Arepublic, if you can keep it,” replied Benjamin Franklin, one of the founding fathers of the USA, when asked by a group of citizens what sort of government had been created by the 1787 Constitutional Convention. The same is true of democracy. You may adopt democracy. But you don’t become one. You become a democracy if you can keep it. Democracy requires institutional architecture, institutional gardening and institutional plumbing. Someone has to work out where something gets stuck to get it unstuck. And in working that out, democracy has to become quite inventive. (Read More)
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