By Alan Wolfe
The earlier few a long time have introduced a shift within the nature of yank democracy—an alarming shift that threatens such liberal democratic values as admire for pluralism, recognition of the separation of powers, and popularity of the rights of competition events. during this insightful publication, political scientist Alan Wolfe identifies the present political stipulations that endanger the standard of our democracy. He describes how politics has replaced, and he demands a democracy safety stream designed to maintain our political traditions now not in contrast to the environmental defense movement’s efforts to protect the average world.Voters who be aware of little approximately matters, leaders who bend principles with little worry of reprisal, and political events which are wasting the facility to mobilize voters have all contributed to a worrisome new politics of democracy, Wolfe argues. He bargains an excellent research of ways faith and morality have changed political and fiscal self-interest as guiding rules, and the way a perilous populism promotes a thorough type of elitism. with out laying blame on one occasion or ideology and with no claiming that concerns will increase with one social gathering or the opposite in workplace, Wolfe as a substitute means that american citizens have to comprehend the chance their very own indifference poses and take political concerns extra heavily.
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Extra info for Does American Democracy Still Work? (The Future of American Democracy Series)
Sample text
Why treat them with respect when they have shown so little respect for those who elect them? Such reasoning, however, can take one only so far. Ultimately the American public’s lack of information about politics stems neither from cognitive limitations hard-wired into the brain, nor from the failure of such institutions as the media to provide them with the information they need, nor from the traumatic experience of having politicians disappoint them. Information gaps exist for one reason only: Americans have the choice to care about politics and have chosen not to.
If it is to perform better, they will have to work harder. III Democracy Without Accountability aybe we expect too much from democracy. 1 Eighteenth-century optimists believed that there was such a thing as the common good, that people could determine it for themselves, and that they would then elect representatives to carry out their will. This “classical theory of democracy,” as Schumpeter argued in 1942, was more a quasi-religious expression of hope than an actual description of how democracies worked.
For nearly everyone else, public opinion works about as well on this issue as a democracy has any right to expect. Abortion is representative of a whole slew of opinions in which Americans, as if instinctively, reach for the middle position between extremes. On Social Security, the top domestic issue of the first decade of the twenty-first century, they were amenable to new approaches designed to protect the program’s fiscal solvency, but, suspicious of privatization, they also wanted to keep the basic concept of insurance intact, while on the war in Iraq, the leading foreign policy issue of the same period, they supported the original invasion but also wanted United Nations approval.
