Talk:How Democratic Is the American Constitution?

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Peer review How Democratic Is the American Constitution? has had a peer review by Wikipedia editors which is now archived. It may contain ideas you can use to improve this article.

Contents

[edit] Todo

  • The chart could be made nicer with some color coding.
  • The chart might be better organized by similarity with the U.S.
  • Markup improvements, especially footnotes and citations.

-- Beland 04:32, 19 May 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Removed Cat

I removed [[Category:Government of the United States]] as this is a book about the Constitution, not an institution of the U.S. Government.

Epolk 22:32, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Revert

I have reverted this article because it seems to have gotten messed up. BebopBob 19:49, 18 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Criticism

 Please help improve this article or section by expanding it.
Further information might be found on the talk page or at requests for expansion. (July 2007)

I removed this from the article. It makes some fine points, but appears to be original research, and is unreferenced. -- Beland 06:10, 6 July 2007 (UTC)

This author's daft opinions about the American Constitution fail to specify the pretext to each of the supposed non-democratic points of the Constitution. The said pretext would include facts such as: Slavery was only allowed because the southern states wouldn't join the new federation unless slavery was permitted. Slavery was the base of the entire southern economy, and to abruptly end it would have caused a massive depression, much like the one we whitness after the Civil War. The end of slavery would have been great for humanitarians, but you can't start a nation on half an economy.

At this point in history, there was no successful democratic nation in the world. A monarchy was the governmental choice of the day. The founding fathers didn't have a viable government to model the emerging United States after, no government to see what has failed and what hasn't.

So the moral of the story is: Don't just judge a book (or document for that matter) by its cover; you need to read it for what it truly is. Never judge history through today's lense.

Thank you for your time.

I should add that criticism of Dahl and alternative viewpoints are welcome and encouraged, but additions will need to respect Wikipedia:No original research and other project policies. I would add some myself, but I'm not familiar with any suitable published sources. -- Beland 07:04, 6 July 2007 (UTC)