A REMINDER: GOOD AND BAD IDEAS HAVE CONSEQUENCES, GOOD AND BAD, RESPECTIVELY.

Jeane J. Kirkpatrick, Dictatorships and Double Standards: Rationalism and Reason in Politics (New York: American Enterprise Institute/Simon & Schuster, 1982) (From the "Introduction": "Ideas have consequences, bad ideas have bad consequences." "This book is about the impact of ideas on politics. The essays collected here, written over two decades, have in common a concern with freedom and unfreedom. What kinds of ideas encourage and support democracy or tyranny? How are they institutionalized? Why and how do so many liberating revolutions go wrong? Why did the American Revolution produce constitutional democracy, while its eighteenth-century counterpart bred a reign of terror? Several of the essays deal with the impact of bad ideas on our political life and institutions." Id. at 8. Though some of the essays here may seem dated, I would suggest they remain not only historically significant but also currently relevant. Some of the essays help explain how we (as a nation, as citizens, as members of political parties) got where we are today. For example, how we learned the wrong lesson from our war in Vietnam, how our efforts to disrupt autocratic governments has resulted in their replacement by anti-democratic regimes rather than democratic ones, how people (including Americans) are not very well equipped to deal with rapid social and technological change, how identity politics have weaken party affiliations and strengthen the cult of the personality and the leader ("Only I can and will fix it!," and, most important, how bad idea--and ideas detached from experience--tend to have bad consequences. "All times and places have their share of mistaken ideas and practices. Like violence and pestilence, old age and taxes, error and silliness are always with us because, while knowledge in fields like mathematics and science is cumulative, ideas about society and history [Query: And Law?] change without getting better."  "Our times seem especially hospitable to bad idea, probably because, in throwing off the shackles of tradition, we have left ourselves especially vulnerable to untried nostrums and untested theories." "Tradition, to be sure, does not filter out bestial conceptions any more than it eliminates brutal practices. Human sacrifice, slavery, inquisitions, caste systems, have all be justified and preserved by a tradition. But traditional ideas have at least the merit of being internally related to actual societies and social practices. However, in times of rapid change and mass communication [Note: This "Introduction" was written in 1982. So, keep in mind that the rapidity of change and the increase in means and speed on mass communication is significantly greater now, thirty-plus years later, in the twenty-first century.], culture can become detached from its foundation in society and character. When a disjunction develops between ideas and experience, theories about human nature and history proliferate and flourish, become objects of fashion and faith, to be changed with changing styles o, like hemlines, regardless of the evidence." Id. at 9-10.  From "Dictators and Double Standards":"Although most governments in the world are, as they always have been, autocracies of one kind or another, no idea holds greater sway in the mind of educated Americans than the belief that it is possible to democratize governments, anytime, anywhere, under any circumstances. This notion is belied by an enormous body of evidence based on the experience of dozens of countries which have attempted with more or less (usually less) success to move from autocratic to democratic government. Many of the wisest political scientists of this and previous centuries agree that democratic institutions are especially difficult to establish and maintain--because they make heavy demands on all portions of a population and because they depend on complex social, cultural, and economic conditions." Id. at 23, 30 (emphasis dded). "In his essay Representative Government, John Stuart Mill identified three fundamental conditions . . .  These are" 'One, that the people should be willing to receive it [representative government]; two, that they should be willing and able to do what is necessary for its preservation; three, that they should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the functions which it imposes on them'" Id. at 30-31 (citation omitted). QUERY: How present, strong, and stable are these three conditions in twenty-first-century America? Do the contours of the 2016 Presidential election raise serious questions regarding the state of representative democracy in America? Food for thought.).