- Welcome to foundations of American democracy.
This is where it all begins.
You might think it's just about the United States.
But here we're going to go much deeper,
and much further back than that.
We're gonna go to the original ideas.
Deep dive into philosophy.
What are the rights of the individual,
and what rights are they willing to give up to a state,
in order to have those individual rights protected.
And this is something that humanity has struggled with
for thousands and thousands of years.
But over those thousands and thousands of years,
as for the most part humanity was controlled
by kings and emperors,
little ideas, like democracy, started to sprout up
in places like ancient Greece, and then in Rome,
and all of these were imperfect,
and many of us would argue
that never have they quite been perfected just yet.
But really it starts to accelerate
in this part of our study,
where we're going to see
that the enlightenment in Europe
sprouts these questions of do we even need kings,
especially when we just fought a big war against them.
Could we create a new type of governance structure.
And what you might not realize is
the United States at its founding
was really something of an experiment.
A state, like the United States, did not exist.
In fact, in the beginning, it did not even view itself
as one state, or one country, but a collection of countries.
So as you'll go through this journey, you're going to see
this fascinating philosophical deep dive,
into the ideas of what makes a government function,
and what powers should it have,
and what powers should it not have.
What powers should go to the aggregate state,
the United States, and what powers should go
to the individual members, to the states themselves.
How does a population protect themselves from the tyranny
of a potential king, or the potential dictator.
In the coming lessons we're going to dive deep
into the ideals of American democracy.
We're going to learn about the debates between the groups,
some of whom thought that the federal government
should have more power, and others who thought
that the states should have more power.
And we'll learn how it all played out
in our actual Constitution.
What powers are in the hands of the federal government,
what powers are in the hands of the state governments,
and what powers are in the hands of both.
So let's start this journey together,
and to learn more about these ideas,
and to get practice with immediate feedback,
I encourage you to look at these lessons on KhanAcademy.org.