Democracy In America Research Articles

Introduction: The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965

Introduction:The Film and History of Selma, Alabama, 1965 Lamont H. Yeakey (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. May Stevens, White Only, c. 1963. May Stevens. Courtesy of the artist and RYAN LEE Gallery, New York. [End Page 159] I This Close-Up is devoted to the film Selma (2014), directed by Ava DuVernay and produced by Christian Colson et al.1 Selma won the Academy Award (Oscar) for Best Original Song in Music ("Glory," written by Common and John Legend) and was also nominated for Best Picture by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Selma is a cinematic portrayal of arguably the most important episode in the twentieth-century civil rights movement, when African Americans campaigned for the right to vote. The film portrayed an event of enormous significance for the nation; indeed it was a major affair of state not seen in over a hundred years since the end of the Civil War when slavery was abolished, black people acquired citizenship, and men secured the right to vote.2 Historically, Selma, Alabama is the city where a struggle of epic proportions occurred in 1965, involving African Americans and their "allies for freedom" (mostly but not exclusively white people), who campaigned to get black people registered to vote in municipal, county, state, and federal elections. This site became the setting for their heroic effort to have the right to participate openly and freely in the society that governed them, to free themselves from the shackles of political exploitation, to eliminate racially based registration and voting restrictions, and to advance democracy in America. In seeking to exercise the democratic franchise, they were violently opposed by white segregationists, who were determined to do everything they could to stop black people from voting. The civil rights activists were savagely attacked, met police brutality, and had their advocates gunned down and murdered. Racist white people were determined to demonstrate to black people that they had no authority over their economic, social, and political affairs.3 The extent to which black agency manifested itself, if at all, would be restricted to intrapersonal affairs with friends, family, and in the rearing of their children. [End Page 160] The white dominance of black people was formally codified in law, reinforced with the brutal application of police power, and cemented with tradition and custom, termed "the etiquette of race." The peaceful nonviolent advocates of universal suffrage were guided by a political concept which maintained that the right of leaders to rule was derived from the governed, which meant that black as well as white citizens should have the opportunity to decide policies and determine who should govern by participating in free, open elections in Alabama as well as anywhere else in the United States of America. Selma, the seat of government for Dallas County, on the banks of the Alabama River, was the location for a cruel, brutal, bloody struggle for democracy having enormous consequences for a numerical minority of corrupt, though formidable, segregationists pitted against a majority of politically excluded people who sought to end political racism and democratize a region of the county that constituted the most pervasive and visible internal government crime of the American body politic. This conflict resulted in a victory for the advocates of civil rights and passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that aimed to eliminate invidious distinctions erected to stop black people from exercising their Constitutional right to vote.4 DuVernay embraced a daunting task in making a film fraught with much dissuasion. First, for courageously taking on a project of such physical magnitude and sociopolitical significance as the Selma campaign without having the vast material resources of a Cecil B. DeMille of yore or a Steven Spielberg of today, she invited cinematic limitations from the outset. The director's initial difficulties in resolving a host of matters involving Pathe UK, the overseas distributor, DreamWorks SKG, and Warner Brothers, along with an inability to secure the full use of Martin Luther King Jr.'s papers from the King estate among other matters stifled the project. Finally, Paramount Pictures agreed to the distribution of the film in Canada and the United States...

Tocqueville and the Legal Culture of Jacksonian America

This article reconstructs the influence of American lawyers on Tocqueville's thought. By placing Tocqueville's well-known reflections on the role of lawyers in American democracy in the context of the 1820s-30s debates about the trial by jury and the issue of codification, and shedding light over the underexplored thought of one of Tocqueville's mains sources, Edward Livingston of Louisiana, the article advances a new interpretation of Democracy in America's considerations about the legal spirit and the dialectics between judicial institutions and democratic society.

Catholicism and Democracy in America

Catholicism and Democracy in America

The Doctrine of Interest Properly Understood in Democracy in America.

Fragil e, segundo Alexis de Tocqueville, o equilibrio em que se encontra a liberdade em um estado social de igualdade de condicoes. Tomados pela sua maior paixao, a da igualdade, os homens democraticos podem assistir a conversao da liberdade em despotismo ao se entregarem a busca exclusiva de seus interesses e bens privados, ao abdicarem da faculdade de julgar, deixandose guiar servilmente pela opiniao da maioria, a fonte da autoridade em tal estado social. Em face disso, este artigo sustenta que, ao discorrer acerca dos costumes estadunidenses, n'A Democracia na America, o autor nao faz mera descricao mas delineia uma teoria social, a doutrina do interesse bem compreendido, a qual relacionaria, na republica americana, a virtude e o interesse, e poderia fornecer elementos para instruir as sociedades democraticas.

Fake News and Propaganda: Trump's Democratic America and Hitler's National Socialist (Nazi) Germany

This paper features an analysis of President Trump's two State of the Union addresses, which are analysed by means of various data mining techniques including sentiment analysis. The intention is to explore the contents and sentiments of the messages contained, the degree to which they differ, and their potential implications for the national mood and state of the economy. In order to provide a contrast and some parallel context, analyses are also undertaken of President Obama's last State of the Union address and Hitler's 1933 Berlin Proclamation. The structure of these four political addresses is remarkably similar. The three US Presidential speeches are more positive emotionally than Hitler's relatively shorter address, which is characterized by a prevalence of negative emotions. However, it should be said that the economic circumstances in contemporary America and Germany in the 1930s are vastly different.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the British Challenge to Republican America, 1783–1795 by Michael Schwarz

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the British Challenge to Republican America, 1783–1795 by Michael Schwarz

DE LA (NON) DÉMOCRATIE EN AMÉRIQUE (LATINE) A TOCQUEVILLE REPORT ON THE STATE OF GOVERNANCE IN LATIN AMERICA

Within a conceptual framework based on Tocqueville’s classic work about Democracy in America – freedom, democracy, equality, political organization, government and administrative centralization, etc. – this essay – drafted in the form of a report from Alexis de Tocqueville to the World Bank, at the demand of its Board – deals with the relative backwardness of Latin American countries, in terms of democratic principles, political accountability, insufficient economic and social development, social inequalities, adopting an historical and comparative perspective (with Asia-Pacific countries, for instance). The region has fragmented itself recently between globalizers, reluctant governments (protectionists and nationalists), and the so-called “Bolivarians”. Finally, it tackles the current and future challenges of Latin American countries, also in a comparative perspective with the Asia-Pacific region, and concludes that most of the problems at the source of the backwardness of the continent, and its peculiar difficulties to adapt and to insert into modernity and globalization are due to especially inept and corrupt elites, of all kinds and social origins.

Book Review: Reclaiming Our Children, Reclaiming Our Schools: Reversing Privatization and Recovering Democracy in America's Public Schools

Book Review: Reclaiming Our Children, Reclaiming Our Schools: Reversing Privatization and Recovering Democracy in America's Public Schools

“Neither Precisely National nor Precisely Federal”: Governmental and Administrative Authority in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America

Tocqueville’s insights on local politics in Democracy in America have led some scholars to ask where he fits into longstanding debates about the balance of power between the national government and state governments in American constitutionalism. Although Tocqueville’s observations speak to these questions, he also transcends them by developing the concepts of governmental and administrative (de)centralization. In differentiating governmental and administrative capacities, Tocqueville offers language by which to understand and evaluate the federal system in terms of the nature of the authority each level of government exercises, rather than simply by the objects of national, state, and municipal powers. The purpose of this article is to clarify Tocqueville’s understanding of governmental and administrative (de)centralization and thereby contribute to a better understanding of political authority in the American federal system.

Learning Through Literature: Whitman’s Concept of Democracy in Trump’s America

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De La (Non) DDmocratie En Ammrique (Latine): A Tocqueville Report on the State of Governance in Latin America

Within a conceptual framework based on Tocqueville’s classic work about Democracy in America – freedom, democracy, equality, political organization, government and administrative centralization, etc. – this essay – drafted in the form of a report from Alexis de Tocqueville to the World Bank, at the demand of its Board – deals with the relative backwardness of Latin American countries, in terms of democratic principles, political accountability, insufficient economic and social development, social inequalities, adopting an historical and comparative perspective (with Asia-Pacific countries, for instance). The region has fragmented itself recently between globalizers, reluctant governments (protectionists and nationalists), and the so-called “Bolivarians”. Finally, it tackles the current and future challenges of Latin American countries, also in a comparative perspective with the Asia-Pacific region, and concludes that most of the problems at the source of the backwardness of the continent, and its peculiar difficulties to adapt and to insert into modernity and globalization are due to especially inept and corrupt elites, of all kinds and social origins.

Alexis de Tocqueville, the modern democratic nation-state, and its competitors

This paper draws on Tocqueville’s Democracy in America to distinguish three different types of modern democracy—(i) the democratic nation-state, (ii) the post sovereign, multinational democracy, and (iii) the populist national democracy. The paper argues that all three have characteristic deficits—respectively, a security deficit, a democratic deficit, and a liberal deficit. The paper discusses the likely impact of Brexit and Trump on these forms of democracy in modern Europe. The paper concludes that while Trump—and more especially, “Trumpism”—poses a challenge to the European Union, Brexit presents an opportunity to demonstrate to its own citizens the benefits of this type of polity.

Democracies Don’t Die, They Are Killed

How Democracies Die offers one of the best accounts available of the crimes against democracy in America. But its prescriptions for redress are underwhelming.

Reading Tocqueville behind the Veil: African American Receptions ofDemocracy in America, 1835–1900

Tocqueville’s views on race and race relations as espoused in Democracy in America have received considerable scholarly attention over the past several decades. This article examines the reception of these ideas within the black counterpublic. The analysis focuses on commentary about Democracy in America in black-controlled periodicals between 1835 and 1900. The main finding is that African American intellectuals developed their own distinct interpretations of the text. This finding is significant because extant reception histories have ignored African American voices. The article also shows that African American commentators were far more critical of Tocqueville’s ideas about race and race relations before the Civil War. By the close of the nineteenth century, African American intellectuals began to elevate Democracy in America to the status of a canonical text on race relations and republicanism. Both of these findings cut against the dominant historiography of the reception of Democracy in America.

"Legitimacy, Performance, and China's Democratic Future—Navigating between Prudential Pragmatism and Moral Idealism"

"Legitimacy, Performance, and China's Democratic Future—Navigating between Prudential Pragmatism and Moral Idealism" Gang Lin (bio) Jiwei Ci, Democracy in China: The Coming Crisis. Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 2019. x, 420 pp. Hardcover $45.00, isbn 978-0674-23818-3. During the third wave of democratization, liberal democracy gained popularity in the world. In the past decade, however, it lost momentum, leading to an arguable view of worldwide democracy decline.1 In the case of China, the quest for democracy started well before the third wave, when the first republic in Asia appeared in 1911, although the early rehearsals of representative democracy in that country were unsuccessful. What China has practiced since 1949 is socialist democracy informed by Karl Marx's communist thought but constrained by social and economic underdevelopment and an inexorable legacy of authoritarianism cohabitated uncomfortably with partial and periodical egalitarianism. The Chinese Formula (zhongguo fang'an, in the words of Xi Jinping) of democracy featured by Leninist democratic centralism and one-party leadership is at odds with universally accepted definition of democracy contributed unilaterally by Western democratic societies, where the mainstream views disregard China as a democracy, simply relegating to lip service that country's official upgrading of democracy, freedom, equality, justice, and the rule according to law as part of socialist Core Value (hexin jiazhi). The subject of Jiwei Ci's book—democracy in China—is explored with such arguable conventional wisdom. The coming crisis as the subtitle actually refers to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), rather than democratic fortune in China. Actually, the main theme of the book is why China needs a democratic change and how China can overcome the related challenges with appropriate responses. This volume demonstrates its strength in theoretic/philosophical discourse and logical reasoning, free from empirical hypothesis and verification relying on quantitative analysis. From a prudential perspective, Ci makes a strong argument in the Introduction that China is in an urgency to bring about a democratic regime complementary to its democratic society. While people may disagree on such asynchronism in China's political and social developments, Ci believes China [End Page 177] has developed a substantial degree of democracy in society based on "equality of condition," a concept used by Tocqueville in his pathbreaking book Democracy in America.2 From this viewpoint, political democratization in China is justified not so much by moral desirability as by prudential necessity for reason of institutional fittingness and governability on the part of regime. This does not suggest that the author has no normative inclination on this value-laden subject. As Ci contends at the very beginning, one extraordinary challenge to liberal democracy is its "oligarchic capture" manifested by growing "polarizing effects of globalization and digital technology" in the United States and, to a lesser degree, other advanced European countries (p. 2). However, liberal democracy, despite its drawbacks, is still better than other choices for China. This does not suggest China can easily approach such a desirable—however modest—and necessary goal. Four daunting challenges to China's democratization are presented thereafter: (1) the inexorable role of the ruling CCP, (2) the absence of a basic level of individual and societal moral maturity, (3) the weakening of the party's centripetal capacity of holding a vast country full with ethnic diversity but lacking democratic tradition, and (4) a lack of preexisted institutions to balance democracy against capitalism as well as neoliberalism. According to Ci, these daunting challenges require prudent responses. This book is divided into three parts. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) argues that a looming legitimation crisis calls for an urgent and prudent response. Legitimation crisis is a hot issue in the field of China studies after Mao, as by-products of reform and openness, economic inequality, social polarization, and official corruption have agitated a new legitimation crisis in China. In response to the wave of global democratization, the CCP has tried to "keep pace with the times" and perpetuate its lifespan by transforming itself from a revolutionary ruling party into a "developmental ruling party"—regaining its ruling legitimacy by building a relatively prosperous society and rejuvenating the Chinese nation. In other words, the ruling...

Navigating democracy in America: a Virginia family’s journey through the changing political and social landscape of the antebellum era

A sense of increased security in the aftermath of the War of 1812, a wave of economic expansion and opportunity, and a firmer sense of nation in the second generation of the United States combined to create a surge in democratic spirit. These trends keenly affected the state of Virginia, with its geographic position between the northern and southern regions and as a stepping-off point for westward expansion. The history of Virginia farmer and entrepreneur Thomas Goodwin and his family traces the ways in which an ordinary family navigated the changing political, social, and economic landscape with new opportunities for inclusion as well as obstacles to full participation in the evolving nation. For Goodwin, inclusion came with marriage into a rooted family with its ethnic connections to community, his military service, land ownership and the associated status as a freeholder, and the industriousness of him and his family. Yet, the Goodwins faced problems because of both old rules and institutions and new expectations in a society where expanded political participation meant increased responsibilities. These problems included ethnic prejudice, conflicts over slavery, and the disadvantages of illiteracy.

Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber

Reviewed by: Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era by Brian Dolber Brian Greenberg (bio) Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era. By Brian Dolber. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. xiv + 256 pp. The 1920s and 1930s witnessed the consolidation of modern America as a consumer society. During these decades, the motion picture, the automobile, and consumer durables for the home such as the radio and [End Page 307] the washing machine were regularly advertised in a growing number of national journals and newspapers. What did the spread of mass consumption, mass media, and mass culture mean for democracy in America? The transformation of America into a consumer culture in the first decades of the twentieth century was the central question addressed by Robert and Helen Lynd in Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, their early 1920s field investigation of Muncie, Indiana. The Lynds viewed the authority achieved by consumer culture as a danger to democracy, because, as Robert Lynd warned, Americans were more important to their country as consumers than they were as citizens. Middletown was written as a secular jeremiad in which the Lynds called on Americans to repent and to renew their traditional nonpecuniary culture. Focusing on the Jewish radical groups and media institutions in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s, Brian Dolber, in Media and Culture in the U.S. Jewish Labor Movement: Sweating for Democracy in the Interwar Era, reaches conclusions far different from those of the Lynds. For Dolber, even as they adapted to the developing consumerism in America, those who identified with the Jewish left kept alive their traditions of community culture and social unionism. As Dolber relates, in the decade following the Red Scare after the First World War, the Jewish Daily Forward (or Der Forverts), which had been founded in 1897 as the first Yiddish socialist newspaper in New York, and other socialist newspapers found themselves in dire financial straits as a result, in part, of the rise in anti-immigrant nativism in America. In 1918 Baruch Charney Vladack became the business manager of the Forward. Over the next decade, as advertising became a fundamental component of commercial culture in the United States, Vladack saw national advertising as fulfilling two functions: as a source of necessary revenue for the Forward and as a way to demonstrate to political and corporate elites that the Forward and its readership were good Americans, thus protecting them from anti-immigrant political repression. Dolber concludes that the commercialization of the Forward during the 1920s marked the integration of the Jewish labor movement’s media with the broader advertising-driven national commercial communications system. Unlike the Lynds, who equated integration with elite cultural domination, Dolber does not see the working class as becoming the passive tools of an all-powerful cultural elite. Instead, he shows how the Jewish left was able to secure a place for itself within the liberal New Deal coalition that developed in the 1930s. Besides the Forward, the Jewish left included the Amalgamated Clothing Workers’ Union (ACWU) and the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union (ILGWU), industrial unions founded in New York City [End Page 308] during the first two decades of the twentieth century. As Dolber notes, the ACWU and the ILGWU, working with affiliated ethnic organizations and political parties, embraced what Daniel Katz’s book All Together Different: Yiddish Socialists, Garment Workers, and the Labor Roots of Multiculturalism (2013) called “social unionism” a radical expression of labor organization that embraced political engagement and integrated union culture with larger social movements. Social unionism was the ideal of unionism that coalesced in the establishment of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in the 1930s, as union leaders and members became key constituents in the New Deal coalition that emerged during Franklin Roosevelt’s presidency. Yet neither Sidney Hillman nor David Dubinsky (the leaders of, respectively, the ACWU and the ILGWU) figure prominently in Dolber’s account of this change. Also largely absent from Dolber’s analysis is John L. Lewis, who personified the aggressive, CIO-led sit-down strikes of the...

Incubating Leaders in Maine

For a sparsely populated state, Maine has produced an extraordinary number of national, bipartisan leaders. What has made Maine an incubator for such leadership? Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of Democracy in America, provides useful insights into Maine’s culture as a breeding ground for its leadership. But rapid societal changes sweeping the country and the world—particularly globalization, urbanization, and the digitization of the economy—will inevitably alter Maine’s culture. This paper explores steps Maine might take to develop leaders in this new environment by preserving its past strengths and adjusting to these new challenges. Maine could overcome its north/south divide and play a role in developing leaders who would bring polarized sectors of the country together.

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the British Challenge to Republican America, 1783–1795 by Michael Schwarz

Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and the British Challenge to Republican America, 1783–1795 by Michael Schwarz

Is the US Electoral College a Polite Fiction That Should Be Abolished?

The US electoral college started to cast doubt in American voters only 20 years after the 12th amendment to the U.S. Constitution was ratified in 1804, which provides for election of the president and vice president by the electoral college. Should there be no majority vote for one person, the House of Representatives (one vote per state) chooses the president and the Senate the vice president. Today, 213 years after the first harbinger sign surfaced in 1824 with the election of John Quincy Adams, the efficiency of the electoral college is still a hot and a highly moot topic… At the time the US constitution was written and ratified, it was, thanks to its vision, an endeavor that was entirely ahead of its time. It epitomizes American exceptionalism, which is characterized by a unique history, a unique mission, and unique values. Alexis de Tocqueville was the first to pinpoint that exceptionalism and to give it his approval or benediction in his book Democracy in America. He was a French observer of American democracy who traveled throughout the new American country and let his French colleagues and philosophers back home know, afterwards, that the ideas that were dear to them were working in America. However, as it is the case for everything that is man-made, the electoral college, the US constitution’s brainchild, is not failproof, and turns out to be the constitution’s white elephant, its bete noire.