A Republic, If You Can Keep It: Structural Case for Saving American Democracy

"A republic - if you can keep it." When Benjamin Franklin left the Constitutional Convention, a bystander asked what kind of government the delegates had made. Two centuries on, the keeping has grown precarious - and this book argues the real threat is not the one most reformers name.

The danger is not faction. James Madison knew faction was inevitable, woven into human nature, and he built a Constitution to channel it. The danger is what came after: the political party - an institution the framers never designed for - which quietly captured the civic loyalty the Constitution meant to direct toward its own institutions. Parties don't merely express our divisions. They aggregate them, harden them, and stand between citizens and the structures built to represent them.

Drawing on Nebraska's century-old nonpartisan legislature as living proof that another design is possible, A. Richard Vial - retired attorney, former state legislator, and former Deputy Secretary of State - makes the structural case for repair: nonpartisan elections, better methods of counting the public will, and a civic attention equal to the work of self-government.

Clear-eyed, historically grounded, and addressed to citizens rather than partisans, A Republic, If You Can Keep It asks the question a free people can never stop answering - how do you keep what you were given?

A. Richard Vial is a retired attorney, a former member of the Oregon House of Representatives, and a former Deputy Secretary of State of Oregon. He spent a decade writing this book, drawing on what he saw from inside the legislature about how party structure shapes what government can and cannot do. He lives in Scholls, Oregon.