What makes a people a people?

[Eva Elisabeth]

Thanks for your comment, Liz. As for the representative government, (why) has there never come up the desire to establish a proportional voting system so that more different parties and thus agendas could be represented in the government?

[Wild Bill]

According to the Founding Fathers, political parties and proportional voting systems supported the notion of factions, verboten in their system of thought. Hence the Federalists (those who supported the Constitution of 1787) like Washington, Adams Hamilton, were against any objection to the government maintaining that the Revolution of 1775 had settled such issues and the new government was too pure to be objected to on any level. Hence they passed and supported the Alien and Sedition Acts in 1797 and threw their opponents in jail. Jefferson believed differently and released these men. You can see the same restrictive notions in American political parties on all sides of the spectrum, especially the Democrats since they control the executive branches government, the IRS, censoring college speakers, etc.

[LincolnToddFan]

(05-21-2014 10:56 AM)Liz Rosenthal Wrote:  I just saw this very interesting thread.

Eva, I think the question you pose is one that great political thinkers over the centuries have pondered - that is, what makes a nation? So there is no easy answer.

In the case of the U.S. Civil War, modern scholars generally believe, and I would agree, that Lincoln was not motivated by "nationalism" in striking down the rebellion. He was, instead, motivated by the abstract notion of republicanism and democracy. Lincoln seems to have felt very strongly about the success of the great American experiment from the time he was a As of that time, the U.S. was the only country in the world experimenting with representative government. Permitting the southern states to leave and form their own country as a response to an election result that they didn't like would mean the collapse of representative government. young man, not just for America's sake, but for the sake of the world. When he said in one of his early messages to Congress that the U.S. was the "last, best hope of Earth," he meant that all other nations looked to the U.S. for inspiration and evidence that they could have representative government, too.

Thanks Liz, this is what I believe also.

[L Verge]

It is interesting to see use of the words "republicanism" and "democracy" in this response (which I agree with) because many years ago, Mike Kauffman wrote an excellent honors thesis on those exact same concepts -- only his thesis was based on John Wilkes Booth's steadfast belief in them also and his fears that our country was ignoring them.