Sunday, April 19, 2009

John Dunn on American Exceptionalism (2005)

No government can make a country prosper; but any government can ruin one; and most today are in a position to do so very rapidly and extremely thoroughly. The country of which this is least clearly true is the United States of America; and the obstacles which stand in the way of its doing so are still a plain legacy from the efforts of Madison and his colleagues...
--John Dunn, Setting the People Free: The Story of Democracy (2005), p. 135 and n.