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“Let us endeavor to make the best of that which is allotted to us and, by finding out both its good and its evil tendencies, be able to foster the former and repress the latter to the utmost.”[1] This was Alexis de Tocqueville’s endeavor in his famed, Democracy in America. He had surmised a providential [...]
Citizens United not only constituted a break from recent tradition that overturned multiple presents but, even more troublingly, it issued a broad re-understanding of the idea of free speech — a corrupted and dangerous interpretation of our first freedom.
Does speech really operate in the same kind of marketplace as commercial goods? Are campaign advertisements equatable to iPods? The “marketplace of ideas” is a popular legal and even colloquial exposition of the first amendment, but we must assess how easily the Forum could be called the Agora.
On the brilliance and meaning of JFK’s Inaugural. His oratory refocused the American system on its founding principles, while expanding them to confront the current crises. With a keen awareness of his audience and breathtaking use of prose, he crafted a concise, but effective speech. More than anything, he set the tone for his administration, not as lofty idealism, but as purposeful realism.
Jurisprudence should move past interpreting the text for the text’s sake, but for the sake of democracy, properly understood, so we will no longer be stuck in the moral world of the 18th century, but free to follow our own moral compass—magnetized by deliberation and consensus—towards a better realization of our most common democratic belief, the right to self-rule.
The Obama campaign took a deeply rooted Chicago-style pragmatism across the country and online, building a social movement dedicated to change but able to disagree about what it meant. By creating social capital among his supporters, he could preserve his political capital, then cashing in both for a historic win. It is a case study in modern campaigning.
The Problems of a Civil Society Moving into the 21st Century At the turn of the century, bowling league membership was down, way down, and this, to Harvard professor Robert Putnam was quite a problem. See, with the loss of bowling leagues go the friendly conversations over beer, pizza, and pretzels and the weekly commitments [...]
How 1830s Political Theory Made a Come Back in the 1990s The 1990’s staged something of a political resurgence for Alexis de Tocqueville. His tome on American democracy had been a much-quoted textbook for decades, but as the nation neared the 21st century, the French aristocrat of centuries past was surprisingly popular in the bully [...]
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