Since James Madison day (and long before), there have been constant struggles over "democratic governance".

It is a virtual reflex for governments to plead security concerns when they undertake any controversial action, often as a pretext for something else.

I pretend no originality in observing that mass education was motivated in part by the perceived need to "educate them to keep them from our throats," to borrow Ralph Waldo Emerson's parody of elite fears that inspired early advocates of public mass education.

I don't use the social media but I can see the effects in my own correspondence. I get a ton of correspondence. It used to be hard copy and now it's a very limited amount of actual letters people write. So it's mostly email.

I didn't pay my taxes for years.

You've just got to get people organized and tell them the truth. There aren't any magic tricks to it. You know, sometimes it's pretty amazing. Actually, I mentioned a pretty striking case of this in "Crisis and Hope," which was the Caterpillar case in the early 1990s.

We could not bring democracy to South Vietnam at a cost that we were willing to accept. So it was a disaster. That' is the left extreme.