Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Jurisprudence Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

Public Law and Legal Theory

PDF

David Barnhizer

PRISM

Publication Year

Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Jurisprudence

Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer Jan 2014

Surveillance, Speech Suppression And Degradation Of The Rule Of Law In The “Post-Democracy Electronic State”, David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

None of us can claim the quality of original insight achieved by Alexis de Tocqueville in his early 19th Century classic Democracy in America in his observation that the “soft” repression of democracy was unlike that in any other political form. It is impossible to deny that we in the US, the United Kingdom and Western Europe are experiencing just such a “gentle” drift of the kind that Tocqueville describes, losing our democratic integrity amid an increasingly “pretend” democracy. He explained: “[T]he supreme power [of government] then extends its arm over the whole community. It covers the surface of society …


Through A Prism Darkly: Surveillance And Speech Suppression In The Post-Democracy Electronic State", David Barnhizer Jan 2013

Through A Prism Darkly: Surveillance And Speech Suppression In The Post-Democracy Electronic State", David Barnhizer

David Barnhizer

Through a PRISM Darkly: Surveillance and Speech Suppression in the “Post-Democracy Electronic State” David Barnhizer There is no longer an American democracy. America is changing by the moment into a new political form, the “Post-Democracy Electronic State”. It has “morphed” into competing fragments operating within the physical territory defined as the United States while tenuously holding on to a few of the basic creeds that represent what we long considered an exceptional political experiment. That post-Democracy political order paradoxically consists of a combination of fragmented special interests eager to punish anyone that challenges their desires and a central government that …