By limiting the terms of our legislators, it might force people to take a closer look at their representatives if they had to chose from a new field of fresh faces every few years.

Sure the Founders expected an educated electorate to ensure that representatives that did not follow the will of the people (or more accurately, did not govern with reason and ethics), would be voted out. They obviously did not expect the people to blindly vote for their incumbent politicians 95% of the time as is common these days in some public positions.

Still, the uneducated voters get some things right from time to time, anyway and the 21st Amendment is one of them. It is simply our jobs as citizens to vote for honest, ethical and responsible people for all of the positions that we fill by public election. We get the government we deserve, after all.

The march toward more freedom continues. Its foes are not all conservatives, Republicans or even Christians but they are certainly working to further restrict your individual freedoms even now! Choose well.

That being said, I repeat: well written, as always. You make some valid points. The idea that we are living in a “democracy” is one of the greatest fallacies perpetrated against the American people since Hoover was painted as an “elitist”. You are correct in asserting we live in a republic, which is a form of representative democracy. The only problem with this is, as you point out, that the people do not hold their representatives accountable.

IMHO, this is a result of a lack of education and general apathy amongst the electorate (oooh, big words). The so called “real Americans”, those flag waving my country and no other morons who seemed so enamored with Palin and march to the drums of Limbaugh and O’Reilly, have been duped into believing this populist falsehood. This is not meant to be an attack on Republicans or conservatives. There are plenty of well spoken, educated, and intelligent Repubs and cons. out there who are sincere in their beliefs, and as close to pure in their efforts as one can get in modern politics. This is an indictment against the uneducated masses. Both Washington and Adams recognized that for this experiment in government we call the United States to succeed, the American people would need a solid liberal education, in mathematics, literature, philosophy, and history.

The 18th Amendment is unique in American history, in that it is the only time we have amended the U.S. Constitution to curtail rather than protect a freedom. While this is certainly a terrible thing, the fact that it has happened only once in the 217 years that we have been amending Constitution illustrates a rare strength of the system: amending our national charter of government is not easy. As both feminists and homophobes have discovered, the system is set up to prevent the Constitution from being changed at every whim of the uneducated masses. The lessons of Prohibition and the 18th Amendment should be that the protection of our liberties requires constant vigilance, that well intentioned people can be easily swayed by pie-in-the-sky promises, and that elected officials do, ironically enough, sometimes respond to what they perceive to be the will of the people, no matter how misguided that perception may be.

I feel I should also point out that the 21st Amendment was passed, not out of a desire to restore some fundamental right but, in an effort to boost tax revenue for the federal government during the depths of the Great Depression. In fact, some historians have argued that it was capitalism that saved alcohol in the United States.