Unit
1: Citizenship and the
American Democracy
Background Information |
What exactly do the concepts of democracy and citizenship
mean? What does it mean to be a local citizen or a global citizen? In this
unit, you will begin to conceive of the U.S. as a community in which collective
values and social institutions shape the ways in which individuals think
and act toward each other and toward nature. It is this community that
defines what it means to be a citizen and the rights and obligations that
citizenship entails. While one can see the U.S. as a community -- with
a common government, culture, and institutions -- looking beyond the scale
of the nation-state, the U.S. is actually a community made up of many smaller
communities. Each of these smaller communities has its own characteristics,
traditions, history, attitudes, local concerns, and sometimes language.
Communities change and grow over time and each has a particular history
created from the layers of people and events that have lived in that particular
place over time. Many, but not all, of these communities are place-based,
meaning that location plays an important role in defining them and in determining
some of the issues they face. Global environmental change may present the
local and the global communities with unprecedented challenges, like those
that would accompany rising sea levels. A key question emerges: "How will
communities respond to global environmental change?"
Not all people or groups of people within a community
have equal power or equal voice, nor are opportunities equally distributed
among the various segments of a community. These disparities often create
fragmentation that can threaten the unity of a community. These basic tensions
have repeatedly arisen in the framing of U.S. political issues and are
likely to continue to do so. Inequalities and fragmentations within communities
prompt the question, "In a democracy, how do communities make decisions
that affect all members, such as how to respond to environmental threats?"
In this Unit, you will focus on three readings: "Influence
of Democracy on the Feelings of Americans" by Alexis De Tocqueville, "Democracy
and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery" by John Mueller, and Chapters I and II
of Saul Alinsky’s Rules for the Radicals. Because critical reading
is an important goal of this module, you are expected to read all three
of these items carefully. The following provides a brief summary of each
reading and some questions to consider as you read:
De Tocqueville, Alexis: "Influence of Democracy on the Feelings
of the Americans"
Alexis De Tocqueville (1805-1850), born of a noble French family, spent
his early career as an assistant magistrate in the French government. In
1831, he journeyed to America in order to study its penal system. Following
this trip, he wrote the book Democracy in America (1835), a much
heralded commentary on the condition of the new American state and its
people. In this classic, he perceptively analyzes the role of "associations"
and money in American life, as well as American beliefs in liberty, equality,
and individualism.
The purpose of assigning this reading is for you to
define the building blocks of democracy: freedom and equality. Consider
the following questions as you read:
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Does the word democracy necessarily equate freedom and equality?
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De Tocqueville distinguishes between a civil society and a political
world; how would this division apply to you and your classmates?
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Does the concept of democracy necessarily embrace individualism?
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If so, are all individuals equal and free in a democracy?
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If not, what are the underlying variables whereby people may not share
equally in a democracy (class, race, gender, etc.)?
This reading will most likely provoke some strong patriotic
reactions in some of your classmates. If you truly believe in democracy
and feel it works, then how can we-- as global citizens -- endorse the
exploitation of the natural and human resources of developing countries?
Mueller, John: "Democracy and Ralph’s Pretty Good Grocery"
John Mueller, a professor of political science at the University of
Rochester, is an authority on how public opinion influences, and is affected
by, foreign affairs. He is author of Retreat from Doomsday: Obsolescence
of Major War (1989) and War, Presidents, and Public Opinion
(1973). Mueller makes three arguments in an effort to help explain the
growth of democracy over the last two centuries. First, he argues the simplicity
of the notion of democracy, which does not need elections to take place.
Second, he argues that democracy has little to do with political equality.
Lastly, Mueller suggests that democracy does not challenge individuals
to be more than average human beings.
This reading challenges the notion that all the people
of a nation are represented in a democracy. Many Americans live day to
day without giving thought to a government body that has been elected by
the people. This article asks "who are ‘the people’?" -- all the citizens
of a democracy or just the ones who vote? Are procedures like elections
simply symbolic in a democracy? If the government does not represent all
the people, then who does it represent?
After you read this article, reflect on your own
participation in the democracy in which you live. Do you vote at every
national and local election? Why or why not?
Alinsky, Saul: Rules for the Radicals, Chapters I &
II
These two chapters offer a radical view of democracy. The following
excerpt gives a sense of the extremity of this piece. "In this book we
are concerned with how to create mass organizations to seize power and
give it to the people in order to realize the democratic dream of equality,
justice, peace, cooperation, equal and full opportunities for education,
full and useful employment, health, and the creation of those circumstances
in which man [sic] can have the chance to live by values that give meaning
to life. We are talking about a mass power organization which will change
the world into a place where all men and women walk erect, in the spirit
of that credo of the Spanish Civil War, ‘Better to die on your feet than
to live on your knees'."
This reading challenges the notions of an "authentic"
democracy. Is the United States truly a democracy or do we need another
revolution to achieve a "real" democracy? This reading is an important
conclusion to our discussion of citizenship in this unit because it considers
the proposed democratic revolution as an "international" process. It is
the first in the unit to challenge the concept of citizenship within a
nation state’s borders; Alinsky proposes that we are all becoming global
citizens whose loyalties transcend political boundaries.
After you have completed these readings, you might
begin to question the ideas of democracy and you may even oppose the suggestion
that you do not live in a democratic nation. You should, however, begin
to see how notions of community at various scales are important aspects
of American democracy. It is within these various communities that we do
many of the things that are integral parts of a democracy -- we express
our beliefs and values, either through formal means such as elections,
or through less formal interactions such as debates or arguments; we define
what it means to be a citizen and negotiate the rights and duties that
citizenship entails; and perhaps most importantly, we make decisions together
that affect the future of our community -- be it our neighborhood, our
state, our nation, or even the world.