Discussion: What is Democracy?

Here's what H.L. Mencken had to say about it... "As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron."

What role, if any, should a referendum have in a representative democracy?

Is government spin acceptable in a representative democracy? In processes of direct democracy, such as initiative, referendum and recall?

It is disappointing to listen to the TTBOOK host Steve Paulsen and Keli Carender display their lack of knowledge. Keli Carender in particular seems to exemplify the "I'm ignorant and proud of it" aspect of the Tea Party despite her claims of education, including the specious "and attended the University of Oxford" in her bio-blurb posted elsewhere on TTBOOK site.
It is typical of the ignorant to "drive by building after building," assume that they are full of cubicles, and then claim that there is nothing important that people are doing in them.
Couldn't ask for a better display of reaching a conclusion without any knowledge...

If either of you want to learn what the US Dept. of Education does please
visit:
http://www2.ed.gov/about/what-we-do.html

And please, if you get a conservative on the show, please get one who has some intelligence.

Ms. Carender's ignorance of what the U.S. Dept. of Education does is positively enormous, and Mr. Paulson's softball questions implying that she knew what she was talking about made me angry. Among many other things, the Dept. of Education runs the NDEA Title VI and Fulbright programs, without which advanced foreign language training for graduate students across the country will be crippled. This is a national security issue. It will never be addressed by individual states, and is one of the many things the federal government must do; else, it will not get done at all.

Right now, Title VI and Fulbright are under threat of defunding because of Mitch McConnell's shameful, blanket obstructionism. Title VI and Fulbright are classic instances of how little power "unelected bureaucrats" actually have and how much damage venal congressmen can do, the very opposite of the situation Ms. Carender claims exists.

It's bad enough that irresponsible people Ms. Carender, who evidently have little or no actual experience of working with the federal government, have seized the media spotlight, but for a public radio outlet to encourage her misleading distortions of reality is outrageous. Big government? I fear lazy journalists!

I feel our grand civilization is in decline, our generation has to rise to that level of our fathers, and of our national forefathers. Unfortunately education, morality, and a nationalistic unity is absent from the present day "big picture". All of these things indicate decay in social structure, as identified years ago:

The Pattern for National Decline-

The author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon, lists five basic reasons for its demise:

n The undermining of the dignity and sanctity of the home, which is the basis of human society n Higher and higher taxes; the spending of public money for free bread and circuses for the populace n The mad craze for pleasure; sports becoming every year more exciting, more brutal, more immoral n The building of great armaments when the real enemy was within—the decay of individual responsibility n The decay of religion; faith fading into mere form, losing touch with life, losing power to guide people

Edward Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
volumes II and III were published in 1781 ;
volumes IV, V, VI in 1788-89.

Democratic nations have progressed through the following sequence:

n From bondage to spiritual faith;
n From spiritual faith to great courage; n From courage to liberty; n From liberty to abundance; n From abundance to selfishness; n From selfishness to complacency; n From complacency to apathy; n From apathy to dependency; and n From dependency to bondage.

Prof. Alexander Tyler, circa 1750,
Reference to:
Edward Gibbon,
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire

No we don't. Why are the media and government constantly trumpeting Democracy?

This is... “a Republic madam, if you can keep it.”
-Ben Franklin

I'm glad this little-known civil rights leader was profiled, but two facts about him were left out, one understandably because it is posthumous. One, he was a Zionist, which antagonized some pro-Palestinian leftists in the last decade of his life, and two, a high school, the former Charles Evans Hughes school, on West 18th Street in Manhattan, was re-named for him: The Bayard Rustin High School for Humanities. I learned about him because I taught at this school, and was told that he lived in the neighborhood.