7/26/2022

Last week’s curation at RealClear’s American Civics portal leads off with a new series at RealClearPolitics called “Disputed Questions,” which is designed to bring notable writers, thinkers, policy analysts, and political commentators of diverse viewpoints together to discuss and debate, with civility, the great issues of our time.

In the first installment of this series, Professors Lee Drutman, Daniel DiSalvo, and Steven Teles debate the merits of America’s two-party system. Drutman argues that we should abandon the two-party system and instead embrace “major structural reforms to make multiparty democracy possible in America.” Meanwhile, DiSalvo and Teles question this arugment and contend, in different ways, for reforms to our existing political system. Teles, for instance, posits that more factionalized parties, which would be composed of smaller groups with differing ideological commitments, are “our constitutional order’s substitute for multipartyism.” “We should embrace and enable them – rather than dream of more radical reforms with theoretical advantages but no anchor in our constitutional practice,” Teles concludes.

Elliott Drago of the Jack Miller Center commemorates the 174th anniversary of the Seneca Falls Convention, which he describes as “the origin of the women's suffrage movement and a landmark event in our historical journey to realize the promises of the Declaration of Independence.” Led by Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott, over 200 women and men gathered in upstate New York to read “The Declaration of Rights and Sentiments,” a treatise drafted by Stanton that grounded its argument of political equality between the sexes on the Declaration’s promise that all human beings are created equal.

At the Washington Examiner, Quin Hillyer argues that Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello and James Madison’s Montpelier “are on a malevolent mission to trash the reputations of those two great founders.” As evidence, he points to the Independence Day message posted on Montpelier’s website, which he says discusses racism and slavery but does not mention “why we celebrate the Fourth of July.” “No decent person wants the reality of slavery to be swept under the historical rug,” Hillyer writes. “Still, to posit that slavery is the single lens through which to view U.S. history is flagrantly dishonest.”