I don't how much it will take to get people to stop trying to work within our political system and to start working to overthrow it, but things are getting bad so fast, and climate change is such a threatening, onrushing catastrophe that it seems that thinking people would finally wise up.
Our form of government, the Madisonian republic, has undergone the most extensive test in the history of political science. It has been tested fifty-one times and has failed repeatedly.
What more evidence do we need? What will it take to launch a revolution?
In Federalist 10 James Madison complained about the American state governments—he told us how they were not doing very well. Apparently the other Framers agreed with him because in Article IV, Section 4, of the Constitution they said:
The United States shall guarantee to every state in this union, a republi-can form of government, and shall protect each of them against inva-sion; and on application of the legislature, or of the executive (when the legislature cannot be convened), against domestic violence.
This requirement has been met. All fifty states have a republican form of government. They all emulate the national government in one important respect: they all have a “scheme of representation” whereby the power of the People is delegated to a small group of officials by means of elections. Thus we have fifty test cases; we have fifty real-life experiments in republican government. The results are not very good. In about half of those fifty states the rights of the usual hated groups—those who are not white, or not male, or not heterosexual, or not Christian, or not well-to-do—are under attack. Preparations are underway in several states to keep blacks from voting in the 2016 elections, and the right of women to get an abortion is being infringed by denying women access to medical practitioners to provide the necessary services, and in some states, Arizona for example, attempts have been made to deny non-heterosexuals public services that are available to others in much the same way that blacks were denied such services during the days of Jim Crow. The record of abuses is long and growing. These fifty states are undeniable proof that the “scheme of representation,” and the Madisonian republic, is an unmitigated disaster.