Democracy in America

I commented recently on how I considered that the success of the American experiment in democracy had "more to do with its foundations in the English common law tradition than the genius of the authors of the Constitution and Bill of Rights." Of course, "blaming" the apparent success of American democracy on something other than the Constitution is quite well-founded. Toqueville in his On Democracy in America (nobody dared to correct him that we are not a democracy, we are a REPUBLIC, amirite?) attributed the success of the American experiment on the mores, or habits of the mind, of the Americans rather than, for instance, a superior and magical Constitution.