Central Government vs Loose Confederation
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The original U.S. Constitution, including the Bill of Rights, created a representative democracy, though the trend since has been more toward a pluralist democracy. There had been earlier efforts to establish self-government in the colonies, the most extensive of which was the Articles of Confederation passed before the Revolutionary War was ended. In this approach, the states came together in a loose confederation which allowed each state to retain its own sovereignty and independence. The states in this confederation were supreme over the national government. The Articles did establish a Congress, but it had limited powers. There was no executive and no judicial branch. The way the Articles were shaped reflected the fears of the colonists concerning centralized power such as applied in England. The Articles also showed that there was as yet no national identity among Americans. The trend was toward representative democracy in the individual states, and many preferred the decentralized system offered by the articles because they believed they could better influence decisions made on a local and state level than they ever could on a federal level. However, the government created by the articles of Confederation was too weak to promote economic security or assure peace (Welch, Gruhl, Steinman, Comer, and Vermeer, 1997, 25-26). The concern about giving a central government too much power would infuse the debate over the Constitution as well, and the Federalists and
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t of free governments to those of the most tyrannical that ever existed in the world (Miroff, Seidelman, and Swanstrom 26).
Thus the size of the new country was one reason for concern that the proposed representative democracy would degenerate into tyranny. The government that was created by the Constitution, however, was shaped by the Founders to be a representative democracy, and the addition of the Bill of Rights demonstrated the willingness of Americans to amend the Constitution to give more protections than were embodied in the original document and to address problems as they were perceived. It also showed a desire to bring factions together by ceding certain powers to the states and to the individual.
However, it is also true that subsequent history has tended to shift more toward a pluralist democracy, with more interplay of factions than madison would have liked. Politics today tend to divide along a variety of conflict lines based on political ideology, ethnicity, race, economic standing, and so on. the creation of political parties began the process of creating factions which helped shape government. At the same time, individuals continue to find ways to have an influence on government by voting, by the referen
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1844
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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