Chapter 1, Democracy Before America Summary and Analysis

Stewart begins by reminding the reader that the United States is among the first if not the first representative democracy. But in present-day America, political participation has precipitously declined. Politicians have a ninety-nine percent incumbency rate, and the United States invades other countries to impose democracy on them. The chapter aims to trace the history of government prior to United States democracy to see how we moved from "there" to "here."

First came early man, who was basically an animal—primitive, lacking civic institutions, and so on. But eventually most people figured out that civilization was needed to survive and move forward. They would do better to cooperate. Next comes Athens, widely understood as the world's first democracy, and which had its own set of civic institutions, like courts, juries, assemblies and so on. The early Athenian democracy...