Amending the Australian Constitution requires a public refernadum with all citizens over 18 required to vote. The amendment must get a majority of votes and pass in at least 3 of the 6 states.

The Australian Constitution does not have a Bill of Rights. There was an attempt to add one in 1989 but it failed in all 6 states! One argument against it was the behaviour of the US Courts.

Surely someone’s written a good book on this, although I can’t think of one.

If I had to guess, I’d say that it was partly a result of yet another rediscovery of revolutionary ideas that date back at least to the 1700s. Some version are peaceful, many are not. Someone pointed out to me once that revolutions and such don’t often happen when things are at their absolute worst. Then people are too absorbed in finding food to eat or keeping out of the way of the secret police to have the time or the ability to revolt. It’s when things get a bit better that revolutions break out. So… the 60s. The big wars are over. Most people in the countries most affected – US, France, Germany, Italy – are relatively prosperous. They’ve got free time; they aren’t scraping for food to eat. There are (as there always have been and always will be) injustices, real and imagined. In the Middle Ages, the idealistic and the ambitious might have called for a crusade. In the 60s, they called for revolution.

Just a guess. I’m sure someone’s written a good analysis of the period.

I’d put the Bill of Rights thing on the debit list, myself, since I see it as tied very tightly to the unelected decision-makers John complains of. That is, I see it as functioning not so much as protection for the individual as a framework from which quite a range of unelected interest groups can launch their programs to have the force of law put behing *their* vision of what it means to be a free individual in a modern democracy. I think that sort of thing should be left up to the people we elect to Parliament, but I admit that my views are those of an idiosyncratic minority in Canada.

I expect the American … not empire, exactly, but period of dominance… will fade away as others have and others will, while the basic ideas of Western civilization continue to flow and mutate. Like an amorphous blob, like I said. Or maybe I’m just too close to see clearly.

I don’t think that the US is entirely dead as a military power because they didn’t start recruiting for a war after 9-11. I thought at the time that they should have treated it as a criminal attack – although since the criminals were in a failed state with an unrecognized government, going into Afghanistan was an acceptable response. Arming up for WW II against terrorist squads wouldn’t be.
But that argument not only a dead horse, but a rotten one. The US is badly and expensively bogged down militarily, but it’s still militarily powerful. It’s not dead yet, far from it, however serious its current problems.

I do think that what Jane says about educating children to know the basic political and cultural ideas of their country is important. As a Canadian, albeit one with strong US ties, who moreover lives way, way outside the typical Canadian’s zone of just north of the US border, my views may not be typically Canadian ones. We do try to teach the basics. Not well, I think, and I think many Canadians would agree. When it comes to deciding what to teach, what our culture is, the Anglos worry about too much influence from the US – the Francophones are fascinated by the US. Plus ca change etc – we gained independance by evolution, not revolution, and the most influential war in that evolution was probably fought alongside our colonial masters, not against them. So what happens after that? Some of us start taking a deep interest in supporting another superpower!

There’s a big difference between education for citizenship in the most powerful country in the world and in the much weaker next-door neighbour. Maintaining what’s distinct while not pissing off a major trading partner and important ally while wailing about the youth who only want American singers and actors while exporting, at least temporarily, a lot of our best and brightest…that’s our challenge, but they are really only details. In the big picture, any culture or county has know who they are, where they came from and what they stand for. And they have to have a way to transmit the important details of what it means to be a member of the culture or a citizen of the country to the next generation. That’s critical. And it has to be done in a way that doesn’t produce a culture that is too narrow, nor one that lacks cohesion.

I think the North American connection to European culture and history is more one of a second cousin twice removed than of kissing cousins. I love Europe. I love reading about it. But when I visited there, I realized that I wasn’t European. Genetics isn’t destiny. It’s like the director of a mixed-race South African choir I heard on the radio this morning said – we’re African. We don’t belong anywhere else. I’m North American. I don’t belong in Europe, even in the UK, where my ancestors came from, and not in Spain or France or Denmark or anywhere else I visited and enjoyed enormously, and would go again if I could. People – any people – can and should look at what’s being done in other parts of the world, and pick and choose useful ideas, but they don’t need to pick only the ones which are cultural cousins.

As for the present state of the US, I don’t know what went wrong but I don’t think its solely the fault of the present education system.

Consider the anti-Vietnam war protests of 1968. That was 40 years ago. Why didn’ the University faculties say “You don’t like the war, we don’t like it, but that doesn’t give you a right to seize University buildings and break into the office of the president.”

How did draft evaders beconme heroes? How did people accept comparing Johnson and Nixon to Hitler?

Remember this was 20 years after the Second World War ended. The students who were protesting were children of people who had fought that war. How did riots get equated to free speech?

I’ll comment on two different things.

A bit of biography – I grew up in the US and moved to Australia when I was 35. Now I’m 72, so I’ve spent half my life in each country. US news tends to be limited here, a half page in the daily paper and maybe 2 minutes in a half hour TV news show.

But one thing I’ve noticed is how intrusive the US courts have gotten. For example, a few weeks ago the US Supreme Court decided that the Navy could use sonar even if it endangered whales.

The US has an elected President who is head of the armed services. It has an elected Congress who are responsible for funding the armed services. Both the President and Congress are answerable to the people. Why would anyone expect unelected judges to determine defense policies?

Robert asked why no one makes decisions anymore, From down here, it looks like every time an elected official makes a decision, he or she gets second guessed by an unelecteed judge.

Perhaps I’m being misled by the limited news cover down here but the US Courts look far too powerful to me. Is it connected to what Jane said about

“The emphasis on the primacy of the individual, for instance, gives us the principle of the primacy of conscience, the Bill of Rights, Jonas Salk and Ludwig von Beethoven. Taken to its logical extreme, it gives us PETA, the North American Man-Boy Love Association, copper bracelets that are supposed to cure arthritis, and Paris Hilton.”

As to education, I think any US education needs to include Europe. It should include the difference between an isolated continent and countries which were continually in fear of invasion. And the contrast between having an empty frontier and a thickly settled country with no room to expand.

Australian education can’t be limited to Australia. We had no revolution or Civil War and the literature is limited by the population. 7 million in 1940 and 20 million now just doesn’t provide many writers.