We are both blessed to enjoy and trained to defend and guard our civil rights. We applaud or condemn the actions of our Supreme Court. Or our Congress or President. Lucky us to be able to do this protest and criticism so freely and publicly without fear of arrest, imprisonment, or execution.
How well do we understand the foundations of these rights and the institutions that affect them? Improving our individual understanding as responsible citizens of a vibrant democracy happens both from formal education in childhood and continued study as adults. Here are several books for a deeper dive.
Democracy: More About Institutions Than Votes
The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad by Fareed Zakaria provides a succinct argument about what truly constitutes a democracy. Perhaps we’re trained to think that democracy is about voting. Zakaria illustrates that voting can be a smokescreen disguising non-democratic governments through examples from around the globe. He relates how institutions provide the greatest protections of individual rights, one of the aspects most cherished by those who live in a true democracy.
Politics and Breaking Up “The Duopoly”
A superb read about moving beyond the two radical parties that dominate current politics is The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy by Katherine Gehl and Michael Porter. Here’s one of my first thoughts after reading it. We’re in an age of entrepreneurism and are a nation of entrepreneurs. Why not view what we so urgently need to do — create new parties — as our national entrepreneurial moment?
Gehl is an entrepreneur herself, and Porter is the Harvard business/competition guru. She developed many of the ideas in this book and worked with Porter to flesh them out. They describe how our two parties became more radicalized and how they prevent change, or even getting any constructive legislation accomplished. The authors provide pragmatic solutions, many of which are already being adopted around the nation. They include a section on our history. We’ve been here before, and citizens of varying political inclinations moved beyond their differences to change the way we elect representatives and how Congress works.
The Constitution.
An excellent book about the Constitution is America’s Constitution: A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science at Yale University. He wrote it to address the general public’s need for explanations of each section of the Constitution and why each made it into the final document, due to both logic and politics. The first section I investigated was the Second Amendment about the right to bear arms. A very interesting history.
Another excellent read about the Constitution’s history is American Creation by Pulitzer-prize-winning (and retired Mount Holyoke chaired professor) Joseph Ellis. How did a group of committed, now-legendary individuals (despite their flaws) battle through several years of debate and advocacy to bring a nation from the document declaring its independence to a document that governs how that nation would be run? One of the most memorable points in my mind is one that is in fact indexed in the book, under Adams. Our revolution was unique among the major revolutions in recent centuries in that it was conducted deliberatively, gradually, and diplomatically. It aimed at the formation of a cohesive citizenry, seeking stability while protecting individual rights, leaving many important but contentious issues to be solved at a later date.
British History That Inspired Our Founding Fathers
Our First Revolution by Michael Barone traces how the British fought for rights that became ingrained in our own Constitution. Our Founding Fathers were very well versed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688-1689. It was the first change of government that the English named a revolution when it happened. That period was deeply unsettled by religions competing to dominate. Monarchs were removed, executions ordered, and even wars ensued. The Glorious Revolution resulted in government by the legislature (Parliament in their case) over the monarch, creation of institutions that protected individual civil rights and economic activity, and, most notably, separation between church and state with a greater level of religious tolerance. It set the stage for the economic prosperity that Britain enjoyed in the subsequent century and beyond.
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