We the Fallen People: The Founders and the Future of American Democracy

Written by Robert Tracy McKenzie

Narrated by Bob Souer

The success and survival of American democracy have never been guaranteed.
What we must do, argues the historian Robert Tracy McKenzie, is take an unflinching look at the very nature of democracy-its strengths and weaknesses, what it can promise, and where it overreaches. And this means we must take an unflinching look at ourselves.

We the Fallen People presents a close look at the ideas of human nature to be found in the history of American democratic thought. McKenzie, following C. S. Lewis, claims there are only two reasons to believe in majority rule: because we have confidence in human nature-or because we don't. The Founders subscribed to the biblical principle that humans are fallen and their virtue is always doubtful, and they wrote the US Constitution to frame a republic intended to handle our weaknesses. But by the presidency of Andrew Jackson, contrary ideas about humanity's inherent goodness were already taking deep root among Americans, bearing fruit in such perils as we now face for the future of democracy.

Focusing on the careful reasoning of the Founders, the seismic shifts of the Jacksonian Era, and the often misunderstood but still piercing analysis of Tocqueville's Democracy in America, McKenzie guides us in a conversation with the past that can help us see the present-and ourselves-with new insight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ChristianAudio.com
• Release date: Sep 21, 2021
• ISBN: 9781545918586

Robert Tracy McKenzie

Robert Tracy McKenzie (Ph.D., Vanderbilt University) is professor and chair of the department of history at Wheaton College, where he teaches courses in U.S. history, the Civil War and historiography. McKenzie is the author of two award-winning monographs: One South or Many? Plantation Belt and Upcountry in Civil-War Era Tennessee (Cambridge, 1994) and Lincolnites and Rebels: A Divided Town in the American Civil War (Oxford, 2009). He has also written numerous scholarly reviews and articles including "Don't Forget the Church: Reflections on the Forgotten Dimension of Our Dual Calling" in the book Confessing History: Christian Faith and the Historian's Vocation (Notre Dame, 2010).