Do the American People Get What they Deserve:
:HL Mencken once said "Democracy is the belief that the common man knows what he wants and deserves to get it good and hard." Today Americans are getting something hard. We are engaged in senseless foreign wars. Government continues to grow at unpreceented rates. Immigration continues to flood our country. Who is to blame? Is it our elites in politics, business, and culture? Are the people too content to watch American Idol to do anything? Or are the elites following the will of the Dixie Chick CD burning peopl?
To discuss these topics (NB: not all of these speakers agree that the above accurately depicts the problems that are plaguing our nation):
Jim Bovard- James Bovard is a bestselling journalist and author. His many books include Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty, Terrorism and Tyranny, and The Bush Betrayal. His latest book, Attention Defecit Democracy deals specifically with the issues being discussed at this meeting
Paul Gottfried-Prof. Gottfried teaches humanities at Elizabethtown College. He is a leading scholar of the conservative movement and has written a number of books including The Conservative Movment, Conservatism and the Search for Historical Meaning, After Liberalism, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt, and The Strange Death of Marxism.
Jesse Walker is the Managing Editor of
Reason, where he has written about a variety of topics, from pirate radio to copyright law to suburban sprawl. He is the author of
Rebels on the Air: An Alternative History of Radio in America, published by New York University Press in October 2001.Walker's articles have appeared in a number of publications, including
The New York Times ,
The Wall Street Journal,
The Washington Post,
Salon,
The New Republic,
L.A. Weekly,
National Review,
No Depression,
Telos, and
Z.