The Ideal of Democracy
Thomas Jefferson envisioned a state of humanity that was absent of a state impose upon humanity. He possessed the conviction that humankind instantiated the necessary dispositions for self-governance. We currently live in a society that provides greater grants of funding to the quasi-academic pursuit of criminal justice while providing little or no funding to fields such as political theory, or political philosophy, or even critical theory. One can draw multiple inferences from this allocation of resources to academia.
The Constitution of the United States has the redeeming quality of explicitly enunciating a Bill of Rights. However, the rest of the document is designed to mitigate the power of the Demos, so to preserve the extant social structure. The Document has been improved and expanded – although currently being retracted – regardless, it is insufficient for the purposes of creating a democracy. The Constitution needs to be drastically reformed. The watered down version of republicanism needs to be extracted and replace with a system that allows for the direct, deliberative involvement of the populace during the decision-making processes that produce public policy.
