5,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
DISCLAIMER
This book does not in any capacity mean to replace the original book but to serve as a vast summary of the original book.
Summary of Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
IN THIS SUMMARIZED BOOK, YOU WILL GET:
- Chapter astute outline of the main contents.
- Fast & simple understanding of the content analysis.
- Exceptionally summarized content that you may skip in the original book
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Ähnliche
Summary of Our Ancient Faith
A
Summary of Kristin Hannah’s Novel
Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
GP SUMMARY
Summary of Our Ancient Faith by Allen C. Guelzo: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment
By GP SUMMARY© 2024, GP SUMMARY.
All rights reserved.
Author: GP SUMMARY
Contact: [email protected]
Cover, illustration: GP SUMMARY
Editing, proofreading: GP SUMMARY
Other collaborators: GP SUMMARY
NOTE TO READERS
This is an unofficial summary & analysis of Allen C. Guelzo’s “Our Ancient Faith: Lincoln, Democracy, and the American Experiment” designed to enrich your reading experience.
DISCLAIMER
The contents of the summary are not intended to replace the original book. It is meant as a supplement to enhance the reader's understanding. The contents within can neither be stored electronically, transferred, nor kept in a database. Neither part nor full can the document be copied, scanned, faxed, or retained without the approval from the publisher or creator.
Limit of Liability
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be resold or given away to other people. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please purchase your own copy. You agree to accept all risks of using the information presented inside this book.
Copyright 2024. All rights reserved.
Note
The author's life has been a rollercoaster of public agonies, from the Vietnam War to the current economic and political turmoil. They have been a lover of democracy, but have seen it stifled by arrogance and those who seek its richest benefits. However, they find consolation in the example of one American who lived a different life and gave democracy a new lease on life. The author offers this man's example to those despised of the future or whose lives have been ruined by the current failures. They take up Lincoln's principles with the hope that once again, democracy may have a new birth of freedom. The author has written several pieces on Lincoln's life, including "Lincoln's Statesmanship in Navigating a Divided Nation," "Lincolnomics: The Economic Mind and Policies of Abraham Lincoln," and "What If Abraham Lincoln Had Lived?" They also drew on this material for lectures on Lincoln and democracy at the New-York Historical Society.
Introduction
The Disposition of Democracy
Democracy has been criticized for being the worst form of government, and it has been repeatedly tried and failed, with recent failures being most pronounced after 1991. The United States of America, the longest-functioning large-scale democracy in the world, is the longest and most still-functioning democracy. Its founding documents, the Declaration of Independence from Great Britain and the federal Constitution of 1787, articulate many of the fundamental principles of a democracy: the natural equality of all humanity, a national government of explicitly limited powers, and a separation of even those powers within the national government. However, the United States is not a pure democracy, as its size and the impracticality of the face-to-face democracy of ancient Athens have made it difficult to implement. The American founders were also concerned that democracy had not always behaved well or wisely, as the Athenian assembly made heroes of scoundrels and martyrs of freethinkers. The number of people living in genuinely democratic states has fallen by more than half since 2003, and the countervailing forces of state control of media, curbs on political assembly, judicial corruption, and bureaucratic metastasis make a mockery of the word.
The American Constitution of 1787 laid significant restrictions on the democratic nature of the American republic. The republic would be a federal republic, a union, and an association of quasi-sovereign states, with the president elected by the states through the Electoral College. The national legislature would be elected by direct vote every two years, and the federal judiciary was appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. The American Revolution's aftermath did not change this attitude, as the American upper classes were already accustomed to public discussion of the interests of the people.
The fundamental notion of any democracy is that political sovereignty ultimately resides in the people of a nation. This idea was a child of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which came to be known as liberalism. The Enlightenment began as a scientific revolt against hierarchical notions of the physical universe, and European political theorists challenged political hierarchy. In liberal societies, people created new societies designed to allow them to exercise rights, with the basic political unit becoming the free individual, the basic political order becoming equality, and equality becoming universal and optimistic.
Liberalism, a political ideology, does not necessarily require government to adopt the specific form of democracy. In the American environment, democracy emerged as the dominant shape with three basic tenets: consent, majority rule, and toleration of the minority. Consent is deployed through participatory assemblies, office-holding, juries, or freely selected representatives, while majority rule ensures that governments represent the people. However, there will always be divisions of opinion, and minority rule can be challenged by self-interest, passion, arrogance, and persuasion.
In practice, the temptation for both over-mighty majorities and desperate minorities to grab state authority and use it to swallow up a political order is present. Democracies must also submit to law, independent of both, to keep violence at bay and give equality a hard, substantial reality. The lines of the democratic state are drawn vertically, with the ups-and-downs of majorities and minorities on one side and the administrative apparatus of the state on the other.
To protect these balances, democracies use tools such as understanding all legal participants as citizens, possessing equal standing and access to political life, and holding leaders accountable. Elections are another tool that protects democracies, as they involve citizens casting votes for offices and determining policies and laws. Accountability is inevitable, leading back ineluctably to elections.
Democracy's protective tools include forums for discussion and association, such as newspapers and political parties. In America, newspapers are the primary source of modern conversations and were once the mouthpieces of political parties. Tocqueville, a French observer of nineteenth-century American democracy, believed that political parties were an evil inherent in free governments, as they resulted from the free association of citizens with each other. However, he found that parties in a liberal democracy could be surprisingly peaceful in their objects and legal in their means.
Democracies that use their tools accomplish many great things, such as allowing citizens the fullest expression of natural rights and allowing mobility and self-transformation. However, the adroit handling of these tools depends on shared assumptions, or mores, which are habits, conventions, assumptions, instincts, customs, and codes that keep the free individual or domineering majority from running off the rails or degenerating into chaos.
