America's 'experiment' with democracy and what the founders foresaw

+ comparisons to the Holocaust; Kissinger's Chile legacy US Edition - Today's top story: Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an 'experiment' -- and were unsure if it would survive [View in browser]( US Edition | 7 December 2023 [The Conversation] [The Conversation]( All writers need editing. But some of them need more, and some less. Historian Thomas Coens at the University of Tennessee sent me an essay this month that was so close to perfect that I barely needed to change anything. That’s rare in my line of work − and a pleasure when it happens. In his story, Coens was essentially scratching an itch of mine. For so long, I’ve heard versions of the phrase “America’s experiment in democracy.” I figured when other people who weren’t historians heard that phrase, they − like me − wondered about it. What did it mean? Who said it? In what context? Coens had the answers. The founders’ use of the term meant two things: “First,” he writes, “[they saw their work as an experimental attempt]( to apply principles derived from science and the study of history to the management of political relations.” And second, there was a more pessimistic meaning − one that presciently relates to the U.S. today. “Their work, the founders believed, was also an experiment because, as everyone who had read their Aristotle and Cicero and studied ancient history knew, republics − in which political power rests with the people and their representatives − and democracies were historically rare and acutely susceptible to subversion.” Naomi Schalit Senior Editor, Politics + Democracy Voters in a county election, 1854. Etching by John Sartain after painting by George Caleb Bingham; National Gallery of Art [Why Franklin, Washington and Lincoln considered American democracy an ‘experiment’ – and were unsure if it would survive]( Thomas Coens, University of Tennessee Is American democracy an ‘experiment’ in the bubbling-beakers-in-a-laboratory sense of the word? If so, what is the experiment attempting to prove, and how will we know if and when it has succeeded? On Oct. 12, a sign in Tel Aviv says in Hebrew, ‘No more words,’ near candles lit both in memory of those killed in the Hamas massacres and for the hostages taken to the Gaza Strip. Amir Levy/Getty Images [Holocaust comparisons are over-used – but in the case of Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel they may reflect more than just the emotional response of a traumatized people]( Avinoam Patt, University of Connecticut; Liat Steir-Livny, Sapir Academic College The Holocaust is not just a memory in Israel. 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