Arthur Bentley's Conflict Of Interest

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Recommended: Direct democracy and representative democracy

In Conflict of Interest, the author described Arthur Bentley’s views on politics and government as being the result of action taken by groups. Bentley argued that there was no such thing as the public, only factions of like minded people. This contrasts with the Declaration of Independence with grouped all of the colonists together by speaking for all of them using “We the people…”. The Declaration of Independence can be related to the article on Brexit since in both, people came together regardless of their groups and made a decision collectively. However, while the Declaration o independence is used as a promotion for democracy, Brexit possess a warning of the dangers of allowing the misinformed public to participate in direct democracy. …show more content…

I had always agreed with the idea of “the common good” or what is “good for the public”. Now, it makes more sense to me to see the public as groups of like minded people, since there is nothing that could be good for every single group. Before reading Destabilizing the American Racial Order, I was already aware of the fact that the people of my generation see race differently than people from generations past. I found it interesting that the author said that different races would be moving into the “most disfavored” category due to changing perceptions of different races. While reading Multiculturalism and Civil Rights in the Future, I wondered if racial categorization will become obsolete in the future when the lines between races are so blurred that they are indistinct. I also wondered how this would impact people’s self identification in the future. I was not surprised to find that Brexit’s Lessons for Democracy had a cautionary tone. I found myself questioning the reasoning behind using direct democracy to decide such important issues. I agree with the author in that too much direct democracy can be a bad thing. After reading these works, I felt like I was able to look at The Declaration of Independence with a more critical eye. I found it to be almost hypocritical that the colonists talked about self evident rights and equality when the only people with those rights were white, property-owning

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