RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/10/james-madison-mob-rule/568351/
overturning unpopular Supreme Court decisions.

These are dangerous times: The percentage of people who say it is “essential” to live in a liberal democracy is plummeting, everywhere from the United States to the Netherlands. Support for autocratic alternatives to democracy is especially high among young people. In 1788, Madison wrote that the best argument for adopting a Bill of Rights would be its influence on public opinion. As “the political truths” declared in the Bill of Rights “become incorporated with the national sentiment,” he concluded, they would “counteract the impulses of interest and passion.” Today, passion has gotten the better of us. The preservation of the republic urgently requires imparting constitutional principles to a new generation and reviving Madisonian reason in an impetuous world.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of a series that attempts to answer the question: Is democracy dying?

James Madison traveled to Philadelphia in 1787 with Athens on his mind. He had spent the year before the Constitutional Convention reading two trunkfuls of books on the history of failed democracies, sent to him from Paris by Thomas Jefferson. Madison was determined, in drafting the Constitution, to avoid the fate of those “ancient and modern confederacies,” which he believed had succumbed to rule by demagogues and mobs.

Madison’s reading convinced him that direct democracies—such as the assembly in Athens, where 6,000 citizens were required for a quorum—unleashed populist passions that overcame the cool, deliberative reason prized above all by Enlightenment thinkers. “In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever characters composed, passion never fails to wrest the sceptre from reason,” he argued in The Federalist Papers, the essays he wrote (along with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay) to build support for the ratification of the Constitution. “Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob.”

Madison and Hamilton believed that Athenian citizens had been swayed by crude and ambitious politicians who had played on their emotions. The demagogue Cleon was said to have seduced the assembly into being more hawkish toward Athens’s opponents in the Peloponnesian War, and even the reformer Solon canceled debts and debased the currency. In Madison’s view, history seemed to be repeating itself in America. After the Revolutionary War, he had observed in Massachusetts “a rage for paper money, for abolition of debts, for an equal division of property.” That populist rage had led to Shays’s Rebellion, which pitted a band of debtors against their creditors.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/government-shutdown-reveals-much-of-federal-government-irrelevant/

So much of government in Washington is nonessential.

One of the lessons of the Trump–Pelosi standoff on border security is that government shutdowns are a foolish way to resolve partisan disputes.

But the other lesson may be far more important. The partial shutdown, with agencies such as the Transportation, Agriculture, and State Departments, as well as other independent agencies, closed for business, demonstrated how irrelevant so much of our $4 trillion government is to the everyday lives of Americans.

As I traveled over the last several weeks to Florida, California, and many states in between, and asked people what they thought of the shutdown, many said they didn’t even know the government was shut down for more than a month. Their everyday lives were disrupted or inconvenienced only, if at all, in a trivial way. It turns out there are countless Americans who don’t watch CNN or MSNBC and so didn’t learn about the supposed horrors of agency closures.

This was a particularly painless shutdown for the average taxpayer because the essential activities of government were mostly unaffected. Seniors got their social-security checks. The military was protecting us. We got through the airports with minimal delays — until the last week when some TSA officials and air-traffic controllers weren’t on the job.