‘Klerostocracy’: a new contributor’s ideas

Posted on August 4, 2013 by Conall Boyle

Terry Hulsey is a writer living in Fort Worth, Texas, who has asked me to flag this:

Instituting Meritocracy After the Collapse of Democracy in America

“Democracy in America has failed. The Framers would not have been surprised.

The central idea of the American Experiment is that our several states have united to form a republic of strictly limited federal power, not a democracy. Without understanding this kernel idea, that the founders repudiated democracy and consciously labored to restrain it, there simply no possibility of understanding the meaning of America.

The specific conditional campaign that will bridle democracy, that will restore federalism in Madison’s sense, is one that mobilizes support for the passage of the Twenty-Eighth Amendment (below) to randomize the election of Congressmen and Senators, and indirectly, the President of the United States.”

Filed under: Elections, Proposals, Sortition |

2 Responses

Yoram Gat, on August 8, 2013 at 7:55 pm said:

It is true that understanding the overt hostility of the American revolutionaries to democracy is of historical interest and it illuminates the historical function of elections. Of course, one would hope that “America” is about more than the oligarchical mindset of an elite group 200 and something years ago. Certainly the American people is about much more than that.

By the way, I understand that some sort of mythologizing of the “ancestral constitution” was part of the political discourse in 4th Athens, so there may be a somewhat interesting parallel here.

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keithsutherland, on August 9, 2013 at 6:49 am said:

Yes, and not just in Athens and the US:

“The common lawyers, epitomized by the great Edward Coke, projected the common law and contemporary English political institutions back into an immemorial past as a permanent feature of English life.” (Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law).

All cultures have their golden age myth, a sign of the conservatism built in to human nature. It’s also a preference for the notion that the law is something more than the positive acts of fallible human agents, and this means elevating the lawmaker (Solon, Madison, the Englishman etc) to the status of Rousseau’s semi-divine Legislator.

Those of us who seek to design legislative institutions need to bear this (prejudice) in mind. The 4th century conservative reaction was prompted by the sense that democracy as vox populi was a decidedly mixed blessing.

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