Consolidating Democracy

Abstract

Abraham Lincoln’s poetic description of democracy remains its most lucid: “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” Exactly what this means in reality has been at the center of politics long before Lincoln’s battleground oration and it remains so long after it. Polities as disparate as Julius Caesar’s republican Rome of 44 BC to Mao Tse-Tung’s communist China in the mid-twentieth century to George W. Bush’s U.S. government in the twenty-first century arguably are governments of the people, for the people, and by the people. In some ways or another, such governments are the choices of the people, are representative of the people, and they ostensibly govern to meet the needs of the people.