It would be in a "direct democracy" in which all citizens participate directly in the government, since they would vote on each individual matter directly instead of electing representatives to vote for them.
James Monroe was the 5th president of the US. He ran from 1817 to 1825.
War Games was just playing on AMC this past weekend. I believe that the sentiment expressed by this film, that there are no winners in a full scale nuclear war, is grounded in fact and not emotions. We already have the example of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to tell us about the devastation possible and the bombs developed later were many times more powerful. Mutual assured destruction was what kept the US and Soviet Union from attacking each other. People had a right to be afraid. We learned that in 1983 the world had a near-miss with nuclear war, when a Russian soldier ignored a false alarm (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov) and did not give orders or launch a counter-strike on the USA. We may never know how many times we were on the brink of global destruction.
