2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: I am not bothering with the story we just ran [View all]senz
(11,945 posts)Like the Greeks 2000 years before them, our nation's founders formulated a well thought-out system that enabled "citizens" to control their own external (public) existence via democratic governance.
The injustices of the Greek system and our system lay not in the structure of the system but in the restricted definition of "citizen." Our nation's founders intended "citizen" to be broadly inclusive of all residents of the country regardless of class or income -- but with some huge oversights based in 18th century consciousness: it was simply "understood" that women were not, by nature, equipped to handle serious matters and African Americans were "savages" from a primitive country. So only white male property owners were initially allowed to vote. (Property owners were not necessarily wealthy.)
But the structure of government laid out in the Constitution accommodated changes in the definition of citizen. So by the mid 19th century the property requirement had been dropped. By 1870 Black men had the legal right to vote but some states erected obstacles in the form of poll taxes, literacy tests, etc. In 1919 women won the right to vote. Racist states continued to erect barriers to AA voting until the Voting Rights Act of 1965 eliminated obstacles to AA voting.
But the basic structure of the government did not change.