TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY DEMOCRACY

I’.ven now these principles move me, as they have moved «mmtlessmillions around the planet. I confess it difficult for iIK to read certain passages of Jefferson or Paine, for exam-HO, without being brought to the edge of tears by their IM .inly and meaning.

I want to thank you, the revolutionary dead, for having inmle possible for me a half-century of life as an American i iir/.en under a government of laws, not men, and particularly for that precious Bill of Rights, which has made it possible for me to think, to express unpopular views, however foolish ui mistaken at times—indeed, to write what follows without fi-iir of suppression.
For what I now must write can all too easily be misunder-ilood by my contemporaries. Some will no doubt regard it as Ni-ditious. Yet it is a painful truth I believe you would have quickly grasped. For the system of government you fash-hmcd, including the very principles on which you based it, is Increasingly obsolete, and hence increasingly, if inadvertently, oppressive and dangerous to our welfare. It must be radically changed and a new system of government invented—a democracy for the twenty-first century.

You knew, better than we today, that no government, no political system, no constitution, no charter or state is permanent, nor can the decisions of the past bind the future forever. Nor can a government designed for one civilization tope adequately with the next.

You would have understood, therefore, why even the Con-Niilution of the United States needs to be reconsidered, and nliered—not to cut the federal budget or to embody this or i hat narrow principle, but to expand its Bill of Rights, taking necount of threats to freedom unimagined in the past, and to create a whole new structure of government capable of making intelligent, democratic decisions necessary for our survival In a new world.

I come with no easy blueprint for tomorrow’s constitution. I mistrust those who think tfiey already have the answers when we are still trying to formulate the questions. But the time has come for us to imagine completely novel alternatives, to discuss, dissent, debate, and design, from the ground up, the democratic architecture of tomorrow.

Not in a spirit of anger or dogmatism, not hi a sudden impulsive spasm, but through the widest consultation and peaceful public participation, we need to join together to reconstitute America.

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