Robert Dahl's How Democratic Is The American Constitution?

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According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary Democracy is a form of government by the people; especially: rule of the majority(Webster). This is what the United States is represented as, and this is based on the United States Constitution from which the United states draws all legal powers. In Robert Dahls book How democratic Is the American Constitution? He challenges this idea by trying to appeal to his readers in a way that they may view the United States Constitution in a different light. Dahl does this by pointing out flaws that the Constitution has and, draws on facts based on the other democracies around the world that the United States is compared too. He points out how many democratic ideas and innovations have a occurred since the conception of the American Constitution yet it has only adopted some of those idea.
Dahl starts his book off by playing devils advocate and proposing a series of questions of which he deems fundamental. He spends the first chapter provoking his readers to think about why the Constitution is the way it is, and if the Constitution is as great as the American people believe it to be, then how come other countries haven't follow suite and adopted it? He then outlines the areas of which each of the succeeding chapters will touch on with more thought provoking questions. Lastly Dahl makes a point to point out that through out his book he'll be referring to the people that had a hand in the constitution as the Framers rather than the Founding Fathers due to the fact that only a portion of them were apart of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
When referring to the Framers Dahl expresses a great amount of respect but, at the same time he dissects their decisions. Citing ignorance being a l...

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...onstitution and the issues with the electoral college. The fact that America remains on a first-past-the-post system instead of moving to a popular vote system when several Presidents were elected despite being the less popular candidate is ludicrous. Also while some of the initial flaws in the Constitution are understandable due to the need to rally support, those flaws are not representative of a democratic nation.
At the end of the day Dahls book should be something that every American should read in order to actually speak and sound educated in the matter. While the Constitution is great for America as a whole, there are reasons that Amendments can be made to it and should be in order to make America more democratic. If Americans want to continue to claim that American Democracy is true, then they need to take a page from Dahls book and rethink how things are run

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