American Democracy In Peril Summary

In the first chapter of William E. Hudson’s book American Democracy in Peril, Hudson discusses the reasoning and application of the separation of powers stemmed from the Constitution, and the impact it has had as well as the failures that came as a consequence of it. Due to the changing meaning of the Jeffersonian model, one of the failures Hudson argues is that the separation of powers in a partisan, party-based system falls apart once both parties are to blame. It is also argued that the same system creates a political minority “biased against change” to protect against the supposed tyranny of the majority. Hudson ends by making a case in favor of a change in government towards the form of a parliament for the sake of accountability and protection …show more content…
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. Instead of weekly protests on the streets, people would have the opportunity to make a productive change. The workers who are most affected by, for example, a factory closing, would be able to make the best decisions that benefit them before they benefit any irrelevant large corporation. I believe that only then, when the United States is more united and efficient than it