The Problem of Democracy

"John and John Quincy Adams: rogue intellectuals, unsparing truth tellers, too uncensored for their own political good. They held that political participation demanded moral courage. They did not seek popularity (and it showed). They lamented the fact that hero worship in America substituted idolatry for results, and they made it clear that they were talking about Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Andrew Jackson. John and John Quincy Adams, the second and sixth presidents, father and son, were brilliant, accomplished men who were disparaged throughout their careers. But this book does considerably more than encompass two essential political lives: it takes the temperature of American democracy from its heated origins through multiple storm events, providing major lessons about the excesses of campaign rhetoric that apply all too obviously to our century. It is a fact that the United States, as originally constituted, was not (nor was even meant to be) a democracy. How we got from there to today's unchallengeable notion of democracy as something real and inviolable is best explained by looking at what the Adamses had to say about the dangers of political de