Stand Up Citizen

Broken norms and bad faith are interfering with the proper functioning of our government.  How can we tolerate this in a time of pandemic and economic calamity?  

Using several sources, we explore the kinds of actions and trends that should alarm us about the advance of tyranny.  Both recent books such as How Democracies Die and On Tyranny, and works a few decades old are used to inform us on how to be vigilant.

In our current political and cultural climate we need citizenship education more than ever.  We look at what our founders had to say about the need for informed, educated citizens in the republic they created for us

We review the founders design for the electoral college method of electing the president.  Selections from Hamilton's presentation of the electoral college give us insight into how the process fit in the entire Constitutional scheme.  I hope this will allow us to look critically at how our process, installed and influenced by political parties, compares and whether it constitutes an example of operator error on our part.

We explore the effect of bad faith actions by our political officials and candidates on the health of our body politic, and ask the question whether the candidate who wins their election, but resorts to bad faith, deceit, misstatements, has properly received citizen consent.  Is their election legitimate if citizen consent has been given in error, influenced by their bad faith.

Using the principles that informed and directed the founding generation, we analyze the Citizens United ruling that led to far more corporate money in campaigns.  By applying the Madison's concerns about factions, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the conflicts inherent in corporate structure, the case against the Supreme Court's decision is convincing.

We explore the importance of civic virtue, public virtue, to our founders when they created our republic.  Then the comments of other luminaries on virtue, government and citizenship. Finally, we ask how our state of the nation has preserved, or abandoned, those original intentions for civic virtue to have a key influence on our republic

The founders of our country are much in the news of late.  Even the Federalist Papers are getting lots of air time.  Let's remind ourselves that our founders tried to solve the challenge and threat of faction by encouraging a diversity of interests and views in our republic.  But gerrymandered safe districts run entirely counter to the intent and design of Hamilton, Madison and the other members of our founding generation.  We need to face this problem using their wisdom, consult their reasoning, and take a hard look at the risks if we don't take care of the threat of gerrymandering.

The Constitution is published after months of hard work, and there is lots of push back.  Opposition to many of its aspects comes even from leading citizens, including Sam Adams, John Hancock, and Patrick Henry.  Essays opposing the Constitution appear within only a few days after it is published for Americans to read.  They are principled, thoughtful, and persuasive articles.  What will those who wrote the Constitution do about this?
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay band together and write responses to all of the opposition writing,  These come down to us as the Federalist Papers.  Their work is relevant to our day, quoted often by courts, academics, politicians.  
This episode provides a glimpse into that greatest debate, what may be the high point of the entire period of our nation's founding.

Setting the stage for the creation of the Constitution, this episode gives background and context for how the framers created our Constitution.  It is about the times and events that affected them, what influenced and concerned them, and some of the main challenges they wanted to handle when making the Constitution.  An overview of their objectives in designing the document will I hope lead listeners to read the document and realize our good fortune.

We take a tour through the principles our founding generation set out for our country.  There is much more to the Declaration of Independence that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness.  We look at the many influences on the founders of our country so we get a good sense of the backdrop of their work.  We also do some testing of those principles in our time and how we are or are not faithful to them.  The consequences of we have gone astray may be grave, and threaten our great experiment in self government.

In this first episode, we look back on our history and refresh our memory of the American experience compared to other nations.  A brief review of the history of other major nations over our 243 year history allows us to see how we have fared.  We set our objective for these podcasts to consult our founders and compare our actions to how they expected citizens to act in our republic.  In this way we can begin to see whether our current generation of citizens and public officials need a new set of principles and guidance, or is any shortcoming due to operator error on our part.