postmodern putin’s Reviews > Democracy in America > Status Update

I see other peoples of America enjoying the same physical conditions of prosperity as the Anglo-Americans but without their laws and customs, and these nations are miserable. Anglo-American laws and customs represent, therefore, the particular and predominant reason, which I have been seeking, for their greatness.

Americans so completely identify the spirit of Christianity with freedom in their minds that it is almost impossible to get them to conceive the one without the other; and this is not one of those sterile ideas bequeathed by the past to the present nor one which seems to vegetate in the soul rather than to live.

In the lucky circumstances which have supported and confirmed the establishment and continuance of the democratic republic in the United States, the most important is the choice of the country itself which Americans inhabit. Their fathers have given them the love of equality and freedom but it was God himself who granted them the means of long remaining equal and free by his gift of this boundless continent.

Two main dangers threaten the existence of democracies: namely, the entire subservience of the legislature to the will of the electorate and the concentration of all the other powers of government in the legislature.

The legislators of the states have encouraged the development of these dangers. Those of the Union have done their utmost to make them less of a threat.

In America the sovereignty of the people is not, as with certain nations, a hidden or barren notion; it is acknowledged in custom, celebrated by law. It expands with freedom and reaches its final aims without impediment.

The people reign in the American political world like God over the universe. It is the cause and aim of all things, everything comes from them and everything is absorbed in them.