative interplay between the two, and a fourth is that perhaps self-government isn’t possible at all. Absent from this debate are some…
I’m thankful to Richard Reinsch for putting together this lively and interesting forum on the pressing difficulty of self-government in America today, and to those who responded to my initial essay in the Liberty Law Forum. Each response brings a different perspective to this debate. They range from optimistic about the practice of self-government in…