Democracy Lincoln Quotes

Elections belong to the people. It's their decision. If they decide to turn their back on the fire and burn their behinds, then they will just have to sit on their blisters.

I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to bring them the real facts, and beer.

The ballot is stronger than the bullet.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.

We the people are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

Our safety, our liberty, depends upon preserving the Constitution of the United States as our fathers made it inviolate. The people of the United States are the rightful masters of both Congress and the courts, not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert the Constitution.

The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearth-stone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature. --as quoted in THE RIVER OF WINGED DREAMS

A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else... The love, the democracy, the floundering into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.

If we put our trust in the common sense of common men and 'with malice toward none and charity for all' go forward on the great adventure of making political, economic and social democracy a practical reality, we shall not fail.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’.

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew. I wouldn’t have been surprised if they had linked arms with a woman in a burka and a Masai warrior, to belt out ‘It’s a Small World After All,’ flanked by a chorus line of nuns and field-tripping, rainbow-skinned schoolchildren

The most sanctified figure in American historiography is, by no accident, the Great Saint of centralizing "democracy" and the strong unitary nation-state: Abraham Lincoln. And so didn't Lincoln use force and violence, and on a massive scale, on behalf of the mystique of the sacred "Union," to prevent the South from seceding? Indeed he did, and on the foundation of mass murder and oppression, Lincoln crushed the South and outlawed the very notion of secession (based on the highly plausible ground that since the separate states voluntarily entered the Union they should be allowed to leave). But not only that: for Lincoln created the monstrous unitary nation-state from which individual and local liberties have never recovered.

Abraham Lincoln struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy’s sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life.

I fear you do not fully comprehend the danger of abridging the liberties of the people. Nothing but the very sternest necessity can ever justify it. A government had better go to the very extreme of toleration, than to do aught that could be construed into an interference with, or to jeopardize in any degree, the common rights of its citizens.

We cannot, of course, expect every leader to possess the wisdom of Lincoln or Mandela’s largeness of soul. But when we think about what questions might be most useful to ask, perhaps we should begin by discerning what our prospective leaders believe it worthwhile for us to hear. Do they cater to our prejudices by suggesting that we treat people outside our ethnicity, race, creed or party as unworthy of dignity and respect? Do they want us to nurture our anger toward those who we believe have done us wrong, rub raw our grievances and set our sights on revenge? Do they encourage us to have contempt for our governing institutions and the electoral process? Do they seek to destroy our faith in essential contributors to democracy, such as an independent press, and a professional judiciary? Do they exploit the symbols of patriotism, the flag, the pledge in a conscious effort to turn us against one another? If defeated at the polls, will they accept the verdict, or insist without evidence they have won? Do they go beyond asking about our votes to brag about their ability to solve all problems put to rest all anxieties and satisfy every desire? Do they solicit our cheers by speaking casually and with pumped up machismo about using violence to blow enemies away? Do they echo the attitude of Musolini: “The crowd doesn’t have to know, all they have to do is believe and submit to being shaped.”? Or do they invite us to join with them in building and maintaining a healthy center for our society, a place where rights and duties are apportioned fairly, the social contract is honored, and all have room to dream and grow. The answers to these questions will not tell us whether a prospective leader is left or right-wing, conservative or liberal, or, in the American context, a Democrat or a Republican. However, they will us much that we need to know about those wanting to lead us, and much also about ourselves. For those who cherish freedom, the answers will provide grounds for reassurance, or, a warning we dare not ignore.

We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past--at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.

Across the sea fat kings watched and were gleeful, that something begun so well had now gone off the rails (as down South similar kings watched), and if it went off the rails, so went the whole kit, forever, and if someone ever thought to start it up again, well, it would be said (and said truly): The rabble cannot manage itself. Well, the rabble could. The rabble would. He would lead the rabble in managing. The thing would be won.

The lessons of history were hard to ignore. Every democracy ever known had failed, beginning with the Greeks twenty-four centuries earlier. They had succumbed, one by one, to all the well-known vices of the people: corruption, greed, lust, ethnic hatred, distractibility, or simply a fatal indifference.

The privilege of creating and issuing money is not only the supreme prerogative of Government, but it is the Government's greatest creative opportunity. By the adoption of these principles, the long-felt want for a uniform medium will be satisfied. The taxpayers will be saved immense sums of interest, discounts and exchanges. The financing of all public enterprises, the maintenance of stable government and ordered progress, and the conduct of the Treasury will become matters of practical administration. The people can and will be furnished with a currency as safe as their own government. Money will cease to be the master and become the servant of humanity. Democracy will rise superior to the money power.

An interest willing to suppress speech was an interest willing to put its own power ahead of democracy.

To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.

As Lincoln wrote, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but can not do, at all, or can not, so well do, for themselves—in their separate, and individual capacities.”[10]

The people who visit the [Lincoln] memorial always look like an advertisement for democracy, so bizarrely, suspiciously diverse that one time I actually saw a man in a cowboy hat standing there reading the Gettysburg Address next to a Hasidic Jew

Both Lincoln and King were appealing to the story—the best story—we tell about ourselves. That our story begins with Americans falling short of the ideals embedded in the Founding is not an indictment of the ideals; it is testament to the nobility of America’s story arc.

The Call: A Lincoln Emancipation Conference to Discuss Means for Securing Political and Civil Equality for the Negro. “ ‘A house divided against itself cannot stand,’ ” Villard wrote, and “this government cannot exist half-slave and half-free any better today than it could in 1861. Hence we call upon all the believers in democracy to join in a national conference for the discussion of present evils, the voicing of protests, and the renewal of the struggle for civil and political liberty.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln's principal than you 'can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people's lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln's logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Trough its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats - either real or imaginary. When you live under such an oligarchy, there is always some crisis or other that takes priority over boring stuff such as healthcare and pollution. If the nation is facing external invasion or diabolical subversion, who has time to worry about overcrowded hospitals and polluted rivers? By manufacturing a never-ending stream of crises, a corrupt oligarchy can prolong its rule indefinitely.

In a democracy, the pursuit of power for power’s sake, devoid of devotion to equal justice and fair play, is tempting but destructive

Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion.

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

Lincoln believed that the ability to frame an argument and sway minds was the essence of power in a representative democracy

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.

The colonization proposals underscored a tragic reality. One could—and many white Americans did—oppose slavery while failing to engage the prospective creation of a multiracial democracy.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as “the capability of a people to govern themselves.

Only a visionary leadership that can motivate "the better angels of our nature," as Lincoln said, and activate possibilities for a freer, more efficient, and stable America -- only that leadership deserves cultivation and support. / This new leadership must be grounded in grassroots organizing that highlights democratic accountability. Whoever our leaders will be as we approach the twenty-first century, their challenge will be to help Americans determine whether a genuine multiracial democracy can be created and sustained in an era of global economy and a moment of xenophobic frenzy.

A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people.

Lincoln never forgot that in a democracy the leader’s strength ultimately depends on the strength of his bond with the people. In the mornings he set aside several hours to hear the needs of the ordinary people lined up outside his office, his time of “public opinion baths.” Kindness, empathy, humor, humility, passion, and ambition all marked him from the start. But he grew, and continued to grow, into a leader who became so powerfully fused with the problems tearing his country apart that his desire to lead and his need to serve coalesced into a single indomitable force. That force has not only enriched subsequent leaders but has provided our people with a moral compass to guide us. Such leadership offers us humanity, purpose, and wisdom, not in turbulent times alone, but also in our everyday lives.

To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A

Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that ‘you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time’. If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realise this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realising the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others, and divert attention to external threats – either real or imaginary.

His closing promise of survival for “government of the people, by the people, for the people” may have had its origin in Daniel Webster’s 1830 speech calling the American government “made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people,” but more probably he derived it from a sermon of Theodore Parker, to which Herndon had called his attention, defining democracy as “a government of all the people, by all the people, for all the people.

It was Abraham Lincoln who struck off the chains of black Americans, but it was Lyndon Johnson who led them into voting booths, closed democracy's sacred curtain behind them, placed their hands upon the lever that gave them a hold on their own destiny, made them, at last and forever, a true part of American political life. How true a part? Forty-three years later, a mere blink of history's eye, a black American, Barack Obama, was sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office.

To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.

It’s not that Jackson had a “dark side,” as his apologists rationalize and which all human beings have, but rather that Jackson was the Dark Knight in the formation of the United States as a colonialist, imperialist democracy, a dynamic formation that continues to constitute the core of US patriotism. The most revered presidents—Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama—have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on what is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.

Is it not Abraham Lincoln who has cleared the title to our democracy? He made plain, once for all, that democratic government, associated as it is with all the mistakes and shortcomings of the common people, still remains the most valuable contribution America has made to the moral life of the world.

The lesson for progressive education is that it requires in an urgent degree, a degree more pressing than was incumbent upon former innovators, a philosophy of education based upon a philosophy of experience. I remarked incidentally that the philosophy in question is, to paraphrase the saying of Lincoln about democracy, one of education of, by and for experience. No one of these words, of, by, or for, names anything which is self-evident. Each of them is a challenge to discover and put into operation a principle of order and organization which follows from understanding what educative experience signifies.

Man’s capacity for self-government is on trial before the world,” he said, “and we must conquer or the verdict will be against democratic government and in favor of privilege and despotism everywhere. The conspirators and rebels are attempting the destruction of our democratic government, because democracy…is opposed to privilege and slavery.

Democracy in America was never the same as Liberty in Europe. In Europe Liberty was a great life-throb. But in America Democracy was always something anti-life. The greatest democrats, like Abraham Lincoln, had always a sacrificial, self-murdering note in their voices. American Democracy was a form of self-murder, always. Or of murdering somebody else.

Passion could fray the bonds of union, divide one from another, and fatally wound the American experiment in democracy that Lincoln defined as “the capability of a people to govern themselves.” He worried about trouble coming from the many as well as the few—or even the one, in the form of a demagogue who might try to profit from lawlessness and distrust.

From Plato to Kant, the substance of what is known as the Golden Rule—one common to the world’s religious and moral traditions—has occupied philosophers across the ages. Lincoln’s own sensibility—both moral and political—was founded on this injunction. “As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master,” he once wrote. “This expresses my idea of democracy.

It is the autobiography of a slave who became and advisor to President Lincoln and the diplomatic representative of the United States to Haiti and the Dominican Republic. Hence, this narrative of his life has inspired Negroes and other disadvantaged Americans to believe that, despite the imperfections of American democracy, a self-made man many aspire to greatness.

Surely part of the moral meaning of representative government is that the representatives from all parts of a vast nation coming together in a great mosaic not only represent the interests and visions of their respective localities but also then learn from each other, affect each other, reason together, diminish their respective provincialisms, and shape something nearer to the common good.

In these pursuits Lincoln was committed to what Theodore Parker defined as the “American Idea,” which was a “composite idea…of three simple ones: 1. Each man is endowed with certain unalienable rights. 2. In respect of these rights all men are equal. 3. A government is to protect each man in the entire and actual enjoyment of all the unalienable rights….The idea demands…a democracy—a government of all, for all, and by all.

The democracy of to-day hold the liberty of one man to be absolutely nothing when in conflict with another man's right of property... This is a world of compensations; and he would -be- no slave must consent to -have- no slave. Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it. All honor to Jefferson - to the man who, in the concrete pressure of a struggle for national independence by a single people, had the coolness, forecast, and capacity to introduce into a merely revolutionary document, an abstract truth, applicable to all men and all times, and so embalm it there, that to-day, and in all coming days, it shall be a rebuke and a stumbling-block to the very harbingers of re-appearing tyranny and oppression. Your obedient Servant, [Abraham Lincoln] April 6, 1859, in a letter to MA State Rep Henry L. Pierce Springfield, Ill.

Majority rule is not “destroyed” by smaller political units. Quite the contrary; it is rendered more efficient in serving the taxpaying public. Majority rule voting will exist in smaller political units even more efficiently than in larger, more centralized ones. That's why Switzerland, with its highly decentralized system of government and with power vested in more than sixty cantons, is arguably the world's most peaceful and prosperous democracy.

There is frequently another way to look at things and we are encouraged to do exactly that if we want to grow as a nation, however when we mess with the principles of what made our country great we are in danger of upsetting the apple cart. Many civilized countries that did, lost their freedom in a rapid downhill spiral. Nero fiddled as Rome burned. Cubans lost out by electing Fidel Castro and the Germans and Italians, wanting a better life, voted for Mussolini and Hitler.

In his low-key, taciturn, winning way, Lindbergh told the airfield crowds and the radio listeners who he was and what he’d done, and by the time he climbed back aboard his plane to take off for his next stop, he could have announced that, following the von Ribbentrop White House dinner, the First Lady would be inviting Adolf Hitler and his girlfriend to spend the Fourth of July weekend as vacation guests in the Lincoln bedroom of the White House and still have been cheered by his countrymen as democracy’s savior.

Belknap replied, “Slavery hath been abolished here by public opinion.” Understanding the importance of public sentiment, abolitionists pioneered the practice of radical agitation in a democracy. They did not put forward a detailed plan of emancipation. Rather, their aim, explained Wendell Phillips, perhaps the movement’s greatest orator, was “to alter public opinion,” to bring about a moral transformation whereby white Americans recognized the humanity and equal rights of blacks. By changing public discourse, by redefining the politically “possible,” the abolitionist movement affected far more Americans than actually joined its ranks.42

The fate of the Union, the possibilities of democracy, and the future of slavery, then, were the stakes of a war that Abraham Lincoln chose to wage to total victory—or to defeat. A president who led a divided country in which an implacable minority gave no quarter in a clash over power, race, identity, money, and faith has much to teach us in a twenty-first-century moment of polarization, passionate disagreement, and differing understandings of reality. For while Lincoln cannot be wrenched from the context of his particular times, his story illuminates the ways and means of politics, the marshaling of power in a democracy, the durability of racism, and the capacity of conscience to help shape events.

Absolute consistency is not a luxury available to the office-seeking and office-holding leaders of a democracy. True greatness in the political arena comes when moral convictions are brought to bear amid conflicting interests. That, in the end, is what Abraham Lincoln did: Amid the myriad forces of politics and of the competing claims of power, he held fast to his view that slavery must end and justice must be pursued. Four miles away from Lincoln’s White House, at the Washington Navy Yard, the laborer Michael Shiner understood the president. “The Hon Abraham Lincoln…was as brave [a] man that ever live[d] on the face of earth,” Shiner wrote, “and all that he done he done it with clear [conscience] before his creator.

Echoing Lincoln, Larson explained, “Our underlying philosophy . . . is this: if a job has to be done to meet the needs of people, and no one else can do it, then it is a proper function of the federal government.” Americans had, “for the first time in our history, discovered and established the Authentic American Center in politics. This is not a Center in the European sense of an uneasy and precarious mid-point between large and powerful left-wing and right-wing elements of varying degrees of radicalism. It is a Center in the American sense of a common meeting-ground of the great majority of our people on our own issues, against a backdrop of our own history, our own current setting and our own responsibilities for the future.”[6]

Let reverence for the laws be breathed by every American mother to the lisping babe that prattles on her lap; let it be taught in schools, in seminaries, and in colleges; let it be written in primers, spelling-books, and in almanacs; let it be preached from the pulpit, proclaimed in legislative halls, and enforced in courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation; and let the old and the young, the rich and the poor, the grave and the gay of all sexes and tongues and colors and conditions, sacrifice unceasingly upon its altars. While ever a state of feeling such as this shall universally or even very generally prevail throughout the nation, vain will be every effort, and fruitless every attempt, to subvert our national freedom

It seemed a church committee needed an architect to build a bridge “over a very dangerous and rapid river.” Designer after designer failed, until one boasted—to the horror of his priggish benefactors—“I could build a bridge to the infernal regions, if necessary.” The chairman assured his shocked colleagues: “he is so honest a man and so good an architect that if he states soberly and positively that he can build a bridge to Hades—why, I believe it. But,” he admitted, “I have my doubts about the abutment on the infernal side!” Henry Villard could not help noticing “Lincoln’s facial contortions” as he reached the story’s moral: “So,” he concluded, when “politicians said they could harmonize the Northern and Southern wings of the democracy, why, I believed them. But I had my doubts about the abutment on the Southern side.

Cambridge. Russia does offer an alternative model to liberal democracy, but this model is not a coherent political ideology. Rather, it is a political practice in which a number of oligarchs monopolize most of a country’s wealth and power and then use their control of the media to hide their activities and cement their rule. Democracy is based on Abraham Lincoln’s principle that “you can fool all the people some of the time, and some people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.” If a government is corrupt and fails to improve people’s lives, enough citizens will eventually realize this and replace the government. But government control of the media undermines Lincoln’s logic, because it prevents citizens from realizing the truth. Through its monopoly over the media, the ruling oligarchy can repeatedly blame all its failures on others and divert attention to external threats, either real or imaginary.

Absolute consistency is not a luxury available to the office-seeking and office-holding leaders of a democracy. True greatness in the political arena comes when moral convictions are brought to bear amid conflicting interests. That, in the end, is what Abraham Lincoln did: Amid the myriad forces of politics and of the competing claims of power, he held fast to his view that slavery must end and justice must be pursued. Four miles away from Lincoln’s White House, at the Washington Navy Yard, the laborer Michael Shiner understood the president. “The Hon Abraham Lincoln…was as brave [a] man that ever live[d] on the face of earth,” Shiner wrote, “and all that he done he done it with clear [conscience] before his creator.” Lincoln surely sought to do so. “Moral cowardice is something which I think I never had,” he remarked. We study Lincoln not because he was perfect but because he was a man whose inconsistencies resonate even now. So, too, does his bigness.

Although industry was now in control of the national government, the Republican party which represented it was a minority party; and Northern and Southern Democrats, especially Southern Democrats with increased power by counting the full Negro population, together with Western malcontents, could easily oust the Republicans. It was because of this thought that Northern industry made its great alliance with abolition-democracy. The consummation of this alliance came slowly and reluctantly and after vain effort to- ward understanding with the South which was unsuccessful until 1876. When Lincoln first laid down his general proclamation concerning Reconstruction, industry paid little attention to it: let the South come back; let it come back quickly, and let us go to work and make money and repair the losses of the war by increased business; and then let the nation go far beyond this through domination of the American market, and perhaps even of the markets of the world.

The DUCE diverted funds intended for the Fiume adventure, and used them for His own election campaign. He was arrested for the illegal possession of arms, sent parcel bombs to the Archbishop of Milan and its mayor, and after election was, as is well-known, responsible for the assassination of Di Vagno and Matteoti. Since then He has been responsible for the murders of Don Mizzoni Amendola, the Rosselli brothers, and the journalist Piero Gobetti, quite apart from the hundreds who have been the victims of His squadistri in Ferrara, Ravenna and Trieste, and the thousands who have perished in foreign places whose conquest was useless and pointless. We Italians remain eternally grateful for this, and consider that so much violence has made us a superior race, just as the introduction of revolvers into Parliament and the complete destruction of constitutional democracy have raised our institutions to the greatest possible heights of civilisation. Since the illegal seizure of power, Italy has known an average of five acts of political violence per diem, the DUCE has decreed that 1922 is the new Annus Domini, and He was pretended to be a Catholic in order to dupe the Holy Father into supporting Him against the Communists, even though He really is one Himself. He has completely suborned the press by wrecking the premises of dissident newspapers and journals. In 1923 he invaded Corfu for no apparent reason, and was forced to withdraw by the League of Nations. In 1924 He gerrymandered the elections, and He has oppressed minorities in the Tyrol and the North-East. He sent our soldiers to take part in the rape of Somalia and Libya, drenching their hands in the blood of innocents, He has doubled the number of the bureaucracy in order to tame the bourgeoisie, He has abolished local government, interfered with the judiciary, and purportedly has divinely stopped the flow of lava on Mt Etna by a mere act of will. He has struck Napoleonic attitudes whilst permitting Himself to be used to advertise Perugina chocolates, He has shaved his head because He is ashamed to be seen to be going bald, He has been obliged to hire a tutor to teach Him table manners, He has introduced the Roman salute as a more hygienic alternative to the handshake, He pretends not to need spectacles, He has a repertoire of only two facial expression, He stands on a concealed podium whilst making speeches because He is so short, He pretends to have studied economics with Pareto, and He has assumed infallibility and encouraged the people to carry His image in marches, as though He were a saint. He is a saint, of course. He has (and who are we to disagree?) declared Himself greater than Aristotle, Kant, Aquinas, Dante, Michelangelo, Washington, Lincoln, and Bonaparte, and He has appointed ministers to serve Him who are all sycophants, renegades, racketeers, placemen, and shorter than He is. He is afraid of the Evil Eye and has abolished the second person singular as a form of address. He has caused Toscanini to be beaten up for refusing to play 'Giovinezza', and He has appointed academicians to prove that all great inventions were originally Italian and that Shakespeare was the pseudonym of an Italian poet. He has built a road through the site of the forum, demolishing fifteen ancient churches, and has ordered a statue of Hercules, eighty metres high, which will have His own visage, and which so far consists of a part of the face and one gigantic foot, and which cannot be completed because it has already used up one hundred tons of metal.

This administration has not been content simply to reduce the Congress to subservience. By closely guarding information about their own behavior, they are dismantling a fundamental element of our system of checks and balances. A government for the people and by the people should be transparent to the people. Yet the Bush administration seems to prefer making policy in secret, based on information that is not available to the public and in a process that is insulated from any meaningful participation by Congress or the American people. When Congress’s approval is required under our current Constitution, it is to be given without meaningful debate. As Bush said to one Republican senator in a meeting, “Look, I want your vote—I’m not going to debate it with you.” When reason and logic are removed from the process of democracy—when there is no longer any purpose in debating or discussing the choices we have to make—then all the questions before us are reduced to a simple equation: Who can exercise the most raw power? The system of checks and balances that has protected the integrity of our American system for more than two centuries has been dangerously eroded in recent decades, and especially in the last six years. In order to reestablish the needed balance, and to check the dangerous expansion of an all-powerful executive branch, we must first of all work to restore the checks and balances that our Founders knew were essential to ensure that reason could play its proper role in American democracy. And we must then concentrate on reempowering the people of the United States with the ability and the inclination to fully and vigorously participate in the national conversation of democracy. I am convinced this can be done and that the American people can once again become a “well-informed citizenry.” In the following chapter I outline how. CHAPTER NINE A Well-Connected Citizenry As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of twenty-eight, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people.” Many

At the level of economic theory, the great fallacy in the logic of David Ricardo, the father of free-trade theory, was to view the gains and losses of trade in a static fashion, as a snapshot at a single point in time. In Ricardo’s theory, whose variants are espoused by free-market economists to this day, if nineteenth-century Britain offered better and cheaper manufactured goods, the US should buy them and export something where it could compete—say, raw cotton and lumber—even if that meant the US never developed an industrial economy. By the same token, if twentieth-century America made the best cars, machine tools, and steel, Japan and Korea should import those, and continue to export cheap toys and rice. And if other nations subsidized US industries, Americans, rather than being fearful of displacement, should accept the “gift.” What Ricardo missed—and what leaders from Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt grasped (likewise statesmen in nations from Japan to Brazil), as well as dissenting economists like the German Friedrich List and the Americans Paul Krugman and Dani Rodrik—was that the dynamic gains of economic development over time far surpass the static gains at a single point in time. Economic advantage is not something bestowed by nature. Advantage can be deliberately created—an insight for which Krugman won a Nobel Prize. Policies of economic development often required an active role for the state, in violation of laissez-faire.

In the middle of the Civil War, Lincoln had decided it was time to make U.S. agriculture more efficient: each person not needed on the farm was another person freed up to do something else. That’s why the Department of Agriculture was created in the first place, as a vast science lab.

Still, Lincoln went on to insist, what made the United States different from Europe, indeed what made its democracy possible, was

Yet Ford was also a widely admired, even beloved, figure in the United States, especially in the Midwest. A “poor farm boy who made good,” the plainspoken businessman was revered by many rural Americans as a folk hero, alongside such presidents as Washington and Lincoln.

The Civil War broke America’s democracy. One-third of American states did not participate in the 1864 election; twenty-two of fifty Senate seats and more than a quarter of House seats were left vacant. President Lincoln famously suspended habeas corpus and issued constitutionally dubious executive orders, though, of course, one notable executive order freed the slaves. And following the Union victory, much of the former Confederacy was placed under military rule.

F.S. Nariman rightly found some similarity between the decision of the ADM Jabalpur and that of Dred Scott, rendered more than a century ago in 1857 by a 6:2 majority of the American Supreme Court. The majority in Dred Scott held that a black person could never be a citizen of the US. A strong criticism of this view by Abraham Lincoln got national attention and ultimately helped him win the presidential election, which changed history. In both the cases, powerful dissenting opinions brought about far-reaching changes in these two democracies.

It was one of those periods of excitement, gathering, contagious, universal, which, while they last, exalt and clarify the minds of men, giving to the mere words country, human rights, democracy, a meaning and a force beyond that of sober and logical argument. They were convictions, maintained and defended by the supreme logic of passion. That penetrating fire ran in and roused those primary instincts that make their lair in the dens and caverns of the mind. What is called the great popular heart was awakened, that indefinable something which may be, according to circumstances, the highest reason or the most brutish unreason. But

He wants to believe that Shakespeare wrote all those books, that Lincoln fought the Civil War to free the slaves and the United States fought World War II to rescue the Jews and keep the world safe for democracy, that Jesus and the double feature are coming back. But I’m no Panglossian American.

What it really means is that the general must understand that he is not a free agent and cannot hope to become one. He has to work within the limitations imposed by the fact that he is working for a democracy, which means that at times he must modify or abandon the soundest military plan and make do with a second-best.

Economic development provided the basis, Lincoln said much later, that would allow every American “an unfettered start, and a fair chance, in the race of life.” To Lincoln’s mind, the fundamental test of a democracy was its capacity to “elevate the condition of men, to lift artificial weights from all shoulders, to clear the paths of laudable pursuit for all.” A real democracy would be a meritocracy where those born in the lower ranks could rise as far as their natural talents and discipline might take them.

Switzerland is the closest to what Aristotle, Plato and Socrates had in mind when democracy was conceived. Americans proudly recite Lincoln’s famous democratic battle cry: ‘Government for the people, by the people and of the people, - but in fact this is a better description of the Swiss model.

But not everyone agreed. In 1858, rising politician Abraham Lincoln told an audience: “I ask you in all soberness, if all these things, if indulged in, if ratified, if confirmed and endorsed, if taught to our children, and repeated to them, do not tend to rub out the sentiment of liberty in the country, and to transform this Government into a government of some other form. Those arguments . . . are the arguments that kings have made for enslaving the people in all ages of the world. . . . Whether it come from the mouth of a King, an excuse for enslaving the people of his country, or from the mouth of men of one race as a reason for enslaving the men of another race, it is all the same old serpent.”[14]

Lincoln’s vision gave the fledgling Republican Party a set of principles to reorganize the government into one that actively worked for ordinary men. Rather than simply protecting the property of wealthy slaveholders, the government would allow all men equal access to resources, including education, so they could be economically secure.

the Southern states were seceding; they were also spreading contempt for the basic assumptions of democracy. Hostility to the Declaration of Independence, with its soaring claim of human rights, was as fundamental

As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy. Whatever differs from this, to the extent of the difference, is no democracy.

These were “times of stress and change,” and Roosevelt had thought much of the responsibilities of the Presidency in 1932. “The Presidency is not merely an administrative office,” he told Anne O’Hare McCormick during the campaign. “That’s the least of it. It is more than an engineering job, efficient or inefficient. It is preeminently a place of moral leadership. All our great Presidents were leaders of thought at times when certain historic ideas in the life of the nation had to be clarified.” So Washington had personified the idea of federal union, Jefferson and Jackson the idea of democracy, Lincoln union and freedom, Cleveland rugged honesty. “Isn’t that what the office is—” he suggested, “a superb opportunity for reapplying, applying in new conditions, the simple rules of human conduct we always go back to? I stress the modern application, because we are always moving on; the technical and economic environment changes, and never so quickly as now. Without leadership alert and sensitive to change, we are bogged up or lose our way, as we have lost it in the past decade.

Democracy is never a gift bestowed by benevolent, farseeing rulers who seek to reinforce their own legitimacy. It must always be fought for, by political coalitions that cut across distinctions of wealth, power and interest. It succeeds and survives only when it is rooted in the lives and expectations of its citizens and is continually reinvigorated in each generation. Democratic successes are never irreversible.

When they become slaves to thoughts that pull them down they fall into another kind of slavery and no one can emancipate them from such bondage as that except themselves—not even a Lincoln. I say this because there is an increasing tendency among the youth of both races to assume that a system of government will unload them of all responsibilities for the care of aged parents, for sicknesses and accidents—often due to their own carelessness and neglect—and for their periods of unemployment, no matter how much their condition is due to laziness or failure to co-operate with others. I see this every day. ‘Let the government do it,’ they say, ignoring the fact that, in a democracy, they themselves help pay for the government’s disbursements. It looks to me at this time as if they wish to declare not their independence, but their dependence upon the government from the cradle to the grave.

a chance to strike and go somewhere else, where you may not be degraded…Then you can better your condition, and so it may go on and on in one ceaseless round.” Lincoln knew that economic mobility can require geographic mobility and that America’s great promise — democracy, freedom, and equal opportunity for all, including immigrants — is built on faith in the future, not longing for the past. But Wister was right: fiction outlives fact.

Geographic mobility is at its lowest level since records began being kept in 1947. The varied causes of the slowdown, including rising housing costs, are not easy to change, but little effort is being made in part because politicians generally don’t like to tell voters that it may be in their best interest to move. Lincoln, whose family moved from Kentucky to Indiana to Illinois in pursuit of economic opportunity, had no such qualms. Addressing striking shoe workers in New Haven, Connecticut, he said, “If you find it hard to better your condition on this soil, you may have

Putting democracy and the country founded on it first is the only way to preserve and, better yet, improve a United States of America that for any and all of its shortcomings and flaws is still the most successful political experiment in human history and the one with the greatest potential. As he did so often, Abraham Lincoln said it best: “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.

The reconstruction of American democracy began not with the Civil War but even earlier, at the moment Lincoln, an antislavery Republican, was elected to the presidency

Lincoln’s longtime barber in Springfield, William de Fleurville, was a Haitian immigrant,

They broke a basic bond of trust that those handed a role of power in a functioning democracy would treat the gift as both priceless and fragile, what Abraham Lincoln called “the legacy bequeathed to us.

As Lincoln hoped, by using their hearts and their heads, Americans have kept their experiment alive long past the age when most democracies die.

Lincoln would not publicly go so far along the skeptical path as he did privately. Like Jefferson, Lincoln was pragmatic about religion. A man who aspired to lead a democracy needed to speak in a common vernacular, and the American vernacular was steeped in the language and in the imagery of Protestantism. Lincoln’s was not an entirely cynical accommodation. He appreciated traditional religious belief even if he did not fully share it. “In my intercourse with Mr. Lincoln I learned that he believed in a Creator of all things,” his friend I. W. Keys recalled. “As to the Christian theory that Christ is God or equal to the Creator, he said that it had better be taken for granted; for by the test of reason we might become infidels on that subject…; but that the system of Christianity was an ingenious one at

Your representative,” Burke remarked, “owes you not his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Lincoln would come to see democracy as a work in progress, a process in which reason took its chances against prejudice and passion. Of significant issues—including emancipation—Lincoln remarked to Herndon, “All such questions must first find lodgment with the most enlightened souls who stamp them with their approval. In God’s own time they will be organized into

Not every former president uses their position for good. Franklin Pierce, a Northerner who favored popular sovereignty—the idea that democracy allowed citizens, and not the federal government, to decide if the territory in which they lived would allow slavery—tried to rally the living ex-presidents in 1861 to resolve the Civil War. But his efforts were torpedoed by Martin Van Buren, and Pierce became a vocal critic of Lincoln, a sympathizer for the South, and a correspondent of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Worse still, Pierce’s predecessor, the Virginian John Tyler, defected from the Union and won a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives. He died a traitor in January 1862, and President Lincoln denied his predecessor a state funeral. Instead, Tyler was honored in

Not every former president uses their position for good. Franklin Pierce, a Northerner who favored popular sovereignty—the idea that democracy allowed citizens, and not the federal government, to decide if the territory in which they lived would allow slavery—tried to rally the living ex-presidents in 1861 to resolve the Civil War. But his efforts were torpedoed by Martin Van Buren, and Pierce became a vocal critic of Lincoln, a sympathizer for the South, and a correspondent of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. Worse still, Pierce’s predecessor, the Virginian John Tyler, defected from the Union and won a seat in the Confederate House of Representatives. He died a traitor in January 1862, and President Lincoln denied his predecessor a state funeral. Instead, Tyler was honored in Richmond, the Confederate capital.

The most revered presidents–Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, both Roosevelts, Truman, Kennedy, Reagan, Clinton, Obama–have each advanced populist imperialism while gradually increasing inclusion of other groups beyond the core of descendants of old settlers into the ruling mythology. All the presidents after Jackson march in his footsteps. Consciously or not, they refer back to him on wheat is acceptable, how to reconcile democracy and genocide and characterize it as freedom for the people.

Of course, for many of the Civil War’s cultured despisers, the Union is old hat and liberal democracy the listless desert of history’s last—and very dull—man. Emancipation makes a better story for our times. But emancipation cannot be so easily detached from union (which is another way of saying that racial justice and liberal democracy rise or fall with each other). Lincoln insisted that the Civil War was being fought by the United States in order to restore the constitutionally mandated union of those states, and the Gettysburg Address was his most eloquent declaration that the ultimate purpose of the war was the test it afforded of the practical viability of democracy. This was not because race, slavery, and emancipation were unimportant to Lincoln, but because the Union (and the liberal democracy it represented) and emancipation were not, after all, mutually exclusive goals. Unless the Union was restored, there would be no practical possibility of emancipation, since the overwhelming majority of American slaves would, in that case, end up living in a foreign country, and beyond the possible grasp of Lincoln’s best antislavery intentions.

As Lincoln saw it, white Southerners were staking everything on a defensive and belligerent worldview. It was all or nothing. “You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to ‘Black Republicans,’ ” Lincoln said, addressing white Southerners. “Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite—license, so to speak—among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all.” Such was not the path to democratic deliberation, but to total war. Lincoln saw this. He knew this. And he warned his audience about this. To blindly and repeatedly assert one’s own position, one’s own righteousness, and one’s own rectitude in the face of widely held opinion to the contrary was not democracy. It was an attempt at autocracy—a bid, as Lincoln said, to “rule or ruin in all events.” Democracies could not endure if absolutists prevailed