Books for the Next Decade

Recommended book for the new decade: Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. An excerpt:

There is a phrase which has grown so common in the world's mouth that it has come to seem to have sense and meaning -- the sense and meaning implied when it is used -- that is the phrase which refers to this or that or the other nation as possibly being "capable of self-government"; and the implied sense of it is, that there has been a nation somewhere, sometime or other which wasn't capable of it -- wasn't as able to govern itself as some self-appointed specialists were or would be to govern it. The master minds of all nations, in all ages, have sprung in affluent multitude from the mass of the nation, and from the mass of the nation only -- not from its privileged classes; and so, no matter what the nation's intellectual grade was, whether high or low, the bulk of its ability was in the long ranks of its nameless and its poor, and so it never saw the day that it had not the material in abundance whereby to govern itself. Which is to assert an always self-proven fact: that even the best governed and most free and most enlightened monarchy is still behind the best condition attainable by its people; and that the same is true of kindred governments of lower grades, all the way down to the lowest.

Who better than the people, through the framework of a sound government, to legislate themselves. To be clear, the narrator is advocating for a republic, as opposed to monarchy or plutocracy. The risks of the United States' plutocracy are little differentiated from those Twain feared in Monarchy. 

The US has for the past two centuries inched from its foundation of Aquinian pre-lapsarian liberalism towards Augustinian moral progressivism. The self-righteous of various tints have claimed a mandate for a strongly moral government, which finds its closest analog in Hobbes' Leviathan and not in later forms of social-contract, like those advocated by James Madison and John Adam's in the Federalist papers. 

The question is not whether to be democratic or hegemonic, but rather if we can return to our roots of a simple, efficient federal vessel of government. If we can, we can also hold out hope that self-government can be revived in local manifestations of community: city, county and state government.

We can govern ourselves peacefully, if we can pry loose the hands of the plutocracy from our throats.