Elections do have consequences - including being governed by who you've elected

If there's one thing that the 21st Century has made abundantly clear, is that elections have consequences - not the least of which is our suffering to be governed by those we've elected into office. Simple buyers regret, however, is not in and of itself a valid basis for reversing the decision of the electorate, and the progressive normalization of such behavior as we've been witness to of late, is, IMHO, a growing threat to representative government.

Elections do have consequences, but there are even worse consequences to be had from overturning elections. It is irresponsible, and not a little dangerous, to demand that elected officials be forced from office over unsubstantiated charges, with no other basis than the fervent opinions of some. And please do not resort to claiming that

"I have a right to my opinion! it doesn't have to stand up to a court of law!'

, you do have a right to your opinion, but your opinion alone is not a justifiable cause for demanding that the opinions of an entire state's (or nation's) electorate, that were voiced, tallied, and duly recorded in an election, should be overturned. The 2016 election is done and over, and the 'will of the people' was made known, and short of a radical change in the nature of the charges against our sitting governor, that election must stand, and if you care about our form of government, you should not demand it be otherwise.

Much as I dislike Eric Greitens - and I wrote several posts explaining why - I will not ignore the fact that unsubstantiated accusations and rumors against him, like any other form of 'sources say', is not a valid basis for my desiring that the will of the entire electorate, be reversed.

Especially not when we have nothing more before us at this point in time, than anonymous accusations which have been made without a shred of proof (and no, an unnamed disgruntled husband, allegedly recording the tearful accusations of his unnamed wife/ex-wife without her knowledge of his doing so, does not qualify as a shred of proof). Short of Gov. Greitens being convicted of, or admitting to, having committed blackmail or some other serious crime, whether or not he stays in office is not a proper consideration or justifiable choice for you or me to call for, and frankly it's not even properly his choice anymore - unless he knows himself to be guilty of blackmail, he should not step down - he is in that office because the electorate duly elected him to be there, and outside of the established paths for recall or impeachment, that is where he should stay for the duration of his term.

I understand your displeasure over discovering that he admitted cheating on his wife prior to his election, but that is not a valid basis for demanding an election be overturned - if that truly displeases you, perhaps pay a little closer attention to details of character, and demand explanations for major changes in stated beliefs, in future elections. Neither is there any valid basis for demanding that he resign because he doesn't 'network' with lawmakers and grassroots activists, as some might have hoped he would have. But worse by far, is for elected representatives to council him to resign - not because they know him to be guilty, but because they fear that a trial would be painful and uncomfortable - that is truly craven, despicable advice, and is dangerous to the continued prospects of representative government.

You cannot credibly claim to be for representative government, while also demanding that elected representatives be turned out of office for unsubstantiated charges. You cannot credibly claim to be for representative government, while also demanding that elected representatives be turned out of office for no better reason than the disappointed mood of a vocal mob - and yes, if you value your emotional disappointment, over the results of an election, if you want to force an elected official from the office that the electorate put him in, by the force of the wailing and stomping feet of a vocal few, then you have joined yourself to a virtual mob.

Do you seriously want to make removing an elected official, something that can be overturned on the basis of allegations alone? Allegations that are made by unnamed individuals, based upon a 'crime' they were privately told about by someone else? A 'crime' that the supposed 'victim' has not even come forward theirself about? Let alone without having even pressed formal charges?!

WTH is passing for 'conscientious consideration' here?! What the hell is wrong with you people?! If you want him out of office, then at the very least have the stones to begin a recall campaign - but I'd recommend that you have something more that you can substantiate first. Like the 'victims' name. And actual charges filed by that victim. And maybe a trial. Or a confession. First.

Do I think that it's possible that he engaged in blackmail? Have you heard his threatening conversation with John Brunner during the election? Have you heard about his belittling conversations with 'beady eyed' lawmakers? Yeah, I would be entirely unsurprised to learn that he sought to intimidate someone into silence, for his own convenience. But guess what - my suspicions do not become worthy of overturning the results of a clear election, simply because I think that they're valid!

I do not like Eric Greitens. I wrote numerous posts (here, and here, and here, and here, and here) saying why I thought he was unworthy of being elected our governor. However my point of view did not win the election. Those who voted for him for Governor, did win. By virtue of our system of representative government, he was elected by We The People - it would be a gigantic mistake to now demand that he resign his office because of unnamed sources, on unsourced, unsubstantiated, and unproven, accusations.

It's worth remembering, however, when you are faced with a choice like this again, before an election for instance, that it's best to choose those who are the most unlikely to find themselves the butt of unsubstantiated charges. What you can do to avoid that in the future, is to learn that 'hope is not a strategy' - that hoping that the fellow who claims he's a conservative, with no further reason or explanation given for that claim than the thinnest of appearances, really is a conservative, is folly and negligence of the highest order. Learn from that. Help your neighbor to learn from that. Because discovering that the guy that you helped get elected, isn't who you'd hoped he was, isn't enough to 'fix' that election after the fact.

I'll close out by leaving this snippet here from my first post having to do with Eric Greitens, "Is being Great all that good?" post back in 2015,

"...I'm not saying that I suspect our latest crop of great candidates of intending to do harm, I'm saying that I suspect them of not knowing what will, and what won't, cause us harm.

I'm saying that it's not their great qualities that concern me, but the little knowledge, understanding and conviction they've yet to demonstrate having about the fundamentals of our laws and their underlying principles.

I'm saying that without that understanding, which are the qualities that make any person, great or not, fit for office, and the lack of which makes anyone, great or not, unfit for office, then unrestrained by those convictions, they are liable, with the very best of intentions, to bring great harm to this nation and/or to our state. and at this point I'm not sure how much more of that we can take. ..."

Take the time to know that a candidate is worthy of your vote, to a reasonable satisfaction, because, as we are all finding out, elections do have consequences.

GOP to America: If you like your Repeal, you can keep your Repeal

GOP to America: If you like your Repeal, you can keep your Repeal.

McConnell on Healthcare Failure: ‘Everybody Has Given It Their Best Shot’

Conservatives to GOP in 2018: If you like your Elected Office, you can keep your Elected Office.


Occupants of geographic America: If you like your Liberty, you can keep your Liberty.

The Catch-22 Republic:

"...And for this reason, I said, money and honour have no attraction for them; good men do not wish to be openly demanding payment for governing and so to get the name of hirelings, nor by secretly helping themselves out of the public revenues to get the name of thieves. And not being ambitious they do not care about honour. Wherefore necessity must be laid upon them, and they must be induced to serve from the fear of punishment. And this, as I imagine, is the reason why the forwardness to take office, instead of waiting to be compelled, has been deemed dishonourable. Now the worst part of the punishment is that he who refuses to rule is liable to be ruled by one who is worse than himself. And the fear of this, as I conceive, induces the good to take office, not because they would, but because they cannot help --not under the idea that they are going to have any benefit or enjoyment themselves, but as a necessity, and because they are not able to commit the task of ruling to any one who is better than themselves, or indeed as good. For there is reason to think that if a city were composed entirely of good men, then to avoid office would be as much an object of contention as to obtain office is at present; then we should have plain proof that the true ruler is not meant by nature to regard his own interest, but that of his subjects; and every one who knew this would choose rather to receive a benefit from another than to have the trouble of conferring one. So far am I from agreeing with Thrasymachus that justice is the interest of the stronger. This latter question need not be further discussed at present; but when Thrasymachus says that the life of the unjust is more advantageous than that of the just, his new statement appears to me to be of a far more serious character. Which of us has spoken truly? And which sort of life, Glaucon, do you prefer?..."

Which do you prefer?

What chance do you think there is that you'll get it?

Carry on.

The Powerful threat from within Representative Government

Ok, sure, it might be a total Captain Obvious move to point out that the term 'Representative Government', is one that contains two very different words, but what's less obvious, is the fact that before you can understand why the first of those two word's meaning is so important, it's necessary to have a fair understanding of what the second word of the term means, and just how dangerous it is to the meaning and purpose of its first word. As noted in my previous post, the trite heads or tails dilemmas that most of our attempts at discussing such matters are so easily diverted into ('A Democracy! No, a Republic!', 'Electoral College vs. Popular Vote', or 'He Is/Isn't my President!'), do nothing to deepen our understanding of either term, and serve mostly to divert our attention away from the questions we're supposedly considering. But not even the questions can be compacted into the space of calling heads or tails, and the more you puff up one preferred answer over the other, the further away we are all drawn from a useful discussion of them.

So, with that in mind, it's worth reminding ourselves of the basics of what it is that government is, how it derives its power, and how and why it is so important to limit its ability to use that power. As the old saying says,

'Government, like fire, is a troublesome servant and a terrible master'.

You want to use the Power... don't you...?

We don't need to try and attribute that phrase to one or more Founding Fathers, as it often has been, in order to make the truth of it more important and relevant, especially when we're so often tempted to turn to govt to impose our very best intentions upon the rest of us. The greatest dangers to our liberty, come from our best intentions to improve upon it. It is precisely when we're caught up in such
enthusiasms for 'doing good!' unto others, that we're most in need of being tempered by an understanding from history - that is what it is was that made our form of government possible, it is what made, and makes, it exceptional, and without which, neither it, nor we, can be exceptional - at least not in a good way.

So what is Government? Stripped of the finery and fanfare:

Government is the means of harnessing the collective power of a community towards... ends. 

What those ends are, who determines them and authorizes the pursuit of them, and most importantly, what it, and they, will not be allowed to do, depends upon how well your society delimits the powers of those holding the reigns of power. Where Government gains its power 'to do' what it will, is by enforcing claims, in whole or in part, upon the possessions, time and lives of its people, and if there are no limits to its claims or ends, then it will turn the collective power of your society, towards accomplishing whatever those in government (or those with their ear) desire to do, and with all of their very best intentions urging them on to do whatever 'it' might be.

Despite the aspirations of our Declaration of Independence, government does not need your consent - it can gain legitimacy from that, sure - but that's a later development, a 'nice to have' (in the eyes of those in positions of power within it), which is in no way necessary for it to wield its power over you.

At this point it might be useful to take note of a rather shocking point, especially shocking for those of us, like myself, who look to government as the means of establishing justice and defending our rights, and that point is this: those are not the most basic requirement that a society demands from their government! And with a very grudging nod towards Hobbes, what people do demand, first and foremost, is: Order. As Hobbes put it,

"...For before constitution of Soveraign Power (as hath already been shewn) all men had right to all things; which necessarily causeth Warre: and therefore this Proprietie, being necessary to Peace, and depending on Soveraign Power, is the Act of that Power, in order to the publique peace...."

I disagree with him, that that provides either a definition or justification for government, but it is, and should be, a frightening and sobering realization that that is the tipping point of political gravity that is always tugging at our perceptions, eagerly awaiting for us to forget our balance and fall back down to its baseline. That point is extremely dangerous to ignore, or to evade the realization that the government that does not effectively provide that fundamental service, will not stand for long; as a society sufficiently shaken up, will sink to any level, in order to enforce that basic compliance upon its own people, if they think it'll mean escaping from chaos - real or perceived (and if you think that doesn't apply to modern man, it's you who are being primitive in your thinking). That ground floor of order forms what I've called the 'Societal Baseline', and is what I was pointing out in an earlier post that looked into the Yanomamö Indians in the Amazon, it is what makes the brutality of a tribal thug, preferable to having no order at all, and it is that point which all real progress, is measured through the horizontal (legislative, via Govt) and vertical (ethical, through the people) distance a society manages to put between itself and that baseline.

The first step of real progress, up and away from that baseline, comes when a society's begins forming rules for its governance, rather than following exclusively upon the wishes of its rulers, and in making them known for all to see and understand, they give a sign that they are developing what can loosely be called 'laws'. As societies' begin doing so, they begin forming political structures that move beyond the moment to moment exercise of brute force, by brutes, and take on the various forms of all of the familiar ___cracys' and ___archy's (you remember, democracy, oligarchy, etc), which takes them further up the winding path of Chieftains, Tyrants & Kings, until they finally arrive at the Prime Ministers and Presidents that typically head up what we like to think of as legitimate, Representative Governments.

If you examine the laws of a society as they progress along that path - if they manage to continue along it - there's an essential characteristic that you'll see becoming more and more pronounced, which is what makes it possible for their laws to be able to be regarded as capital 'L' "Laws" with a straight face, rather than just an assortment of rules written down by thugs, and it's a development of an idea that I went into some depth upon in previous posts (two in particular, pt 2:Why a Govt of Laws, and not of men? & pt 3:Who Benefits from transforming Rules into Laws), which, sparing you a few thousand of those post's words, can be summed up in what's best captured in two translations of one potent phrase from Aristotle's Politics,

'The law is reason unaffected by desire',

and

'The Law is reason free from passion.'

The more that a people's laws adhere to and exhibit that sensibility, the more legitimate they and their Laws, are likely to become - it is the means of putting the point upon the arrow of political progress; pointing their society in the right direction, onwards, upwards, and away from that societal baseline of barbaric order. And while it may seem a bit counter-intuitive, that characteristic, in the raw, is also what is being crudely expressed in that primal desire for the societal baseline of Order; seeking relief from the chaos brought on by violent passions and desires that've run rampant. Surprisingly, at least a little bit, it is in seeking that order that they also find that the seeking itself, demands an exercise of methodical reasoning in order to bring even that baseline condition about, and continuing with that, developing and reflecting upon that, refining that, that is the natural means of eventually implementing Laws that one day will tower above the mere scribblings of one or another tyrant's demands of the moment.

Following closely on Aristotle's essential ideal, are two from the Roman jurist, Cicero, with his,

"No one can be judge in his own cause; Hear the other side"

, and,

“True law is right reason in agreement with nature"

These are also logical developments of Aristotle's advice to separate your passions and desires from your attempts to realize justice; in pursuing that it soon follows that a fair and impartial hearing should be given to both sides of an issue, it is a result of seriously taking that advice to heart, and as a result, your laws, and the application of them, become more reasonable, and those applying and enduring them also begin seeking conclusions derived from factual evidence, rather than reacting to impassioned desires.

These are not inventions of The West, they are discoveries about what is common to all of mankind, but they were first fully realized in The West. Following these dictums, and ridding the writing and administering of a society's laws of personal passions and biased desires, is, in the real sense of making progress away from the baseline, Progressive, and it will be accompanied by a visible increase in the methodical, reasonable nature, of their laws. On the other hand, shedding that quality, seeking to appeal to the passions and desires of the many, is Regressive, and deliberately seeking to do so, while justifying those actions and stirring up the passions of the people in order to satisfy the ambitions of their rulers (whether they be one, or the many), is what I refer to as being Pro-Regressive. If you want to know whether your society's laws are truly Progressive, or Pro-Regressive, look at how those who propose them, urge you to embrace them.

The direction that our laws move in can be objectively measured as progress over what came before, moving from chaos, to order, to recorded and predictable rules, to rules which make sense together and integrate with each other, developing a progressively less contradictory nature - reasonable, understandable, and flexible enough to be applied in a variety of circumstances, yet rigid enough to be familiar to, and understood by 'the common man'; that is the path of progress. As these advanced ideas, and the attitudes which accompany them become the norm, such laws as that people govern themselves through, begin to lose their erratic nature, as both the people and their laws become more ordered, more reasonable, more respectful of their fellows lives.

The Best of Times, and the Worst of Times
But as wonderful and profound as such progress is, a society has to be on their guard against their own hubris, for while they may have become convinced of the soundness of their good intentions, the nature of government has not changed - not one bit - and the raw force and power which it is, will seep through such blind spots, like groundwater through an old foundation, progressively saturating and weakening it. Government is power, it is force, it can fine, punish, stifle, intimidate, imprison and persecute, it can kill and it can destroy, it is like fire, a troublesome servant and a terrible master, and if you dare presume that you can fully domesticate such primal forces through law, that you can safely use that primal power best suited to preventing or punishing actions, to initiate and do good unto others for what you consider to be for their own good, then you fail the test of Tolkien's Ring of Power, and turn towards darkness with all of the urgency and false light of your very best of intentions.

It is at this point, that the question arises as to who it is that will, and should, write a society's laws. How are they to be chosen? The means of binding both laws and its officers, from engaging in erratic or passionate actions, is best made by means of those laws themselves being ordered by objectively higher laws (see Cicero's “True law is right reason in agreement with nature"), so that society becomes compatible with what all can see as being true and right.

 But how will they be written, and how will those charged with writing and attending to them, be chosen? This is where 'The consent of the governed' begins to come into play, but how so? Is their consent to be gathered and given in any way shape, manner or form? Are there good and bad ways to gain that consent? Is it possible to curry that consent in such a way as to subvert the consent of the governed, for the benefit of those who would govern them?

There's more to the matter than simply encouraging individual choices and preferences; giving political power to the administration of our laws, if those laws are to be Laws, rather than rules in drag, they must be written and applied in a manner as free from personal passions and desires as is possible. Simply having all of the people of that society participating in that process, appealing to them to 'express their choice!', means putting people into power over the laws, by means of inciting passionate desires for wide approval and calls for collective action, which means turning against the very thing that the Laws, and the administration of them, are designed to bar from issues of Law!

And yet, the consent of the governed is vital to a 'Representative Government' - that's the puzzle at the heart of the first of our terms, 'Representative'.

What the 'Representative' portion of 'Representative Government' must never forget, is that the 2nd word in its term is representative of a fearsome and dangerous power, one that feeds upon your own confidence in your own ability to master it, and especially through your belief that you can 'do good' by imposing your own best judgment upon the choices that other people are trying to make for their own lives. The 1st word in that term must keep in mind, that it can, at best, tame the beast inherent in the 2nd word, but only as a trainer tames a tiger, and that if you turn your back upon it, thinking that your laws alone will keep it in its place (as if they somehow had the power of judgment outside of your own ability to govern yourself), then you can rest assured that your own government will use them as the means of devouring you, from the inside out.

Despite all of the fear mongering, the real threats to a 'Representative Government' rarely come in the form of thuggery and violence from external 'others!', instead they come upon a society from within themselves, through there own good intentions (and thinly disguised desires), by the means of which Frédéric Bastiat's understood all too well:

“Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.”

As a people begin to give in to that con, then soon enough they will discover how the expectations of achieving unworthy ends, through high minded laws, is a most perilous matter. If We The People fail to require that our Representatives be, and be selected by means as free of passionate desires as the laws they are to be in charge of, then the troublesome servant will have become the master of them, once again. Unless they and their laws are bound down by recognizably external, and constitutional fixtures, their representatives will become every bit as representative of the most tyrannical of individual tyrants - and especially as they do so in the name of "We The People!".

Progress is made when the people support taking substantial steps towards turning their power towards the service of judgment, rather than passionate desires. The Representative portion of our term 'Representative Government', is the means open to us for doing that, at least in part, it is the means of seeking and using good judgment, cool, reasonable deliberation and disinterested action, in service to those interests. But before getting into the best means found for electing the Executive of such a system of laws - the Electoral College - we need to dig a bit more into what we mean by the 'Representative' portion, of Representative Government - next post.

If Democracy, Republic, Electoral College, Popular Vote, are the answers, WTH was the Question? Representative Government pt. 1

I find that when it comes to New Year's Eve, rather than making new resolutions, I prefer pursuing older and more satisfying questions. And going into this new year, with all the post election controversy, the maligning of the Electoral College, and the bi-partisan angst over the new President-Elect, I hereby resolve to pursue a whole line of old questions, into the new year, beginning with one that has been going loudly unasked for so long, and that is:

What do we mean by 'Representative Government'?

Unfortunately, if anyone does attempt to have that conversation, it typically takes an immediate turn, Left or Right, into one of a number of polarizing false dilemmas, such as 'Electoral College vs. Popular Vote', or 'He Is/Isn't my President!' or everyone's favorite fever-fest of replies that follow from that long dead little old lady's question of 'what type of government did you give us, Mr. Franklin?'. Old Ben had answered: "A Republic, if you can keep it.", which should provide a fine crop of follow up questions to anyone who is actually interested in what his answer meant, but instead, we turn down the road of:

We're not a Democracy! We're not a Republic!
We are America!

• 'We're Republic!'
• 'We're a Democracy!'
• 'Wrong, we're a Republic!'
• 'You can't have a Republic without a democracy!!!'
• 'Democracy means two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner!

(and then of course the one point they all agree on:)

• 'Why do you hate America?!'

Unfortunately, the only thing that we seem able to keep, is fighting over those same dead end answers, over, and over, and over again. I know that I've often been diverted into that dead-end cycle, and good lord how I'd like to punch my fellow man in the nose after just a few rounds of it! But the truth is that those answers might as well have been designed to shield us from considering the question that they are supposedly given in answer to. And as the true answer is that we are an intricate formulation and development of both, rather than either one answer or the other, we never get past the false either/or answer, in order to ask them.

That is the nature of these coin-toss dilemmas, which is a clue for us, if we care to pay attention. Such answers prevent any real consideration of the questions that prompts them, and maybe, the fact is that when what you're looking for is a cheap fight, then an answer which encourages more questions and requires respectful conversation - well that just won't do, will it( self, I'm looking at you...)?

I think you'll see what I mean if you imagine that same coin toss played out on a different field - like this: Picture walking up to someone on the street and calling out to them: "Hey, you're an animal!", it's unlikely that such a comment would be taken well.

Right? Right. But would it be technically wrong? No, it wouldn't. Human beings are, in the biological sense, Animals. But... how much better of a reaction do you think that'd get, if someone else ran up and yelled out "No! That person isn't an animal, they're a Mammal!'?

Sure, yes, technically... that is also correct... but....

Right?

The nature of such coin tossed false dilemmas (which are kissing cousins to "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"), is that they ensure our failure to acknowledge that we are a more developed form of that subject - whatever it is - that either answer alone provides for - and that should catch our attention like an mid-day siren, that an important context has been dropped from our awareness. The nature of that 'Heads or tails?!' answer which they expect you to give, is to manoeuvre our discussion away from recognizing that that particular 'more' which you are being diverted away from, which in this case, is that you are, in fact, Human - and that's the part it doesn't want you to take notice of.

The coin toss dilemma of 'Democracy!' or 'Republic!, is doing the political equivalent of demanding that you answer to being either an Animal, or a Mammal, in regards to our form of government. Both answers are technically correct, within a given context, but without defining that context, and in fact wiping the need for context from your context, they instead restrict the discussion from noticing or questioning the full hierarchical nature of the issue, and in that sense both answers are wrong. Wrong, because when taken, or given, on their own, they effectively drop the context of the critical question which America is the most revolutionary answer in history, to:

• How best to provide Representative Government' to an entire nation?

Plato asked a similar question to this too, though in a very different context, in his Republic, but his Republic, is nothing like our Republic, and no coin toss level answer can ever supply the reasons for explaining why our republic is so different, let alone answering what those differences are, or why. Today it's perhaps even more important to realize that the discussion you're being prevented from having, is the discussion we so desperately need to be having... but which we can't have, while the answers we've become so accustomed to giving and arguing over, are keeping us from really considering the question that we thought we were answering.

One result of not allowing the full context to be dropped, is that, we'd waste little or no time on the arguments we've been so bogged down in having! If the context were clear, no one would even assume that anyone was advocating for 'Democracy!' in the sense of unlimited majority rule, as it'd be obvious that they were only advocating for a political system of self governance. And by that same token, if the full context were taken into account, no one would ever assume that those who answer 'a Republic!', would intend that to mean some sort of rule, where laws were issued by an unelected platonic elite, but would instead understand that they meant only that very particular form of a Republic, which our nation was designed to be, something along the lines of:

A constitutional, representative government of laws which stand in opposition to the fickle rulings of men's passions

, and the fact that we are that form of a republic, of course requires some degree of democratic participation from the electorate.

IOW, the arguments we've been having, are little better than diversions from those conversations that would have been extremely valuable, to have been having these last many years. As it is, I know that in the past when I've let that context be punted away with my answer that we're a 'Republic!', the next thing I knew was that I'd been practically prevented from going a syllable beyond that coin toss of an answer, and no matter how ardently I might have tried to explain that what I meant was less a case of my calling out heads or tails, but the act of planting my flag on the peak of that mountain which America is the pinnacle of... instead it became apparent that the nature of the coin-toss, is that its answers are expected to not only evade that full context, but to seek (as if it had a will of its own) to prevent our gaining an understanding of the principles and purposes which that full context would have self-evidently demanded of us.

So for this coming new year, please, resolve to stop giving answers that answer nothing, instead start asking questions that lead away from easy answers. 'Why is a democratic means of self determination, worthwhile?' is a question worth asking, but realize that the easy answer that's dying to be given, is not the answer that's worth being accepted. Pursue it! Yes, it is necessary, it is the foundational layer of our political structure, but why is it so important? We need to begin asking that, because without asking that question, the answers of Democracy or Republic become the means of losing our understanding of what we are so very fortunate to have. To accept the 'Democracy!/Republic!' answer, is to ignore the vitally important features which our system of government has developed, features which could not have been built without that foundation, and which resulted in our Republic - and realize that answering only 'Democracy!/Republic!', is the means of dropping the necessary context, and is willfully dismissive of, and insulting to, all that has been built upon that foundation, and all of that which make us so much more than simply either a 'Democracy!', or a 'Republic!'.

Seeing that our answers have become the means to ignoring the questions that gave rise to them, it's worth asking why... isn't it?

America is, and can only be, an answer, to that full context of questions being asked. If they are no longer asked, or even known, then either answer will become truly meaningless, and the historic exceptionalism that America is, will cease to exist, drowned out, no doubt, in a war of competing answers shouted after coins tossed into the air, answers that are doomed to be shouted down, as the coin falls to the ground.

In order to determine how to provide Representative Government, we need to understand what Representative is, and why it's needed so that when those representatives are elected to positions of power in our government, they will govern in that particular manner, that makes our government so very different from any other in the history of the world. Those are the conversations that we need to engage in, even more so now, than four or eight or sixteen years ago, but before we can, we've got to ask, and pursue, those questions which alone can spawn answers that are worth understanding the meaning of.

Those are the questions I'll be pursuing over the next few posts, into the new year of 2017.

Happy New Year!