The latest New Yorker contains a quote from Rousseau about the British parliament. “The English people think it is free. It greatly deceives itself; it is free only during the election of members of Parliament. As soon as they are elected, the people are enslaved and count for nothing.”
I haven’t studied Rousseau—I’ve read he liked to expose his genitalia to passing women, who were, in his view, “specially made to please man.” But don’t some of us believe that, once an election ends, we count for nothing? Certainly the followers of Dumb Donald Trump feel that. I suspect that many Latinos and Black Lives Matters activists might agree. Even Henry Adams, directly descended from two Presidents and one Speaker of the House, wrote that a friend in power is a friend lost. Rousseau thought that the situation was an inevitable result of how our capitalist representative democracies work. And here we are.
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