An early theme in class is the requirement that citizens in a republic be actively involved in its maintenance. I threw this quote at you for good measure:
The tyranny of a prince in an oligarchy is not so dangerous to the public welfare as the apathy of a citizen in a democracy.
It was from Charles de Montesquieu - one of the better regarded commentators around the time of the constitutional convention. The great danger to public welfare is if people just check out, this is something that can very easily happen if they feel unable to impact events. Here's an update on the notion.
- Click here for the article.
The author takes the general population to task for failing to live up to its responsibilities - and perhaps having an unreal expectation of what immediate impact they can have on the political system. His key point seems to be that government classes seem to paint an unrealistic picture of the relationship between the governed and the government. People in power will follow the will of the people because we think they are supposed, despite evidence that they tend to follow the money - or at least the engaged. The lesson seems to be "citizenship ain't easy." Not a bad one.
American citizens themselves are a part of the problem and largely responsible for their marginalized status in the world’s most celebrated self-rule democracy. Why have the American people, the popular sovereign of our democracy, not challenged this political take over by the fat cats?
In high school government and civics high school classrooms across America young citizens-to-be are indoctrinated with a version of democracy based more on historic and political myths than political reality.
Magruder's American Government, a widely used textbook revised and published annually since 1917, is a typical example of schoolbook democracy. Here students learn the U.S. Constitution is built on a few basic principles, including popular sovereignty: "In the United States, all political power belongs to the people. The people are sovereign. Popular sovereignty means that people are the only source of governmental power. Government can govern only with the consent of the governed.”
As school kids mature into young adults and gain their own first-hand experience of the political world around them, they soon realize how ill-prepared they—the sovereign people—are to compete with wealthy election campaign donors and professional corporate lobbyists who dominate, between elections, the behind the scenes deal making that determines who gets what.
In addition, studies show that once in office lawmakers give top priority to the care and feeding of their election campaign backers and corporate lobbyists, not the citizens who actually voted them into office.
No wonder citizens feel angry and politically powerless. But why don’t citizens unite and push back?
The late Yale professor Edmund Morgan, author of, Inventing the People: the Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America, provides a more complete explanation for the failure of American citizens to react more strongly against the outsourcing of their democracy.
Clinging to their classroom version of democracy in which they are the ultimate and legitimate political power in America, citizens, according to Morgan, willingly suspend their disbelief in schoolbook myths and pretend they are true——even with abundant real-life evidence that they are not.
“The success of government,” says Morgan, “requires the acceptance of fictions, requires the willing suspension of disbelief, requires us to believe that the emperor is clothed even though we can see that he is not…Government requires make-believe…Make believe that the people have a voice or make believe that the representatives of the people are the people.”
This tug-of-war between political myths and political reality has driven citizens out of the political arena and, in effect, outsourced the American democracy to wealthy campaign financiers and powerful corporations.
