Читать книгу Keeping the Republic - Christine Barbour - Страница 50

One of the core values of American political culture is democracy, an ideal that unites citizens—both those who are born here as well as more newly minted naturalized citizens—in the activity of self-governance. In terms of the right to vote, we have grown more democratic in the past two hundred years. Many more people can participate now—women, African Americans, and eighteen-year-olds. Although it has been subject to some authoritarian battering lately, as have other democracies around the world, our national narrative, one shared by most Americans no matter what our ideological positions, is that we are a strong and active democracy, if not the premier democracy in the world.

Does it matter to the success of a democracy if relatively few people take an active political role (by paying attention, voting, exchanging political views, and the like)?

The prevailing narrative is that the American notion of democracy doesn’t ask much of us except that we pay attention to the news of the day and come together periodically and vote to elect our public officials. But most of us don’t even do that. The news we get, as we have seen, is highly mediated by people who are trying to influence our views, American turnout rates (the percentages of people who go to the polls and vote on election days) are abysmally low compared to those of other Western industrialized democracies, and surveys show that many Americans are apathetic toward politics. Even in 2008, a year of unusually high turnout, only about 60 percent of eligible voters cast a vote although, remarkably, that number was almost duplicated in the midterms of 2018.

How does American democracy work with such low rates of participation or interest on the part of the citizenry? One theory, based on the elite notion of democracy described in Chapter 1, claims that it doesn’t really matter whether people participate in politics because all important decisions are made by elites—leaders in business, politics, education, the military, and the media. Drawing on the pluralist theory of democracy, another explanation claims that Americans don’t need to participate individually because their views are represented in government sufficiently through their membership in various groups. For instance, a citizen may make her views heard through membership in an environmental group, a professional association or labor union, a parent-teacher organization, a veterans’ group, a church, or a political party.

By contrast, some educators and social scientists argue that falling levels of involvement, interest, and trust in politics signal a true civic crisis in American politics. They see a swing from the collectivist citizens of republican virtue to the self-interested, individualistic citizens of Madisonian theory so severe that the fabric of American political life is threatened. For instance, Benjamin Barber, discussing the tendency of Americans to take their freedoms for granted and to assume that since they were born free they will naturally remain free, says that citizenship is the “price of liberty.”²¹ For all the importance of presidents and senators and justices in the American political system, it is the people, the citizens, who are entrusted with “keeping the republic.”

The question of how democratic the United States is may seem to be largely an academic one—that is, one that has little or no relevance to your personal life—but it is really a question of who has the power, who is likely to be a winner in the political process. Looked at this way, the question has quite a lot to do with your life, especially as government starts to make more demands on you, and you on it. Are you likely to be a winner or a loser? Are you going to get what you want from the political system? How much power do people like you have to get their way in government?

In Your Own Words

Describe the role and responsibilities of citizens in American politics.