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Article: Democracy's failures. (Letters).
- Article from:
- Quadrant
- Article date:
- May 1, 2002
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 Quadrant Magazine Company, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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SIR: Ronald Conway's wide-ranging criticism (March 2002) of the shortcomings of democracy are not new and were described by de Tocqueville and many others. Few of the framers of the American Constitution were for a democratic government; rather the question was: How strong should the democratic element be in the political pyramid?
As history has shown, a popularly elected government can range from totalitarian democracy to constitutional democracy, but Conway's suggestion for the improvement of representative government is to search for the missing element in today's "increasingly contaminated political culture in the form of authority which derives from charisma, ...