For over sixty years when Communists or other dictatorial groups took over a country, they tried to give a veneer that their government was a popular government: for example the People's Republic of China. But it was not a republic and it relied more on dogma than any definable public will.
Now we hear charges in the U.S. that elected politicians are not listening to the people or that the people are angry or the people are…
But who are "the people"? It depends on who you talk to. "The people" are whoever agrees with the speaker, it doesn't matter what portion of the population actually agrees with the speaker. We have the Tea Party speaking for "the People", we have the Democrats speaking for "the People", and we have the Party of One speaking for "the People".
Lost is the "We the people" of the preamble to the Constitution:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish
Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity…"
That is, "the People" work together to achieve these things, not form factions that consider all the other factions wrong.
Oh, well! Before a decade had passed, U.S. politics was descending into charge and counter-charge, extravagant insults were begin hurled about, and much other uncivil discourse had become part of the national landscape.
The more things change, the more they remain the same.
