I feel that the United States as a whole has grown too apathetic towards its own success to really have most people hold any applicable interest in the near-future of the country, and to relate to the models of democracy Hudson discusses in an earlier chapter, the protective democracy where individuals protect their own economic self-interest only seems to work when the country happens to have a strong economy to do so. I felt that protective democracy is the weakest model presented in that reading, along with pluralist democracy, which runs on a dichotomy of relying on interest and lobbying groups to get anything done while still extoling the virtues of ‘rugged’ individualism. This seemed to me to be one of the biggest challenges to the separation of powers, and democracy itself, so far, as interest groups have clearly grown out of control in the United States to the point that we still have groups like Monsanto around despite decades of bad ideas such as DDT, Agent Orange, and the addition of chemicals into everyday food. Interest and lobbying groups are something that I do not believe James Madison could have anticipated in The Federalist Papers, and they have grown large and insidious enough to become a danger towards a just representative government. This is where I believe a combination of the participatory and developmental democracy models would work the best, as there can still be a ‘power elite,’ but the common people create unions and boards to better control and manage non-government institutions that matter to them.…
