Transcript
KEVIN O'LEARY: There is a core question, as E.J. has spoken about this. The core question driving this book is: How can we make democracy meaningful and alive in modern America?
How can we give real power to citizens in a responsible way, so that the nation is run by more than 435 in the House, 100 in the Senate, and the President, so 536 people when we have 300 million?
If you deal with this question, you have to deal with the challenge of scale and grapple with population head-on. It is interesting; when I was researching the book, there is not that much written in the political science literature on scale. Robert Dahl and Tufte wrote a book on size and democracy about 20, 25 years ago, but there is not that much after that.
Much of the 20th Century, in terms of the struggle for democracy was about inclusion, and that is very important. If you go back to the Greeks, as I did in writing the book, of course, they are famous for having male citizens of Athens, and everybody else -- women, slaves, children, and barbarians -- are outside. Certainly, we have had this struggle. So, at the beginning of the 20th Century, we have the Women's Movement and then finally in the sixties, the great Civil Rights Movement and then pushing for other groups since then. We arrive at 2006 where nearly everybody is included in the demos, and we can all participate, but at the same time, there is a felt sense that is hard to give statistical data but a sense that democracy doesn't mean as much as it did in the past, and I think that is the challenge for us now.
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