Take as You Will

…Though probably not the Jackson you were thinking of. I have a gripe about how the constitutional structure of foreign policy power is talked about, but for someone not quite up to speed on this stuff it’ll probably feel confusing, so let me start at the beginning—then I’ll get to complaining. Democratic government, by design, constantly clashes with itself as the tides of popular opinion flow into and out of its various branches. In the realm of domestic policy this works by design to yield popular sovereignty as the law. In foreign policy however, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed at the start of the American republic, it can yield inferior policy relative to aristocracies’ due to its tendency to eliminate consistency, commitment, and long-term strategy from a nation’s external affairs. The Constitution partially addresses Tocqueville’s concern by insulating the process of American foreign policy from the worst consequences of democracy, but, nonetheless, leaves it open to many of t...

  THE PROBLEM:              Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting a young United States in the early 19 th century, observed that one of America’s greatest strengths lay in its people’s habits of voluntary association, which allowed their democracy to function a successful degree that Europe had never been able to achieve. Writing a couple hundred years later, Robert Putnam wrote of a   historic decline in civic engagement over the latter half of the 20 th century, a phenomenon that he labeled Bowling Alone and lamented, as Tocqueville would have concurred, as unquestionably bad for America; he sought to show the fact of the decline, its causes, and propose solutions. Fixating on the problem of civic disengagement as today's great American civic disaster and pointing to Putnam as the main expose on the crisis is not a new revelation. However, I have found myself wondering how much of Putnam's analysis really fits ...