America-Democratic Nation By: Tan Ly

Essay by viethelldragonCollege, UndergraduateA+, March 2004

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America is a democratic nation. The word democratic sets our government apart from the majority of the world's nations. Dictators control many countries, which is unlike our wonderful democratic system, so we should consider ourselves blessed. Although we live in one of the fairest countries in the world, there are still many issues that our political system brings about. These flaws in our government can only be solved while being more altruistic, initiating proportional representation, and "the power of context". These three ideas point out the roots of the issues not only in our political system, but also in our society such as racism, misrepresentation, misunderstandings, and stereotypes, just to list a few.

The three ideas presented by De Waal in "The Ape and the Sushi Master", Lani Guinier in "Second Proms and Second Primaries: The Limits of Majority Rule", and Malcolm Galdwell in "The Power of Context" can all be implemented to improve the American democratic system, but the place to start looking for the system's weakpoint is not necessarily apart of the system, but in our society.

The American democratic process would greatly improve if the peoples' personal opinions about race were not solely based on stereotypes, but based on what a person's personality is like. Also, it would improve if there were equality in the voting process, so that the under represented would have a fair chance of being equally represented in our governments. Finally, it would improve if everybody respected each other as human beings, and only that, where there would be no condescension based on social status and wealth.

De Waal's views on altruism, Guinier's ideas on proportional representation and Gladwell's notion of "he power of context" all go to support a similar topic, which is that the world is an imperfect place. "Our species...