In my very first week of college, I was assigned to describe the best form of government. As a recent high school graduate, my only previous exposure to political philosophy was an AP Government revelation that the Founding Fathers’ famous phrase in the Declaration of Independence was borrowed from some guy named John Locke. So needless to say, I wasn’t particularly prepared to tackle the question mulled by philosophers for millennia. I did, however, know a few things: America was a democracy. And I liked America.
Indeed, my patriotism is the sort that’s sincerely stirred by the seemingly cliché crooning of Lee Greenwood, Aaron Tippin, and Brooks & Dunn. It’s no surprise, then, that this debut college paper turned out as a robust defense of democracy. Like most Americans, I simply figured that democracy and patriotism go hand in hand. To suggest a civic retreat from our democratic institutions, let alone entertain the merits of a non-American system of government, is completely foreign to the American experience.