Stand Up Citizen

Using the principles that informed and directed the founding generation, we analyze the Citizens United ruling that led to far more corporate money in campaigns. By applying the Madison's concerns about factions, the principles of the Declaration of Independence, and the conflicts inherent in corporate structure, the case against the Supreme Court's decision is convincing.

We explore the importance of civic virtue, public virtue, to our founders when they created our republic. Then the comments of other luminaries on virtue, government and citizenship. Finally, we ask how our state of the nation has preserved, or abandoned, those original intentions for civic virtue to have a key influence on our republic

The founders of our country are much in the news of late. Even the Federalist Papers are getting lots of air time. Let's remind ourselves that our founders tried to solve the challenge and threat of faction by encouraging a diversity of interests and views in our republic. But gerrymandered safe districts run entirely counter to the intent and design of Hamilton, Madison and the other members of our founding generation. We need to face this problem using their wisdom, consult their reasoning, and take a hard look at the risks if we don't take care of the threat of gerrymandering.

We take a tour through the principles our founding generation set out for our country. There is much more to the Declaration of Independence that life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. We look at the many influences on the founders of our country so we get a good sense of the backdrop of their work. We also do some testing of those principles in our time and how we are or are not faithful to them. The consequences of we have gone astray may be grave, and threaten our great experiment in self government.

In this first episode, we look back on our history and refresh our memory of the American experience compared to other nations. A brief review of the history of other major nations over our 243 year history allows us to see how we have fared. We set our objective for these podcasts to consult our founders and compare our actions to how they expected citizens to act in our republic. In this way we can begin to see whether our current generation of citizens and public officials need a new set of principles and guidance, or is any shortcoming due to operator error on our part.