From Stanford University: Evaluating Information: The Cornerstone of Civic Online Reasoning

Younger adults find it difficult to tell real news from fake news - or to detect political bias. Something for us to be mindful of this semester. Skepticism - but not cynicism - of the information seems increasingly justified.

- Click here for the study.

Here's the executive summary:

When thousands of students respond to dozens of tasks there are endless variations. That was certainly the case in our experience. However, at each level—middle school, high school, and college—these variations paled in comparison to a stunning and dismaying consistency. Overall, young people’s ability to reason about the information on the Internet can be summed up in one word: bleak.

Our “digital natives” may be able to fit between Facebook and Twitter while simultaneously uploading a selfie to Instagram and texting a friend. But when it comes to evaluating information that follows through social media channels, they are easily duped. We did not design our exercises to shake out a grade or make hairsplitting distinctions between a “good” and a “better” answer. Rather, we sought to establish a reasonable bar, a level of performance we hoped was within reach of most middle school, high school, and college students. For example, we would hope that middle school students could distinguish an ad from a news story. By high school, we would hope that students reading about gun laws would notice that a chart came from a gun owners’ political action committee. And, in 2016, we would hope college students, who spend hours each day online, would look beyond a .org URL and ask who’s behind a site that presents only one side of a contentious issue. But in every case and at every level, we were taken aback by students’ lack of preparation.

For every challenge facing this nation, there are scores of websites pretending to be something they are not. Ordinary people once relied on publishers, editors, and subject matter experts to vet the information they consumed. But on the unregulated Internet, all bets are off. Michael Lynch, a philosopher who studies technological change, observed that the Internet is “both the world’s best fact checker and the world’s best bias confirmer—often at the same time.”1 Never have we had so much information at our fngertips. Whether this bounty will make us smarter and better informed or more ignorant and narrow-minded will depend on our awareness of this problem and our educational response to it. At present, we worry that democracy is threatened by the ease at which disinformation about civic issues is allowed to spread and flourish.

- NPR outlines the study's finding: Students Have 'Dismaying' Inability To Tell Fake News From Real, Study Finds.

- Most middle school students can't tell native ads from articles.
- Most high school students accept photographs as presented, without verifying them.
- Many high school students couldn't tell a real and fake news source apart on Facebook.
- Most college students didn't suspect potential bias in a tweet from an activist group.
- Most Stanford students couldn't identify the difference between a mainstream and fringe source.

From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Ballot Pox - It's time to stop pretending that there's such a thing as a rational voter

This supplements recent conversations we've been having about what drives people to vote.

It also suggests that Trump's success will not only have an impact on the parties, but on a key aspect of political science research.

Do we expect too much from voters?

- Click here for the article.

Perhaps it is finally time to stop pretending there is such a thing as a rational voter who seeks information to vote based on the issues alone, as decades of political-science research has assumed. Instead, Achen and Bartels argue, we can only progress by accepting that most voters are deeply uninformed and lack meaningful preferences, and even those who do know and care about politics are all just partisan loyalists. Can we acknowledge that social-group identities are the most important structuring force in politics, and politics is really at heart just identity politics? And can we build new theories around the undeniable evidence that politics is and always will be based on emotion and conflict, not logic and consensus?

It's time to make peace with a simple fact of political life: Rationality is a chimera.

For political science, this argument actually amounts to a rediscovery of old truths about group conflict being the center of politics. A half century ago, these were the mainstream views in the discipline. At that time, political science was also much more qualitative — for example, congressional scholars actually hung out in Washington and spent hours talking to people who worked there, instead of only staring at computers analyzing data — and sociological, in that scholars focused more on norms and cultures and folkways than they did on modeling individual incentives.

But sometime in the 1960s, political science took a turn away from groups and toward "rational individualism." Scholars began to treat both voters and politicians as utility-maximizing actors who had consistent and externally determined preferences along some unidimensional left-right spectrum. (Where these preferences came from, it was never clear.) And scholars also assumed these voters knew enough to adequately express these preferences meaningfully. Voters and officeholders and groups all existed in a "game" in which they tried to move policy to their "ideal point." Voters tried to hold politicians "accountable" for their performance, while politicians "maximized" their utility from office holding. Economics, not sociology, became the model discipline. Incentives replaced norms and cultures.

These assumptions were popular in the academy because they made both formal modeling and fancy statistical analysis more tractable, and therefore made political science more "scientific." Plus, there was plenty of easily accessible data on elections, roll-call votes, and public-opinion surveys to be tilled into publishable journal articles. "The result," Achen and Bartels write, "was a body of work that was simultaneously advanced in its methods and antiquated in its ideas."

They were also popular because they fit with the prevailing good-government idea, what Achen and Bartels dismissively call "the folk theory of democracy." Under the folk theory, "Democracy makes the people the rulers, and legitimacy derives from their consent." Elections should and can be meaningful events that truly empower the people. Therefore, if democracy has gone wrong, it’s merely because our voters are too uninformed, our candidates are too corrupt, our political discourse is too awash in lies. Like political science, good-government reformers pursued an idealized world of informed voters making meaningful independent choices that could give them actual power.

For Achen and Bartels, all this reformist moral exhortation is an exercise in futility. All the standard bromides of good-government reformers — more participation, better civic education, a more responsible media — represent mountains of wasted good intention that will never lead to more responsive government.

The most obvious flaw of the folk theory is that it expects far too much out of citizens: "Can ordinary people, busy with their lives and with no firsthand experience of policy making or public administration, do what the theory expects them to do?" Of course not. "Mostly," Achen and Bartels write, "they identify with ethnic, racial, occupation, religious or other sorts of groups, and often — whether through group ties or hereditary loyalties — with a political party."

From the Washington Post: When the facts don’t matter, how can democracy survive?

This fits an ongoing question we raise in class.

- Click here for the article.

Americans — or, at least, a particular subset of Americans — have had enough of experts, facts, math, data. They distrust them all.

This rising cynicism, sown recklessly by opportunistic politicians, will not only make it increasingly difficult for policymakers to make good choices and govern peacefully; it could also become a significant economic challenge.

The latest evidence of this anti-evidence trend comes from a Marketplace-Edison Research Poll released last week.

The survey found that more than 4 in 10 Americans somewhat or completely distrust the economic data reported by the federal government. Among Donald Trump voters, the share is 68 percent, with nearly half saying they don’t trust government economic data “at all.”

From Brookings: How rising polarization will challenge the next president

Regardless who wins - apparently - the political environment will negate the ability of the next president to get much done.

Dysfunction will continue.

- Click here for the article.

While most political observers are focused on the ups and downs of the presidential race, it’s not too early to think about the condition of our politics once it ends. There is no evidence that the campaign will do anything to reduce the partisan polarization that has blocked progress on vital national problems. On the contrary, it seems likely to deepen the crisis of governance that has hobbled the United States for much too long.

There are three reasons to fear the worst. In the first place, the campaign has done little to help voters understand the real choices we face, especially in the economic sphere. The recovery from the Great Recession has been achingly slow, wages have barely budged, many working-age Americans remain outside the labor force, and productivity—the key to higher living standards—has declined for three consecutive quarters. Slamming the door on immigration won’t cure these ills, and neither will protectionism. Policies such as paid family leave will help at the margin but leave the core of the problem untouched. The president-elect will not enter the transition with an economic mandate and will have to create one virtually from scratch.

Second, challenges to the legitimacy of elections and candidacies have disfigured our politics for the past four presidential elections, a trend that may well continue into 2017 and beyond. In the wake of the botched vote count in Florida and the Supreme Court’s controversial Bush v. Gore decision, many Democrats never accepted the legitimacy of George W. Bush’s inauguration. In 2008 and beyond, conspiracy theories about Barack Obama’s birthplace convinced many Americans that he was not an American citizens and was therefore ineligible to serve as president. This year’s Republican nominee, a principal proponent of these theories, has repeatedly warned his supporters that the election may be “rigged.” If he loses by a relatively narrow margin, there is a real danger that he may question the outcome and give his supporters additional reasons to reject the winner’s legitimacy.

Third, and most fundamentally, the 2016 campaign has further divided Americans along demographic lines, according to a just-released reportfrom the Pew Research Center. Among whites, men are 10 percentage points more likely to identify as Republicans than they were in 2008; individuals over 50 are 13 points more likely; whites with a high school education or less, 14 points more likely. Because white women haven’t shifted nearly as much, the gender gap among whites has widened significantly.

From Vox: "Is this the way we want to live?" Andrew Sullivan on our distraction sickness — and Trump

Another writer slams democracy and the decisions the electorate makes.

This includes a great description of how a republic contains democratic impulses.

- Click here for the interview.

Sean Illing: You seem to suggest in your piece that too much democracy is a bad thing.

Andrew Sullivan: It's always been a bad thing. Democracy is only as good as the people who are in it. And people in general are shitty and we are prone to all sorts of ugliness. That's why we have a system designed to make sure that that shittiness is actually constrained by elite institutions, by the rule of law, by separations of powers and federalism, and all the other aspects.

Sean Illing: That’s a classically conservative view of human nature and government.

Andrew Sullivan: Yes, and in this country conservatism hasn’t really been conservative for quite a while. Conservatism is about the restraint of government, not the empowerment of government, and Trump has no interest in restraint. Again, this is a person who has never conceded an error, never admitted a mistake, never taken responsibility for something he's done wrong — even though the examples have been simply extraordinary.

From the NYT: The Dumbed Down Democracy

This is what the class is all about right?

- Click here for the article.

Are you smarter than an immigrant? Can you name, say, all three branches of government or a single Supreme Court justice? Most Americans, those born here, those about to make the most momentous decision in civic life this November, cannot. And most cannot pass the simple test aced by 90 percent of new citizens.

Well, then: Who controlled the Senate during the 2014 election, when control of the upper chamber was at stake? If you answered Dunno at the time, you were with a majority of Americans in the clueless category.

But surely now, when election news saturation is thicker than the humidity around Lady Liberty’s lip, we’ve become a bit more clue-full. I give you Texas. A recent survey of Donald Trump supporters there found that 40 percent of them believe that Acorn will steal the upcoming election.

Acorn? News flash: That community-organizing group has been out of existence for six years. Acorn is gone, disbanded, dead. It can no more steal an election than Donald Trump can pole vault over his Mexican wall.

We know that at least 30 million American adults cannot read. But the current presidential election may yet prove that an even bigger part of the citizenry is politically illiterate — and functional. Which is to say, they will vote despite being unable to accept basic facts needed to process this American life.

. . . The dumbing down of this democracy has been gradual, and then — this year — all at once. The Princeton Review found that the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 were engaged at roughly a high school senior level. A century later, the presidential debate of 1960 was a notch below, at a 10th grade level. By the year 2000, the two contenders were speaking like sixth graders. And in the upcoming debates — “Crooked Hillary” against “Don the Con” — we’ll be lucky to get beyond preschool potty talk.

From Vox: The alt-right is more than warmed-over white supremacy. It’s that, but way way weirder.

Welcome to the world of the neo-reactionaries.

These people do not like democracy - which some refer to as "demotism" - and would prefer a return to some form of monarchy. Their complaints echo those of the Constitution's framers.

- Click here for the article.

. . . the core contention . . . is one that's been common in technolibertarian circles for a long time: Democracy is a failure.

"Democracy is — as most writers before the 19th century agreed — an ineffective and destructive system of government," Moldbug writes. Moldbug doesn't actually like the term "democracy." He prefers "demotism," or rule of the people, a label under which he sweeps modern-day developed democracies like the US or Western Europe but also the former Soviet bloc, Nazism, and fascism. "Universalist lawful democracy is the least demotist of demotisms, Demotism Lite if you will," he writes. "Compared to Communism and Nazism, there's much to be said for it. But this is a rather low bar."

The purpose of government, in the view of neoreactionaries, isn't to represent the will of the people. It's to govern well, full stop. "From the perspective of its subjects, what counts is not who runs the government but what the government does," Moldbug explains. "Good government is effective, lawful government. Bad government is ineffective, lawless government. How anyone reasonable could disagree with these statements is quite beyond me. And yet clearly almost everyone does."

And democratic government, the neoreactionaries insist, is not effective, lawful government. Because the will of the people is arbitrary and varying, it cannot have the consistency of real, durable law, and it creates incentives for wasteful and, worse still, left-wing government. Moldbug started as an Austrian-school libertarian, and most neoreactionaries have general small-government sympathies and express a fear that democracy inevitably leads to ever greater taxation and redistribution, and otherwise encroaches on individual liberty.

"Democracy and ‘progressive democracy’ are synonymous, and indistinguishable from the expansion of the state," Nick Land, the next most influential neoreactionary thinker after Moldbug, writes. "Since winning elections is overwhelmingly a matter of vote buying, and society’s informational organs (education and media) are no more resistant to bribery than the electorate, a thrifty politician is simply an incompetent politician, and the democratic variant of Darwinism quickly eliminates such misfits from the gene pool." The result is a government that grows larger and larger.

From the Washington Post: New proposals would let lotteries or experts replace voting. Here’s what’s wrong with that.

More evidence that elites are way down on democracy.

- Click here for the article.

Is it time to rethink representative democracy? After the Brexit vote, some voters in the United Kingdom had a case of “regrexit” and called for a second referendum. In the United States, the recent arguments that the November 2016 election may be “rigged” generated a great deal of public discussion, as did concerns that the Republican Party candidate is not qualified for office.

Those who study this topic have been looking at ways to “renew” representative democracy.

Recently, two rival proposals that trace back to classical Greece have resurfaced for a modern audience. Both limit who can vote and seek to stimulate apolitical and rational decision-making:

1) Representatives by lottery.
2) Experts as representatives.

From the Guardian: Why elections are bad for democracy Our voting system worked well for decades, but now it is broken. There is a better way to give voice to the people

Is there a better way for people to make decisions? One that checks sudden fickle urges?

Perhaps we should substitute elections with lotteries.

- Click here for the article.

What kind of democracy is appropriate to an era of fast, decentralised communication? How should the government deal with all those articulate citizens who stand shouting from the sidelines?

Imagine having to develop a system today that would express the will of the people. Would it really be a good idea to have them all queue up at polling stations every four or five years with a bit of card in their hands and go into a dark booth to put a mark next to names on a list, names of people about whom restless reporting had been going on for months in a commercial environment that profits from restlessness?

People care deeply about their communities and want to be heard. But a much better way to let the people speak than through a referendum is to return to the central principle of Athenian democracy: drafting by lot, or sortition as it is presently called. In ancient Athens, the large majority of public functions were assigned by lot. Renaissance states such as Venice and Florence worked on the same basis and experienced centuries of political stability. With sortition, you do not ask everyone to vote on an issue few people really understand, but you draft a random sample of the population and make sure they come to the grips with the subject matter in order to take a sensible decision. A cross-section of society that is informed can act more coherently than an entire society that is uninformed.

Experiments with sortition have been successfully applied in the US, Australia, and the Netherlands. The most innovative country so far is certainly Ireland. In December 2012, a constitutional convention began work in order to revise several articles of the constitution of Ireland. Its members were not just a committee of MPs working behind closed doors, but a mixture of elected politicians and ordinary people: 33 elected politicians and 66 citizens, drafted by lot, from both Ireland and Northern Ireland. This group met one weekend per month for more than a year.

For more: Is It Time to Take a Chance on Random Representatives? Selecting legislators by lottery was good enough for the ancient Athenians. Why not good enough for Congress?

From the Atlantic: How American Politics Went Insane

Jonathan Rauch bemoans what he calls "chaos syndrome," which he sees as a threat to democratic governance.

- Click here for the article.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Our intricate, informal system of political intermediation, which took many decades to build, did not commit suicide or die of old age; we reformed it to death. For decades, well-meaning political reformers have attacked intermediaries as corrupt, undemocratic, unnecessary, or (usually) all of the above. Americans have been busy demonizing and disempowering political professionals and parties, which is like spending decades abusing and attacking your own immune system. Eventually, you will get sick.

From the Atlantic: The Seven Broken Guardrails of Democracy - The American republic was long safeguarded by settled norms, now shattered by the rise of Donald Trump.

We'll look at the current status of democratic governance in the Unites States. Here is one critics look at the current state of it, and how this might have lead to the Donald Trump's recent success. He makes the arguments that several "rails" - settled norms - have been broken in recent decades, which has allowed for the rise of Mr. Trump, who seemingly is unconcerned with abiding by the rules which have governed America since the ratification of the Constitution.

It'll be worth a talk in class.

- Click here for the article.

There are the rails according to the author:

1 - The first guardrail to go missing was the old set of expectations about how a candidate for president of the United States should speak and act.

2 - The second broken guardrail is the expectation of some measure of trustworthiness in politicians.

3 - A third broken guardrail is the expectation that a potential president should possess deep—or at least adequate—knowledge of public affairs.

4 - he guardrail of ideology.

5 - he primacy of national security concerns.

6 - A deep belief in tolerance and non-discrimination for Americans of all faiths, creeds, and origins.

7 - Partisan identities have hardened.

From the NYT: Why Donald Trump Has Done Worse in Mostly White States

Apparently whites in states with high populations of minority groups are more responsive to Trumps message. The author speculates about why this may be the case. It has little to do with his stances on issues, and much more with who he targets his wrath towards. Race is central to it.

- Click here for the article.

An appeal to white identity tends to work better in areas where that identity is felt to be under threat. The South, where Mr. Trump has performed well, has long been known for racially polarized politics.

Race essentially predicts political affiliation there, with blacks lining up for Democrats and whites for Republicans. A state like Mississippi, whose population is around 37 percent black, is an obvious example. If even 25 percent of white Mississippians voted for Democrats, the state could tilt blue — and perhaps elect the state’s first black governor, or first black senator since Reconstruction.

Democratic strategists dream of a blue North Carolina and Florida, and further in the future, a blue Georgia or Arizona.

But few dream of a blue Mississippi. The numbers have long been locked in. For example, according to the 2012 Mississippi exit polls, 96 percent of blacks voted for President Obama, but 89 percent of whites voted for Mitt Romney, who won by 55 percent to 44 percent.

Political scientists have written about the importance of tipping points in ethnic strife or resentment around the globe. It occurs when one group grows big enough to potentially alter the power hierarchy.

The author links to a large number of studies. Here are a few:

- RAND Kicks Off 2016 Presidential Election Panel Survey.
- Who Are Donald Trump's Supporters, Really?
- Measuring Donald Trump’s Supporters for Intolerance.
- How political science helps explain the rise of Trump: the role of white identity and grievances.
- Obama's Unwanted Legacy: The Renewed Influence of 'Old-Fashioned Racism'
- Racial Identity, and Its Hostilities, Are on the Rise in American Politics.
- Could America Become Mississippi?
- THE BROWNING OF AMERICA.
- The downside of diversity: A Harvard political scientist finds that diversity hurts civic life.

From the NYT: As Frustrations With Mexico’s Government Rise, So Do Lynchings

We'll touch on the need for a stable governing system to minimize mob violence - a key point made by the framers of the constitution.

- Click here for the story.

By some accounts, there were more public lynchings this past year than at any other time in more than a quarter-century. There were at least 78 lynchings last year in Mexico, more than double the number the previous year, according to data collected by Raúl Rodríguez Guillén, a professor and an author of the book “Mexico Lynchings, 1988-2014.”

The mob actions were born of a sense of hopelessness and impotence shared by many in Mexico, where 98 percent of murders go unsolved and the state is virtually absent in some areas. By some estimates, just 12 percent of crimes are even reported in Mexico, largely because of a lack of faith that justice will ever be served.

Such a void, taken to extremes, has found its resolution in violence.

“There is a crisis in terms of the growth of violence and crime and a parallel erosion of authority and the rule of law,” Mr. Guillén said. “These lynchings acquire a double meaning. People lynch both the suspect and the symbol of authority.”

The First SOTU

It was - as you hopefully guessed - delivered by George Washington.

- Click here for the text.

For comparison's sake with the one recently delivered, here are a few facts about it:

It was:

- delivered on January 8, 1790.
- given as a speech to a joint session on Congress.
- given at the opening of the second session of the 1st Congress.
- the shortest: 1,083
- delivered at a 20.4 education level.

Give recent attention to gun rights, I found this part interesting:

A free people ought not only to be armed, but disciplined; to which end a uniform and well-digested plan is requisite; and their safety and interest require that they should promote such manufactories as tend to render them independent of others for essential, particularly military, supplies.

The bearing of arms must be disciplined, and - as I read it - there should be a unique source of these arms. I'm not up on the history of that era as it pertains to arms, so I'm not clear at the moment about what that's all about. He does mention this in a section dealing with how the common defense is best provided for - so it seems connected to militias.

As far as other requests, keeping in mind that he has been president a year and he is in a position to make practical requests about items that Congress could provide him that would help him do his job, here's what he asked for:

- means to deal with "certain hostile tribes of Indians."

- executive positions - adequately compensated - that would assist " our intercourse with other nations."

- "Various considerations also render it expedient that the terms on which foreigners may be admitted to the rights of citizens should be speedily ascertained by a uniform rule of naturalization."

- "Uniformity in the currency, weights, and measures of the United States."

- "the expediency of giving effectual encouragement as well to the introduction of new and useful inventions from abroad as to the exertions of skill and genius in producing them at home."

- " . . . facilitating the intercourse between the distant parts of our country by a due attention to the post-office and post-roads."

- "the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is in every country the surest basis of public happiness."

And there's this bit I want to highlight separately because it suggest that Washington was open to the possibility of establishing a national university at least in part to assist citizens in governing themselves.

To the security of a free constitution it contributes in various ways - by convincing those who are intrusted with the public administration that every valuable end of government is best answered by the enlightened confidence of the people, and by teaching the people themselves to know and to value their own rights; to discern and provide against invasions of them; to distinguish between oppression and the necessary exercise of lawful authority; between burthens proceeding from a disregard to their convenience and those resulting from the inevitable exigencies of society; to discriminate the spirit of liberty from that of licentiousness - cherishing the first, avoiding the last - and uniting a speedy but temperate vigilance against encroachments, with an inviolable respect to the laws.

Whether this desirable object will be best promoted by affording aids to seminaries of learning already established, by the institution of a national university, or by any other expedients will be well worthy of a place in the deliberations of the legislature.

This might be worth exploring in class. Some of these issue seem similar to those we deal with today.

From the Guardian: The state of our union is … dumber: How the linguistic standard of the presidential address has declined

The title speaks for itself.

If you click on the article, you'll that the following graphic is dynamic, so you can follow how the reading level for the state of the union had declined over time. The high point was James Madison at 25, the low point was George W Bush at 7. This might be worth a look as we look at the importance of education in a republic.



- Click here for the article.

From The Hill: Why Americans feel politically powerless

An early theme in class is the requirement that citizens in a republic be actively involved in its maintenance. I threw this quote at you for good measure:

The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.

It was from Charles de Montesquieu - one of the better regarded commentators around the time of the constitutional convention. The great danger to public welfare is if people just check out, this is something that can very easily happen if they feel unable to impact events. Here's an update on the notion.


- Click here for the article.

The author takes the general population to task for failing to live up to its responsibilities - and perhaps having an unreal expectation of what immediate impact they can have on the political system. His key point seems to be that government classes seem to paint an unrealistic picture of the relationship between the governed and the government. People in power will follow the will of the people because we think they are supposed, despite evidence that they tend to follow the money - or at least the engaged. The lesson seems to be "citizenship ain't easy." Not a bad one.

American citizens themselves are a part of the problem and largely responsible for their marginalized status in the world’s most celebrated self-rule democracy. Why have the American people, the popular sovereign of our democracy, not challenged this political take over by the fat cats?

In high school government and civics high school classrooms across America young citizens-to-be are indoctrinated with a version of democracy based more on historic and political myths than political reality.

Magruder's American Government, a widely used textbook revised and published annually since 1917, is a typical example of schoolbook democracy. Here students learn the U.S. Constitution is built on a few basic principles, including popular sovereignty: "In the United States, all political power belongs to the people. The people are sovereign. Popular sovereignty means that people are the only source of governmental power. Government can govern only with the consent of the governed.”

As school kids mature into young adults and gain their own first-hand experience of the political world around them, they soon realize how ill-prepared they—the sovereign people—are to compete with wealthy election campaign donors and professional corporate lobbyists who dominate, between elections, the behind the scenes deal making that determines who gets what.

In addition, studies show that once in office lawmakers give top priority to the care and feeding of their election campaign backers and corporate lobbyists, not the citizens who actually voted them into office.

No wonder citizens feel angry and politically powerless. But why don’t citizens unite and push back?

The late Yale professor Edmund Morgan, author of, Inventing the People: the Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, provides a more complete explanation for the failure of American citizens to react more strongly against the outsourcing of their democracy.

Clinging to their classroom version of democracy in which they are the ultimate and legitimate political power in America, citizens, according to Morgan, willingly suspend their disbelief in schoolbook myths and pretend they are true——even with abundant real-life evidence that they are not.

“The success of government,” says Morgan, “requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not…Government requires make-believe…Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.”

This tug-of-war between political myths and political reality has driven citizens out of the political arena and, in effect, outsourced the American democracy to wealthy campaign financiers and powerful corporations.

From Vox: Are Americans losing faith in democracy?

Well this is depressing.

Scholars who study democracy like to point out that democratization happens in waves, Furthermore, waves come ins and waves come out. We've been through recent periods where an increasing number of countries become democracies. This does not appear to be one of them. Even in the United States there are indications that more and more people would prefer a more authoritative governing system - perhaps this explains Trump's appeal?

The author points about a variety of indications suggesting that democracy is falling out of favor. If this was a longer semester, I'd ask you to critically evaluate this statement, but you have enough on your plate right now.

- Click here for the article.

Here are his observations.

1) Americans trust their political institutions less2) Young Americans are giving up on politics3) Most millennials don’t think it’s essential to live in a democracy4) A growing number of young Americans think democracy is a bad way to run the country5) More Americans want the Pentagon to take over6) Support for illiberal alternatives to democracy is growing especially fast among wealthy Americans7) Public opinion is shifting away from democracy in many countries around the globe

If you are really ambitious - here are two books on the history of citizenship

Both are by a man named Derek Heater and can be found on Google Books.

- A Brief History of Citizenship.
- A History of Education for Citizenship.

The last one is obviously related to the subject matter of the opening weeks of the class, so give it a look if you care to.

Is the United States ruled by 31,976 people?

One of the themes in the early material in this class was that keep a republic - a government based, indirectly, on the people was tough to do. There are forces at work that attempt to constrict power to a smaller handful of elites.

We referred to this as oligarchy, which is a general term describing any system that allows a small elite to rule. More recently the term plutocracy has been used. It refers to ruled by the wealthy. Some argue that the US is becoming more a plutocracy than a democracy. Here's an example.

- Click here for 5 signs America is devolving into a plutocracy.

2305 students will note that the Supreme Court has made recent rulings allowing wealthy people to spend more and more funds on elections. The Center for Responsive Politics conducted a study recently that argued that the increase in spending on elections is driven by the 1% of the 1%.

It might be worth a quick read:

- The Political One Percent of the One Percent in 2014: Mega Donors Fuel Rising Cost of Elections.

From the New Critereon: Augustus & the birth of the West

The Dish flags a the latest story on the person most responsible for Romes' shift from republic to empire - Augustus Caesar. He recently turned 2000.

- Click here for the Dish's appraisal.
- Click here for the article - which is behind a paywall.

Along with his better known uncle Julius - Augustus was considered a warning by the framers of the Constitution. An ambitious person who was able to consolidate power and rule directly - no input was necessary from the general population unless he thought it expeditious.

The irony is that despite all this, it's the Roman Empire (with the coliseum and aqueducts and the rest) that we remember and what is emulated in the architecture American government. Consolidated governments can sometimes enhance peace and prosperity - at least for a while. This creates the obvious dilemma.

From the article:

Bereft of historical sensitivity and untutored in the milestones of world history, Americans let slip by, all but unnoticed, the bimillennium of the death of one of the truly towering figures in Western history. While the works of Alexander the Great and Napoleon disappeared with their exit from the stage of history, and where George Washington and Winston Churchill worked on a smaller canvas, Imperator Caesar Divi Filius Augustus created and dominated a political system that set the Western world on its path for the succeeding two thousand years. In forgetting the death of Rome’s first emperor and ignoring his legacy, Americans continue to impoverish their understanding of the world they now bestride.

. . . After the Ides of March, the teenaged Octavian figured in no one’s political calculations. Mark Antony was the dominant figure, and Brutus and Cassius retained significant forces. Yet within just a few years, it would be Antony and Octavian fighting for the ultimate supremacy of the Western world. To read of Octavian’s cautious, calculating, and sure moves during the two decades of civil war, leading to his victory at Actium in 31 B.C., is to encounter political genius of the rarest kind. With his indispensable partner, Agrippa, Octavian then did what had escaped even the great Caesar: establish a durable and impregnable political system to capitalize on his military victory. Thus ended both a century of civil war and Rome’s traditional freedoms. To a world desperate for stability, Augustus was accepted as the unquestioned and irreplaceable arbiter of order.

Augustus’s legacy did not stop with politics, for the Rome of our dreams, too, is largely his creation, carried to its ultimate expression by his successors. The world might not still be fascinated with a city of brick had not Augustus left it one of marble, to paraphrase his famous saying. The fora, baths, Colosseum, and palaces of eternal Rome maintained, even enhanced, their spell over men’s imaginations by their ruins, as much as in their pristine prime. Even the anti-monarchical Americans drew legitimacy from Rome’s material forms. Washington, D.C. is modeled more on imperial Rome than Greece, with its Capitol Hill and classic architecture.