{"id":1780,"date":"2018-01-26T15:32:45","date_gmt":"2018-01-26T20:32:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/?p=1780"},"modified":"2018-01-31T16:13:36","modified_gmt":"2018-01-31T21:13:36","slug":"democracys-pretty-cool-good-job-america","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/2018\/01\/26\/democracys-pretty-cool-good-job-america\/","title":{"rendered":"Democracy’s Pretty Cool. Good Job, America!"},"content":{"rendered":"

The creation of America\u2019s representative democracy was designed to be a perfect system that secured the rights of the people.\u00a0 <\/span>It was a system created to protect the three benchmarks of democracy: popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty.\u00a0 <\/span>Although the underlying structure seems to do so, our democracy has seen faults in all sections of these benchmarks.\u00a0 <\/span>Particularly, we have seen faults in political equality with years of majority tyranny.\u00a0 <\/span>Where the majority opinion, with the democratic majority rules pillar, can undermine any minority opinion, hindering political equality.\u00a0 <\/span>This can be seen with slavery and Jim Crow laws, disallowing African-Americans equal political power, as well as during the Cold War, where McCarthyism led to unjust discrimination against anyone remotely supporting a communist approach to society.\u00a0 <\/span>However, in today\u2019s America, although not without its inconsistencies and faults, majority tyranny is protected against by the political divide we see today.<\/span><\/p>\n

People seem to panic when anybody discusses how divided the country is today.\u00a0 <\/span>We see two powerful viewpoints, conservatives and liberals, constantly battle it out in Congress and in the media.\u00a0 <\/span>This presents the image that we are falling apart as a nation.\u00a0 <\/span>However, this continuous arguing and prevention for one side to dominate is our democracy working.\u00a0 <\/span>Majority tyranny is nearly impossible with today\u2019s political spectrum.\u00a0 <\/span>Yes, Trump has used his power to succeed in questionable actions, but there have been many times where democrats have been able to stop or slow this power.\u00a0 <\/span>Furthermore, his actions have not been able to drastically shift our way of government.\u00a0 <\/span>Our country is not close to spiraling progressively backwards.\u00a0 <\/span>This is because of the divide.\u00a0 <\/span>Strong political equality on both sides.\u00a0 <\/span>Some people may be screaming \u201cmajority tyranny,\u201d but when it\u2019s half the country screaming it, it doesn\u2019t exist.\u00a0 <\/span>Although republicans control the majority of our government, they do not have majority tyranny and have enough contention to hold our democracy strong.<\/span><\/p>\n

If we look at how the government has had control in the past and how misrepresented the minority was, we can have clear perspective on what we have today.\u00a0 <\/span>Of course, it is imperfect and there are plenty of cases where minority opinions do not hold strong.\u00a0 <\/span>However, when we look at the power of the two sides in our nation, we will see that majority tyranny does not exist.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The creation of America\u2019s representative democracy was designed to be a perfect system that secured the rights of the people.\u00a0 It was a system created to protect the three benchmarks of democracy: popular sovereignty, political equality, and political liberty.\u00a0 Although the underlying structure seems to do so, our democracy has …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3772,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40542,40530,68425],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1780","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-1030am-section","category-our-unique-experiment","category-spring-2018","column","twocol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3772"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1780\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/introamgov-mcgowen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}