The History Book Club discussion

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by Alexis de Tocqueville

Harvey Mansfield on Alexis de Tocqueville

A very good overview of this great classic.

On You Tube - Conversations with Bill Kristol
Here is the link:
https://youtu.be/SJ9dIYd-vUQ

In the fifth conversation in our series with Harvey Mansfield, a discussion of the French philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville. Click "Show more" to view all chapters. For more conversations, visit http://www.conversationswithbillkrist...
Chapter 1 (00:15 - 20:08): Thinking about Democracy
Chapter 2 (20:08 - 33:12): Individualism and Associations
Chapter 3 (33:12 - 43:46): Who was Tocqueville?
Chapter 4 (43:46 - 1:12:24): Liberalism with a Soul
The fifth conversation in our ongoing series with the distinguished Harvard government professor considers the French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59). Mansfield and Kristol discuss key themes in Tocqueville’s work, including the nature of democracy and his views of America. They also consider Tocqueville's views as to why individualism is a danger to democracy, how associations counteract individualism, and how religion and liberty reinforce one another in our times. Mansfield also describes Tocqueville’s own life and political career, and how his thought differs from that of other modern thinkers such as J.S. Mill, Edmund Burke, John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes.

Be sure to check out the FCG page on Tocqueville at "Great Thinkers," http://thegreatthinkers.org/tocqueville

There are some wonderful videos which will spur discussion on this great classic and wonderful book.

Source: Youtube

How To Read de Tocqueville's 'Democracy In America' (John Wilsey - Acton Institute)

https://youtu.be/fKzz4gHGpDA

Like any book, we should read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with its historical context in mind. Tocqueville wrote his work as an outside observer, not as an American. He wrote as a critical bystander, not as an admirer. And he wrote as one who saw first hand the effects of revolution on his family and his country. Let’s explore some ways to learn from Tocqueville’s remarkable work.

SPEAKER - Dr. John D. Wilsey
John Wilsey serves as assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He teaches primarily in the Seminary’s fully accredited B.S. program offered to offenders serving life sentences at the Darrington Unit, a maximum security state facility. He is the author of several articles and editorials, as well as One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America (Pickwick, 2011), and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (IVP Academic, 2015). Most recently, he has produced Democracy in America: A New Abridgment for Students for Lexham Press, which will be appearing this November. He has been married for nineteen years to Mandy, and they have two daughters.

Source: Youtube

Tocqueville on the Foundations of American Democracy

Here is the link:
https://youtu.be/AzLTT-1_Gys

James W. Ceaser, Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia, talks about "Tocqueville on the Foundations of American Democracy" at Emory University as part of the Emory Williams Lectures in the Liberal Arts series (April 3, 2013).

Prof. Ceaser has written several books on American politics and political thought, including "Presidential Selection", "Liberal Democracy and Political Science", "Reconstructing America", and "Nature and History in American Political Development". He has held visiting professorships at the University of Florence, the University of Basel, Oxford University, the University of Bordeaux, and the University of Rennes. He is also a frequent contributor to the popular press.

Source: Emory University

Tocqueville's Alliance of Religion and Liberty

Source: The Catholic University of America

Link: https://youtu.be/jMIAlptqbbc

Harvey Mansfield, professor at Harvard University, speaks at the anual Fall lecture series of the School of Philosophy. October 8, 2010.

You are welcome Nancy - I will be taking over the discussion.

Dr. Michael Kammen talked about Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and what the book means to the nation and why it is still cited as an important work in modern times. He also answered questions from viewers via telephone, fax and electronic mail.

https://www.c-span.org/video/?100768-...

Please watch the video- there are many in this series that will be helpful to you while reading Democracy in America.

Some ideas and topics for discussion from the broadcast:

a) Beginning in May 1997, the C-Span bus retraced the steps of Alexis de Tocqueville, author of Democracy in America, who traveled throughout the US in 1831 with his friend Gustave de Beaumont. Starting in Newport, Rhode Island, the bus explored the eastern half of the US. Over 9 months, the bus made 55 stops along Tocqueville's route and the discussions identify the same issues Tocqueville raised - issues such as religion and politics, the impact and power of the press and the changing role of government.



b) Democracy in America is a work which matters because it explains how best to understand civil society in the United States. Tocqueville felt that voluntary associations and civic duty as well as an active community life with a concern and necessity for civil participation were paramount to the continued success of the US democracy. How do you think that this has evolved in the US currently and what needs to change or what needs to stay the same? Are we at risk? Do we even discuss civics and/or civic duty any longer - should we? Why or why not?



c) The Hawaii Federation of Republican Women put this out and it is discusses Tocqueville and what he said about civic associations:

"Constitutional Rights have to be understood and exercised to be alive and kept in force. Alexis De Tocqueville landmark work Democracy in America carried many observations that have proved salient and correct right up to this day.

His observation that the wealthy and powerful are in themselves an “association” (controlling both wealth and the allegiance of those whose lively-hood are dependent on them), while the average citizens has little power outside of combining with others into their own civic associations.

The Hawaii Federation of Republican Women is exactly the sort of citizens alliance De Tocqueville describes as essential in his observation of American democracy.

This excerpt,taken from Chapter V, Section 2 Volume 2 ,Tocqueville explains the importance of Public Associations In Civil Life

Tocqueville writes - "I do not propose to speak of those political associations—by the aid of which men endeavor to defend themselves against the despotic influence of a majority—or against the aggression’s of regal power. That subject I have already treated. If each citizen did not learn, in proportion as he individually becomes more feeble, and consequently more incapable of preserving his freedom single-handed, to combine with his fellow-citizens for the purpose of defending it, it is clear that tyranny would unavoidably increase together with equality.

Those associations only which are formed in civil life, without reference to political objects, are here adverted to. The political associations which exist in the United States are only a single feature in the midst of the immense assemblage of associations in that country. Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations. They have not only commercial and manufacturing companies, in which all take part, but associations of a thousand other kinds—religious, moral, serious, futile, extensive, or restricted, enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to found establishments for education, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send missionaries to the antipodes; and in this manner they found hospitals, prisons, and schools. If it be proposed to advance some truth, or to foster some feeling by the encouragement of a great example, they form a society.

Wherever, at the head of some new undertaking, you see the government in France, or a man of rank in England, in the United States you will be sure to find an association. I met with several kinds of associations in America, of which I confess I had no previous notion; and I have often admired the extreme skill with which the inhabitants of the United States succeed in proposing a common object to the exertions of a great many men, and in getting them voluntarily to pursue it. I have since traveled over England, whence the Americans have taken some of their laws and many of their customs; and it seemed to me that the principle of association was by no means so constantly or so adroitly used in that country. The English often perform great things singly; whereas the Americans form associations for the smallest undertakings. It is evident that the former people consider association as a powerful means of action, but the latter seem to regard it as the only means the have of acting.

Thus the most democratic country on the face of the earth is that in which men have in our time carried to the highest perfection the art of pursuing in common the object of their common desires, and have applied this new science to the greatest number of purposes. Is this the result of accident? Or is there in reality any necessary connection between the principle of association and that of equality? Aristocratic communities always contain, amongst a multitude of persons who by themselves are powerless, a small number of powerful and wealthy citizens, each of whom can achieve great undertakings single-handed. In aristocratic societies men do not need to combine in order to act, because they are strongly held together. Every wealthy and powerful citizen constitutes the head of a permanent and compulsory association, composed of all those who are dependent upon him, or whom he makes subservient to the execution of his designs.

Amongst democratic nations, on the contrary, all the citizens are independent and feeble; they can do hardly anything by themselves, and none of them can oblige his fellow-men to lend him their assistance. They all, therefore, fall into a state of incapacity, if they do not learn voluntarily to help each other. If men living in democratic countries had no right and no inclination to associate for political purposes, their independence would be in great jeopardy; but they might long preserve their wealth and their cultivation: whereas if they never acquired the habit of forming associations in ordinary life, civilization itself would be endangered. A people amongst which individuals should lose the power of achieving great things single-handed, without acquiring the means of producing them by united exertions, would soon relapse into barbarism.

Unhappily, the same social condition which renders associations so necessary to democratic nations, renders their formation more difficult amongst those nations than amongst all others. When several members of an aristocracy agree to combine, they easily succeed in doing so; as each of them brings great strength to the partnership, the number of its members may be very limited; and when the members of an association are limited in number, they may easily become mutually acquainted, understand each other, and establish fixed regulations. The same opportunities do not occur amongst democratic nations, where the associated members must always be very numerous for their association to have any power.

I am aware that many of my countrymen are not in the least embarrassed by this difficulty. They contend that the more enfeebled and incompetent the citizens become, the more able and active the government ought to be rendered, in order that society at large may execute what individuals can no longer accomplish. They believe this answers the whole difficulty, but I think they are mistaken. A government might perform the part of some of the largest American companies; and several States, members of the Union, have already attempted it; but what political power could ever carry on the vast multitude of lesser undertakings which the American citizens perform every day, with the assistance of the principle of association?

It is easy to foresee that the time is drawing near when man will be less and less able to produce, of himself alone, the commonest necessaries of life. The task of the governing power will therefore perpetually increase, and its very efforts will extend it every day. The more it stands in the place of associations, the more will individuals, losing the notion of combining together, require its assistance: these are causes and effects which unceasingly engender each other.

Will the administration of the country ultimately assume the management of all the manufacturers, which no single citizen is able to carry on? And if a time at length arrives, when, in consequence of the extreme subdivision of landed property, the soil is split into an infinite number of parcels, so that it can only be cultivated by companies of husbandmen, will it be necessary that the head of the government should leave the helm of state to follow the plough? The morals and the intelligence of a democratic people would be as much endangered as its business and manufactures, if the government ever wholly usurped the place of private companies.

To preserve and defend our Democracy we must re-capture the energy of the civic associations De Tocqueville described. We call on all citizens to refuse to be be “incapacitate observers” of events and join with us to move forward!

Questions: What are your thoughts on the above?

Continued discussion of Tocqueville video above - link in message 88

d) Tocqueville would be concerned about the decline in voter turnout and participation in community life today. Does he have a point? What does this identify as issues for America and Americans and how can this be remedied? What solutions do you think that Tocqueville might come up with.

See article from the Pew Institute -
Even in Era of Disillusionment, Many Around the World Say Ordinary Citizens Can Influence Government
Health care, poverty, education are top motivators for political action
Link: http://www.pewglobal.org/2016/10/24/e...

Do you agree with the premise of the article and is our democracy in danger because of low voter turnout - why or why not?



e) Tocqueville believed there was a need for morality and that this was a basic underpinning of our society and was what made any democracy work. In what ways do you believe or not believe Tocqueville's idea on moral fiber?

f) Tocqueville was very impressed with the democratic stability of the US at the time of his visit - he thought that a social commitment by its citizens would continue to make possible a stable society.
How has the US changed from the time of Tocqueville - do you think that most Americans have made a social commitment or even know how to do that? How would a citizen today make a social commitment to their society?

g) At the time of Tocqueville, American citizens were very "present-minded" and just wanted to make a living. They spoke very little about the future. Tocqueville did believe that we would have the Mexican War due to our expansionist proclivities but he never predicted the Civil War. Do you think that Americans have remained the same? How are Americans today different - do you think that they are more concerned about posterity than their counterparts of the 1830s or are they living pay check to pay check?

h) Spiritual Values - Tocqueville believed that there was a need for spiritual values amount the citizenry. However he himself had experienced a personal spiritual crisis and could not accept traditional christian belief. However despite this - he felt that belief was essential for souls and spiritual well being and that taking this spirituality a step further - that it was essential for the successful functioning of democracy. Do you think that spiritual values are different than religious values? The US prides itself on the separation of church from state that has served us well. What was Tocqueville talking about?

I thought that this was extremely interesting - do you agree or disagree -


Was Tocqueville misunderstanding the Koran and Islam? Why do you think he felt this way? Many would say that the Bible has a great deal of violence in it too. Do you agree or disagree? The Crusades for example were not peaceful in their intent or in their execution.

i) What about this statement in terms of this year's political campaigns?



j) Some believe that Tocqueville was a passionate believer in individual liberty. Tocqueville had a fear of centralization of power. He was in great fear that the excessive centralization of power would ruin a democracy. Do you think that if Tocqueville lived today - would he be a Democrat or a Republican? Why?

k) Regarding Native Americans - Tocqueville observed what was happening to the Native Americans who were being physically relocated and he and his companion Beaumont were deeply moved by what they perceived to be the tragedy of the expansion of white settlements on the native population. He was also ahead of his time because he also felt that this expansion would not only displace the Native Americans but he pointed out the ecological impact of the westward expansion and the ultimate destruction of our natural resources. He felt that this was virtually inevitable. He also abhorred chattel slavery. What was going on during the 1830s which would impact Tocqueville's observations? Do you agree with him - why or why not?

Here is a very interesting older article from the New Yorker which is I think makes some interesting points:
TOCQUEVILLE IN AMERICA
The grand journey, retraced and reimagined by James Wood
Link: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/201...

l) The military in the 1830s played a very small role in American life and Tocqueville thought that the US enjoyed at that time - "splendid isolation". Aristocracies in the old world were constantly going to war with one another and boundaries were permeable. Those countries had to keep up their armed forces and devote a large number of their resources to it. The US enjoyed an incredible boon by not having threatening neighbors although Tocqueville predicted the Mexican War. How have things changed since the 1930s with the military and military complexes? Discuss the differences.

m) Tocqueville was very specific that religion had a lot to do with solidifying the underpinnings of democracy. He specifically focused on two religions - Catholicism and Protestantism. Why do you think he focused on these two religions? He felt that church going was more of a social event in the US rather than something that came from the heart. Whereas in France - religion really mattered to people. Do you think that Tocqueville was correct - why or why not? He actually stated that religion was essential to the functioning of religion. How do you feel about that statement?

n) Tocqueville predicted the transition in America from an agrarian to an industrial society. He also thought that inequality of wealth was inevitable. However he might still be shocked that some Americans are in the top 1% while so many others are living on the edge. He also would be probably shocked at the impact that technology would have on people's lives. Quote from Tocqueville's writing why you agree with these statements or not.

o) Democracy in one country was not transportable to another! - that is what Tocqueville believed. Isn't it interesting how we and others try "nation building" and wonder why it is does not succeed. Tocqueville felt that democracy would take many different forms due to different cultures and was not transportable. Do you agree with him or not. Be specific and pull quotes from Tocqueville's writings to discuss.

p) Tocqueville and Thomas Jefferson - There are many indications that Tocqueville thought that Jefferson was wonderful. It may have been that Jefferson was very much a Francophile. However, it is apparent that Tocqueville did not know Jefferson's governmental stance - for Jefferson was OK with instability - Tocqueville was absolutely not. In the 1830's - Tocqueville believed that America seemed so astonishingly stable. He would have been horrified if he read Jefferson's ideas that a government needed revolutions at regular intervals. That would have been horrifying to Tocqueville because he would have predicted that this sort of upheaval would lead to the demise of democracy which was dependent on folks believing in "what binds them together" rather than what "tears them apart". What are some of your beliefs about Tocqueville and Jefferson's philosophies? And who do you believe was on the right track? Why or why not?

q) Most countries have a Ministry of Culture - why would it be a good idea for the United States to have one? Or why not? What difficulties would we run into?

r) Tocqueville regarding African Americans - Tocqueville's Journals were filled with a steady running commentary on the plight of the African Americans which both Tocqueville and his companion Beaumont found to be appalling. Gustave de Beaumont was planning to write a novel about the slave system of the South but for both of them - they found that racism was more prevalent in the states that had abolished slavery rather than the ones that still retained slaves. I personally found that odd. What do you think?

s) Tocqueville paid close attention to the texture of American Society and how Americans function within their governmental system and he asked very basic questions about what was needed in order to make democracy survive in the long run. What did Tocqueville feel was needed to allow Democracy to survive? To Tocqueville in the 1830's - the democracy in America was very much a novelty - its future was very much in doubt. What do you think is the future of the American democracy?

t) Tocqueville thought that democracy was the ideal government for the United States - but personally he preferred constitutional monarchies - at least for France. Libertarianism would have disturbed him - because one of the dirtiest words in Tocqueville's vocabulary was "individualism". Individualism to Tocqueville meant people doing their own thing without any regard of how it would effect any other individual or the society as a whole. He felt it would result in the fragmentation of society and that it was important that a people contemplate that which binds them together versus what makes them unique or different. What do you think about his attitudes towards libertarianism and fragmentation?

Tocqueville in Historical Perspective:

Professor Kammen talked about the various interpretations of Tocqueville’s ideas and how they are used and misused. He examined why U.S. leaders have consistently reacted very positively to Tocqueville’s observations during his trip through the United States. After his lecture, he took questions from the audience

Video on C-Span

https://www.c-span.org/video/?94609-1...

Marie or, Slavery in the United States: A Novel of Jacksonian America (Race in the Americas)

by Gustave de Beaumont (no photo)

Synopsis:

Gustave de Beaumont's 1835 work, Marie, or Slavery in the United States is structured as a fascinating essay on race interwoven with a novel. It is the story of socially forbidden love between an idealistic young Frenchman and an apparently white American woman with African ancestry. The couple's idealism fades as they repeatedly face racial prejudice and violence, and are eventually forced to seek shelter among exiled Cherokee people. Notable as the first abolitionist novel to focus on racial prejudice rather than bondage as a social evil, Beaumont's work was also the first to link prejudice against Native Americans to prejudice against blacks. This translation, with a new introduction by Gerard Fergerson, provides modern readers with interesting insights into the inconsistencies and injustices of democratic Jacksonian society.

Gustave de Beaumont (1802-1866) is primarily remembered as Alexis de Tocqueville's travel companion and literary executor. He was co-author, with Tocqueville, of On the Penitentiary System in the United States.

"Beaumont's chef-d'oeuvre was, and has remained, illuminating... It follows that to readers of the present work the book of 1835 will seem strangely and wonderfully familiar... Marie will be a book of echoes."

— George Wilson Pierson - Tocqueville in America

More:

While we are all familiar with Alexis de Tocqueville and his book Democracy in America, less known is the name of Gustave de Beaumont, Tocqueville's traveling companion during his journey through America in 1831. The two Frenchmen came to America under the auspices of the French government.

Their official task was to conduct a study of American prisons, which were then in the forefront of the new movement to rehabilitate criminals. Although both men had a serious and continuing interest in prison reform, they had larger aims as well.

Initially, they intended to publish a joint work on American institutions and mores. The plan seemed to be to divide their labors, with Tocqueville writing on American institutions and Beaumont writing on American manners and mores, and then to publish the two studies in one volume.

But quite soon the idea of a collaborative study was set aside and in 1835 Tocqueville and Beaumont each published a separate work on America.

Tocqueville's book, the first volume of Democracy in America, was immediately heralded as a masterpiece, and Tocqueville himself acclaimed as the Montesquieu of his century.

Beaumont's book, a novel entitled Marie,or Slavery in the United States, was a critical and popular success also. Now however, Beaumont is pretty much forgotten, even in the wake ofthe tremendous resurgence ofinterest in Tocqueville since the 1950s. Perhaps Beaumont is worth another look.

Remainder of Article from the Atlantis - http://www.thenewatlantis.com/doclib/...


Gustave de Beaumont

Wikipedia Article:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gustave...

Retracing the steps of Alexis de Tocqueville's 1831 journey.

https://www.c-span.org/series/?tocque...

Source: C-Span

Alexis de Tocqueville:

http://www.tocqueville.culture.fr/en/...

The Tocqueville Society:

https://www.unitedway.org/get-involve...

This is an interesting article which was in the Atlantic in 2015 prior to this election cycle - it quotes Alexis de Tocqueville and it is very interesting about optimism. I wonder if this same article could be written now after this recent election.

What Makes Americans So Optimistic

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/a...

An Excerpt:

Alexis de Tocqueville, a French observer of American life at the beginning of the 19th century, observed that the Americans of his day “have all a lively faith in the perfectibility of man ... They all consider society as a body in a state of improvement.” Political and social observers have echoed this sentiment for centuries, enshrining optimism as an essential feature of not just the abstract ‘American Dream,’ but also of the social and economic institutions of American civil society.

“Anyone visiting America from Europe cannot fail to be struck by the energy, enthusiasm, and confidence in their country’s future that he or she will meet among ordinary Americans—a pleasing contrast to the world-weary cynicism of much of Europe,” observed Irish philosopher Charles Handy, who retraced de Tocqueville's trek across the country in 2001. “Most Americans seem to believe that the future can be better and that they are responsible for doing their best to make it that way.”

Source: The Atlantic

Question: Any thoughts? Trump's Make America Great Again strikes at the heart of the above. Every other president talks about the goodness of the American people and focused on hope. The president elect seems to be focused on things that are "wrong" - I am wondering if Tocqueville made his journey today - how optimistic would he find the American people. Even in 2001 - Handy found that same basic optimism. I wonder what Tocqueville and Handy might find today in 2016. Do Americans believe that the future will be better?

the teaching company has a course on Tocqueville. It is 24 thirty minute lectures by . Prof. William Cooke

I am in the process of rereading this book but I don't remember Tocqueville revering Jefferson. If he did, it was probably Jefferson's intellect and his love of French culture. As I remember the book, Toc said a lot about the importance of the family structure, women and religion to the survival of democracy. In volume 2, he emphasizes the importance of freedom of the press.

Thank you Savannah.

He did like Jefferson because Jefferson liked all things French and had served in France. He does Savannah.

How To Read de Tocqueville's 'Democracy In America' (John Wilsey - Acton Institute)

Published on Oct 10, 2016
Like any book, we should read Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America with its historical context in mind. Tocqueville wrote his work as an outside observer, not as an American. He wrote as a critical bystander, not as an admirer. And he wrote as one who saw first hand the effects of revolution on his family and his country. Let’s explore some ways to learn from Tocqueville’s remarkable work.

SPEAKER - Dr. John D. Wilsey
John Wilsey serves as assistant professor of history and Christian apologetics at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. He teaches primarily in the Seminary’s fully accredited B.S. program offered to offenders serving life sentences at the Darrington Unit, a maximum security state facility. He is the author of several articles and editorials, as well as One Nation Under God: An Evangelical Critique of Christian America (Pickwick, 2011), and American Exceptionalism and Civil Religion: Reassessing the History of an Idea (IVP Academic, 2015). Most recently, he has produced Democracy in America: A New Abridgment for Students for Lexham Press, which will be appearing this November. He has been married for nineteen years to Mandy, and they have two daughters.

Link to Youtube video: https://youtu.be/fKzz4gHGpDA

A reference book for reading Tocqueville:

by George Wilson Pierson (no photo)

Synopsis:

Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America (1835) has become a touchstone for almost any discussion of the American polity.

Taking as its topic the promise and shortcomings of the democratic form of government, Tocqueville's great work is at or near the root of such political truths as the litigiousness of American society, the danger of the "tyranny of the majority," the American belief in a small government that intrudes only minimally into the daily lives of the citizenry, and Americans' love of political debate.

Democracy in America is the work of a 29-year-old nobleman who, with his friend Gustave de Beaumont, traveled the breadth of Jacksonian America to inquire into the future of French society as revolutionary upheaval gave way to a representative government similar to America's.

In his magisterial Tocqueville in America, George Wilson Pierson reconstructs from diaries, letters, and newspaper accounts the two Frenchmen's nine-month tour and their evolving analysis of American society. We see Tocqueville near Detroit, noting the scattered settlement patterns of the frontier and the affinity of Americans for solitude; in Boston, witnessing the jury system at work; in Philadelphia, observing the suffocating moral regimen at the new Eastern State Prison (which still stands); and in New Orleans, disturbed by the racial caste system and the lassitude of the French-speaking population.

Source: You tube and Acton Institute

Overdoing Democracy
By NIALL FERGUSON - APRIL 13, 2003

Reviewing - THE FUTURE OF FREEDOM by Fareed Zakaria.

''IT is evident to all alike that a great democratic revolution is going on among us,'' the great French liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville declared in ''Democracy in America,'' published in 1835.

It was, he continued, an ''irresistible revolution, which has advanced for centuries in spite of every obstacle and which is still advancing in the midst of the ruins it has caused.''

Tocqueville had visited the United States, seen the future and decided that it worked. Today he stands vindicated. Something like 62 percent of the world's countries are now democracies.

To be sure, Tocqueville was not blind to the defects and potential hazards of American democracy.

Political parties were ''an inherent evil of free governments.'' The press was prone to gratuitous muckraking. The electorate tended to vote mediocrities into high office. Above all, there was the danger of the ''tyranny of the majority.''

But that risk, he believed, was held in check by the vitality of some distinctively American institutions that tended to preserve individual freedom: the decentralization of government, the power of the courts, the strength of associational life and the vigor of the country's churches.

The big question was whether similar safeguards would operate in Europe when democracy made its inevitable advance there.

By the time he published ''The Old Regime and the Revolution'' in 1856, Tocqueville had grown deeply pessimistic. In France, despite several attempts, it had proved impossible to introduce democracy without an intolerable diminution of freedom.

The aristocracy and the church -- against which the revolutionaries of 1789 had directed their energies -- had, he argued, been bastions of liberty.

Once these had been swept away there was nothing to check the twin processes of centralization and social leveling, which Tocqueville had come to see as the sinister confederates of the democratic revolution. Under French democracy, bureaucracy and equality trumped liberty. The result was a new Napoleonic despotism.

In his brave and ambitious book, Fareed Zakaria has updated Tocqueville. ''The Future of Freedom'' is brave because its central conclusion -- that liberty is threatened by an excess of democracy -- is deeply unfashionable and easily misrepresented. (''So, Mr. Zakaria, you say that America needs less democracy. Doesn't that make you some kind of fascist?'') It is ambitious because Zakaria seeks to apply the Tocquevillian critique not just to modern America but to the whole world.

In some ways, the book is a magazine article that just grew. In 1997 Zakaria -- now the editor of Newsweek International -- published a brilliant article in Foreign Affairs entitled ''The Rise of Illiberal Democracy.''

His argument was that the ''wave'' of democracy that had swept the world in the 1980's and 1990's had a shadow side.

Many of the new democracies -- Russia under Yeltsin and Putin, Venezuela under Chávez -- are routinely,'' as he puts it in ''The Future of Freedom,'' ''ignoring constitutional limits on their power and depriving their citizens of basic rights.'' Just holding elections did not make them free.

Remainder of article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/13/boo...

Source: The New York Times (2003)

by Fareed Zakaria

by Alexis de Tocqueville

America’s democracy has become illiberal by Fareed Zakaria

Two decades ago, I wrote an essay in Foreign Affairs that described an unusual and worrying trend: the rise of illiberal democracy. Around the world, dictators were being deposed and elections were proliferating. But in many of the places where ballots were being counted, the rule of law, respect for minorities, freedom of the press and other such traditions were being ignored or abused. Today, I worry that we might be watching the rise of illiberal democracy in the United States — something that should concern anyone, Republican or Democrat, Donald Trump supporter or critic.

What we think of as democracy in the modern world is really the fusing of two different traditions. One is, of course, public participation in selecting leaders. But there is a much older tradition in Western politics that, since the Magna Carta in 1215, has centered on the rights of individuals — against arbitrary arrest, religious conversion, censorship of thought. These individual freedoms (of speech, belief, property ownership and dissent) were eventually protected, not just from the abuse of a tyrant but also from democratic majorities. The Bill of Rights, after all, is a list of things that majorities cannot do.

In the West, these two traditions — liberty and law on the one hand, and popular participation on the other — became intertwined, creating what we call liberal democracy. It was noticeable when I wrote the essay, and even clearer now, that in a number of countries — including Hungary, Russia, Turkey, Iraq and the Philippines — the two strands have come apart. Democracy persists (in many cases), but liberty is under siege. In these countries, the rich and varied inner stuffing of liberal democracy is vanishing, leaving just the outer, democratic shell.

What stunned me as this process unfolded was that laws and rules did little to stop this descent. Many countries had adopted fine constitutions, put in place elaborate checks and balances, and followed best practices from the advanced world. But in the end, liberal democracy was eroded anyway. It turns out that what sustains democracy is not simply legal safeguards and rules, but norms and practices — democratic behavior. This culture of liberal democracy is waning in the United States today.

The Founding Fathers were skeptical of democracy and conceived of America as a republic to mitigate some of the dangers of illiberal democracy. The Bill of Rights, the Supreme Court, state governments and the Senate are all bulwarks against majoritarianism. But the United States also developed a democratic culture, formed in large part by a series of informal buffers that worked in similar ways. Alexis de Tocqueville called them “associations” — meaning nongovernmental groups such as choir societies, rotary clubs and professional groups — and argued that they acted to “weaken the moral empire of the majority.” Alexander Hamilton felt that ministers, lawyers and other professionals would be the “impartial arbiters” of American democracy, ensuring that rather than narrow, special interests, the society and its government would focus on the national interest.

The two prevailing dynamics in U.S. society over the past few decades have been toward greater democratic openness and market efficiency. Congressional decision-making has gone from a closed, hierarchical system to an open and freewheeling one. Political parties have lost their internal strength and are now merely vessels for whoever wins the primaries. Guilds and other professional associations have lost nearly all moral authority and have become highly competitive and insecure organizations, whose members do not — and probably cannot — afford to act in ways that serve the public interest. In the media — the only industry protected explicitly in the Constitution — a tradition of public interest ownership and management aspired to educate the public. Today’s media have drifted from this tradition.

I recognize that this is a romantic view of the role of these elites and hierarchical structures. Parts of the media were partisan and scandal-hungry from the start. Lawyers often acted in their own narrow interests; accountants regularly conspired in frauds. And those smoke-filled rooms with party bosses often made terrible decisions.

But we are now getting to see what American democracy looks like without any real buffers in the way of sheer populism and demagoguery. The parties have collapsed, Congress has caved, professional groups are largely toothless, the media have been rendered irrelevant. When I wrote a book about “illiberal democracy” in 2003, I noted that in polls, Americans showed greatest respect for the three most undemocratic institutions in the country: the Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve and the armed forces. Today, the first two have lost much of their luster, and only the latter remains broadly admired.

What we are left with today is an open, meritocratic, competitive society in which everyone is an entrepreneur, from a congressman to an accountant, always hustling for personal advantage. But who and what remain to nourish and preserve the common good, civic life and liberal democracy?

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Source: The Washington Post

Democracy in America - ANNENBERG LEARNER

A video course for high school, college and adult learners ; 15 half-hour video programs, print guide, and Web site

Democracy in America, a video course in civics, covers topics of civic knowledge, skills, and dispositions recommended by The Civics Framework for the National Assessment of Educational Progress developed by the U.S. Department of Education. The 15 half-hour video programs, hosted by national television correspondent Renée Poussaint, and related print and Web site materials provide inservice and preservice teachers with both cognitive and experiential learning in civics education.

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

15 VIDEOS AS WELL:

1. Citizenship: Making Government Work
This program introduces basic concepts of government, politics, and citizenship. It explores the tension between maintaining order and preserving freedoms, the essential role of politics in addressing the will of the people, and the need for citizens to participate in order to make democracy work. Go to this unit.

VOD2. The Constitution: Fixed or Flexible?
This program examines the search for balance between the original Constitution and the need to interpret and adjust it to meet the needs of changing times. It explains the original Jeffersonian-Madisonian debate, the concept of checks and balances, and the stringent procedures for amending the Constitution. Go to this unit.

VOD3. Federalism: U.S. v. the States
This program explores federalism as a Constitutional compromise, especially in terms of present-day conflicts between people who believe that power should reside primarily in the national government and those who want government authority retained within the states. Go to this unit.

VOD4. Civil Liberties: Safeguarding the Individual
This program examines the First, Fourth, and Sixth Constitutional Amendments to show how the Bill of Rights protects individual citizens from excessive or arbitrary government interference, yet, contrary to the belief of many Americans, does not grant unlimited rights. Go to this unit.

VOD5. Civil Rights: Demanding Equality
This program looks at the nature of the guarantees of political and social equality, and the roles that individuals and government have played in expanding these guarantees to less-protected segments of society, such as African Americans, women, and the disabled. Go to this unit.

VOD6. Legislatures: Laying Down the Law
This program explores the idea that legislatures, although contentious bodies, are institutions composed of men and women who make representative democracy work by reflecting and reconciling the wide diversity of views held by Americans. Go to this unit.

VOD7. The Modern Presidency: Tools of Power
This program shows that the American Presidency has been transformed since the 1930s. Today, presidents are overtly active in the legislative process: they use the media to appeal directly to the people and they exercise leadership over an "institutional presidency" with thousands of aides. Go to this unit.

VOD8. Bureaucracy: A Controversial Necessity
This program reveals how the American bureaucracy delivers significant services directly to the people, how it has expanded in response to citizen demands for increased government services, and how bureaucrats sometimes face contradictory expectations that are difficult to satisfy. Go to this unit.

VOD9. The Courts: Our Rule of Law
This program examines the role of courts as institutions dedicated to conflict resolution, with the power both to apply and to interpret the meaning of law in trial and appeal courts. It shows the increased power of the Supreme Court through its use of judicial review and the difficulty of creating a judiciary that is independent of politics. Go to this unit.

VOD10. The Media: Inside Story
This program explores the media as an integral part of American democracy, highlighting the scrutiny they impose on the performance of public officials, the interdependence of politics and the media, and the power the media wields in selecting the news. Go to this unit.

VOD11. Public Opinion: Voice of the People
This program examines the power of public opinion to influence government policy, the increasing tendency of public officials to rely on polls, and the need to use many forms of feedback to get an accurate measure of public opinion. Go to this unit.

VOD12. Political Parties: Mobilizing Agents
This program shows how political parties perform important functions that link the public to the institutions of American government. Parties create coalitions of citizens who share political goals, elect candidates to public office to achieve those goals, and organize the legislative and executive branches of government. Go to this unit.

VOD13. Elections: The Maintenance of Democracy
This program explores the crucial role of strategy in the two-stage electoral campaign system; the opportunities for citizens to choose, organize, and elect candidates who will pursue policies they favor; and the need for campaigns to increase voter turnout by educating citizens about the importance and influence of their vote. Go to this unit.

VOD14. Interest Groups: Organizing To Influence
This program shows how America's large number of corporate, citizen-action, and grass-roots interest groups enhance our representative process by giving citizens a role in shaping policy agendas. Go to this unit.

VOD15. Global Politics: U.S.A. and the World
This program examines the need for the United States to use the tools of foreign policy in ways that recognize the growing interdependence of nations — implementing both traditional and new forms of military, trade, and diplomatic strategies to promote benefits for America and the world as a whole. Go to this unit.

Making Civics Real: A Workshop for Teachers

A video workshop for high school teachers; 8 one-hour video programs, workshop guide, and Web site; graduate credit available

This video workshop for the professional development of high school teachers illustrates a constructivist approach to the teaching of civics, with eight video programs, each dedicated to one teacher's multi-part lesson. Developed in collaboration with the National Council for the Social Studies and the Center for Civic Education, the video programs, Web site, and print guide provide the methodology for the effective teaching of civics, and include complete lesson plans of the lessons shown in the video.

Produced by State of the Art, Inc., in collaboration with the National Council for the Social Studies and the Center for Civic Education. 2003.

LINK: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

8 VIDEOS:
Workshop 1. Freedom of Religion
Ninth-grade civics teacher Kristen Borges involves her students at Southwest High School in Minnesota in a simulation of a U.S. Supreme Court hearing on a First Amendment case. Students assume the roles of Supreme Court justices, attorneys for the school district, and attorneys for the families. They first work in groups to prepare for the hearing, then participate in the hearing, and finally, debrief their experiences and write short papers stating their positions on the case. The methodologies highlighted in this lesson include questioning strategies and mock trials. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 2. Electoral Politics
This program shows the conclusion of a 12-week civic engagement unit developed by the national Student Voices program. José Velazquez's 12th-grade students at University High School in New Jersey divide into small groups to brainstorm and research community issues, prioritize the issues on the basis of what they have learned, present their findings to the class both orally and through a visual presentation, and develop a whole-class consensus on a youth agenda that they present to the mayoral candidates in a televised question-and-answer forum. The methodologies highlighted in this lesson include issue identification and consensus building. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 3. Public Policy and the Federal Budget
Leslie Martin's ninth-graders at West Forsyth High School in North Carolina create, present, revise, and defend a federal budget, and then reflect on what they have learned. After assuming the roles of the President and his or her advisors to create a federal budget, students are introduced to the actual 2001 federal budget, and in a whole-class discussion, discuss some key concepts involved in creating it. Next, students return to cooperative learning groups, revise their budgets based on what they learned, present their revised budgets, and simulate a Congressional hearing. This lesson highlights the integration of teacher-directed instruction with small-group work. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 4. Constitutional Convention
Matt Johnson teaches an AP Comparative Government class to seniors at Benjamin Banneker Senior High School in Washington, DC. In this lesson, his 12th-grade students create a constitution for a hypothetical country called Permistan. Matt Johnson uses this lesson to help students review for their final exam and the AP exam by having them draw on what they have learned during the semester about international governments. Students work in cooperative learning groups to discuss and debate issues relating to the executive and legislative branches of government. The lesson closes with a simulation of a constitutional convention. Simulation is the primary methodology highlighted in this lesson. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 5. Patriotism and Foreign Policy
The students in this program are seniors at the Duke Ellington School of the Arts, a public magnet school in Washington, DC. In this lesson, U.S. government teacher Alice Chandler has her students create a Museum of Patriotism and Foreign Policy. The lesson alternates between whole-class discussion and small-group committee work as students create a gallery for the museum using their respective arts concentration as the medium. The lesson concludes with students presenting their gallery contributions in dance, music, theatrical performances, and visual presentations, along with rationales for their selections. This lesson highlights small-group work as a constructivist methodology. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 6. Civic Engagement
This program shows a group of 11th- and 12th-grade students at Anoka High School in Minnesota engaging in service learning — a requirement for graduation. In this human geography class taught by Bill Mittlefehldt, students work in teams to define a project, choose and meet with a community partner who can help educate them about the issue and its current status, conduct further research, and present the problem and a proposed solution first to their peers, and then to a special session of the Anoka City Council. The primary methodology presented in this lesson is service learning. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 7. Controversial Public Policy Issues
In this 12th-grade law class at Champlin Park High School in Minnesota, JoEllen Ambrose engages students in a structured discussion of a highly controversial issue — racial profiling — and connects student learning both to their study of due process in constitutional law and police procedure in criminal law. Students begin by completing an opinion poll, which they discuss as a group. Students are then put into pairs in which they conduct research on the topic. Next, students participate in a debate in which each partnership argues both sides of the issue. A debriefing discussion completes the lesson. The methodologies highlighted in this lesson include role playing and structured academic controversy. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 8. Rights and Responsibilities of Students
Students in Matt Johnson's 12th-grade law course at Benjamin Banneker Senior High School in Washington, DC, engage in a culminating activity to help them review and apply what they have learned. Students write and distribute one-page briefs of Supreme Court cases they have studied. Next, students are assigned to small groups and given hypothetical cases related to student rights cases from the Supreme Court's 2001-2002 term. Students prepare their cases and present them to the Justices. Justices deliberate and present majority and dissenting opinions, after which the class discusses both the process and the disposition of the cases. This lesson highlights the use of case studies for synthesis and analysis.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

A Biography of America

A video instructional series on American history for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 26 half-hour video programs, coordinated books, and Web site

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

A Biography of America presents history not simply as a series of irrefutable facts to be memorized, but as a living narrative. Prominent historians -- Donald L. Miller, Pauline Maier, Louis P. Masur, Waldo E. Martin, Jr., Douglas Brinkley, and Virginia Scharff -- present America's story as something that is best understood from a variety of perspectives. Thought-provoking debates and lectures encourage critical analysis of the forces that have shaped America. First-person narratives, photos, film footage, and documents reveal the human side of American history -- how historical figures affected events, and the impact of these events on citizens' lives.

Produced by WGBH Boston in cooperation with the Library of Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration, and with the assistance of Instructional Resources Corporation. 2000.

26 Videos:

1. New World Encounters
Professor Miller introduces A Biography of America and its team of historians. The program looks at the beginnings of American history from west to east, following the first Ice Age migrations through the corn civilizations of Middle America, and the explorations of Columbus, DeSoto, and the Spanish. Go to this unit.

VOD2. English Settlement
As the American character begins to take shape in the early seventeenth century, English settlements develop in New England and Virginia. Their personalities are dramatically different. Professor Miller explores the origins of values, cultures, and economies that have collided in the North and South throughout the American story. Go to this unit.

VOD3. Growth and Empire
Benjamin Franklin and Franklin's Philadelphia take center stage in this program. As the merchant class grows in the North, the economies of southern colonies are built on the shoulders of the slave trade. Professor Miller brings the American story to 1763 with the Peace of Paris and English dominance in America. Go to this unit.

VOD4. The Coming of Independence
Professor Maier tells the story of how the English-loving colonist transforms into the freedom-loving American rebel. The luminaries of the early days of the Republic -- Washington, Jefferson, Adams -- are featured in this program as they craft the Declaration of -- and wage the War for -- Independence. Go to this unit.

VOD5. A New System of Government
After the War for Independence, the struggle for a new system of government begins. Professor Maier looks at the creation of the Constitution of the United States. The Republic survives a series of threats to its union, and the program ends with the deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson on the Fourth of July, 1826. Go to this unit.

VOD6. Westward Expansion
At the dawn of the nineteenth century, the size of the United States doubles with the Louisiana Purchase. The Appalachians are no longer the barrier to American migration west; the Mississippi River becomes the country's central artery; and Jefferson's vision of an Empire of Liberty begins to take shape. American historian Stephen Ambrose joins Professors Maier and Miller in examining the consequences of the Louisiana Purchase -- for the North, the South, and the history of the country. Go to this unit.

VOD7. The Rise of Capitalism
Individual enterprise merges with technological innovation to launch the Commercial Revolution -- the seedbed of American industry. The program features the ideas of Adam Smith, the efforts of entrepreneurs in New England and Chicago, the Lowell Mills Experiment, and the engineering feats involved in Chicago's early transformation from marsh to metropolis. Go to this unit.

VOD8. The Reform Impulse
The Industrial Revolution has its dark side, and the tumultuous events of the period touch off intense and often thrilling reform movements. Professor Masur presents the ideas and characters behind the Great Awakening, the abolitionist movement, the women's movement, and a powerful wave of religious fervor. Go to this unit.

VOD9. Slavery
While the North develops an industrial economy and culture, the South develops a slave culture and economy, and the great rift between the regions becomes unbreachable. Professor Masur looks at the human side of the history of the mid-1800s by sketching a portrait of the lives of slave and master. Go to this unit.

VOD10. The Coming of the Civil War
Simmering regional differences ignite an all-out crisis in the 1850s. Professor Martin teams with Professor Miller and historian Stephen Ambrose to chart the succession of incidents, from 'Bloody Kansas' to the shots on Fort Sumter, that inflame the conflict between North and South to the point of civil war. Go to this unit.

VOD11. The Civil War
As the Civil War rages, all eyes turn to Vicksburg, where limited war becomes total war. Professor Miller looks at the ferocity of the fighting, at Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation, and at the bitter legacy of the battle -- and the war. Go to this unit.

VOD12. Reconstruction
Professor Miller begins the program by evoking in word and picture the battlefield after the battle of Gettysburg. With the assassination of President Lincoln, one sad chapter of American history comes to a close. In the fatigue and cynicism of the Civil War's aftermath, Reconstructionism becomes a promise unfulfilled. Go to this unit.

VOD13. America at Its Centennial
As America celebrates its centennial, 5 million people descend on Philadelphia to celebrate America's technological achievements, but some of the early principles of the Republic remain unrealized. Professor Miller and his team of historians examine where America is in 1876 and discuss the question of race. Go to this unit.

VOD14. Industrial Supremacy
Steel and stockyards are featured in this program as the mighty engine of industrialism thunders forward at the end of the nineteenth century. Professor Miller continues the story of the American Industrial Revolution in New York and Chicago, looking at the lives of Andrew Carnegie, Gustavus Swift, and the countless workers in the packinghouse and on the factory floor. Go to this unit.

VOD15. The New City
Professor Miller explores the tension between the messy vitality of cities that grow on their own and those where orderly growth is planned. Chicago -- with Hull House, the World's Columbian Exposition, the new female workforce, the skyscraper, the department store, and unfettered capitalism -- is the place to watch a new world in the making at the turn of the century. Go to this unit.

VOD16. The West
Professor Scharff continues the story of Jefferson's Empire of Liberty. Railroads and ranchers, rabble-rousers and racists populate America's distant frontiers, and Native Americans are displaced from their homelands. Feminists gain a foothold in their fight for the right to vote, while farmers organize and the Populist Party appears on the American political landscape. Go to this unit.

VOD17. Capital and Labor
The making of money pits laborers against the forces of capital as the twentieth century opens. Professor Miller introduces the miner as the quintessential laborer of the period -- working under grinding conditions, organizing into unions, and making a stand against the reigning money man of the day, J. Pierpont Morgan. Go to this unit.

VOD18. TR and Wilson
Professor Brinkley compares the presidencies of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson -- the Warrior and the Minister -- in the first decades of the twentieth century. Professor Miller discusses American socialism, Eugene Debs, international communism, and the roots of the Cold War with Professor Brinkley. Go to this unit.

VOD19. A Vital Progressivism
Professor Martin offers a fresh perspective on Progressivism, arguing that its spirit can be best seen in the daily struggles of ordinary people. In a discussion with Professors Scharff and Miller, the struggles of Native Americans, Asian Americans, and African Americans are placed in the context of the traditional white Progressive movement. Go to this unit.

VOD20. The Twenties
The Roaring Twenties take to the road in Henry Ford's landscape-altering invention -- the Model T. Ford's moving assembly line, the emergence of a consumer culture, and the culmination of forces let loose by these entities in Los Angeles are all explored by Professor Miller. Go to this unit.

VOD21. FDR and the Depression
Professor Brinkley continues his story of twentieth century presidents with a profile of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Brinkley paints a picture of America during the Depression and chronicles some of Roosevelt's programmatic and personal efforts to help the country through its worst economic crisis. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt is at FDR's side and, in many respects, ahead of him as the decade unfolds. Go to this unit.

VOD22. World War II
America is enveloped in total war, from mobilization on the home front to a scorching air war in Europe. Professor Miller's view of World War II is a personal essay on the morality of total war, and its effects on those who fought, died, and survived it, including members of his own family. Go to this unit.

VOD23. The Fifties
World War II is fought to its bitter end in the Pacific and the world lives with the legacy of its final moment: the atomic bomb. Professor Miller continues the story as veterans return from the war and create new lives for themselves in the '50s. The GI Bill, Levittown, civil rights, the Cold War, and rock 'n' roll are discussed. Go to this unit.

VOD24. The Sixties
Professor Scharff weaves the story of the Civil Rights movement with stories of the Vietnam War and Watergate to create a portrait of a decade. Lyndon Johnson emerges as a pivotal character, along with Stokely Carmichael, Fanny Lou Hamer, and other luminaries of the era. Go to this unit.

VOD25. Contemporary History
The entire team of historians joins Professor Miller in examining the last quarter of the twentieth century. A montage of events opens the program and sets the stage for a discussion of the period -- and of the difficulty of examining contemporary history with true historical perspective. Television critic John Leonard offers a footnote about the impact of television on the way we experience recent events. Go to this unit.

VOD26. The Redemptive Imagination
Storytelling is a relentless human urge and its power forges with memory to become the foundation of history. Novelists Charles Johnson (Middle Passage), Arthur Golden (Memoirs of a Geisha), and Esmeralda Santiago (America's Dream) join Professor Miller in discussing the intersection of history and story. Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., closes the series with a reflection on the power of the human imagination.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

The Constitution: That Delicate Balance

A video instructional series on the American Constitution for college and high school classrooms and adult learners; 13 one-hour video programs and coordinated books

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

Constitutional issues come to life in this Emmy Award-winning series. Key political, legal, and media professionals engage in spontaneous and heated debates on controversial issues such as campaign spending, the right to die, school prayer, and immigration reform. This series will deepen understanding of the life and power of this enduring document and its impact on history and current affairs, while bringing biases and misconceptions to light.

Produced by Columbia University Seminars on Media and Society. 1984.

12 Videos:

1. Executive Privilege and Delegation of Powers
Can the President's conversations with advisors remain secret when Congress demands to know what was said? Congresswoman Barbara Mikulski, former President Gerald Ford, and Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox bring first-hand experience to this topic.

VOD2. War Powers and Covert Action
If the president, as commander in chief, decides to declare war, can Congress restrain him? Debating the issue are Gerald Ford, former CIA deputy director Bobby Inman, former secretary of state Edmund Muskie, and others.

VOD3. Nomination, Election, and Succession of the President
A tangled web of issues is involved in electing a president. Edmund Muskie, former presidential press secretary Jody Powell, party officials, and others discuss the role of political parties, the electoral college, and what to do if a president becomes disabled.

VOD4. Criminal Justice and a Defendant's Right to a Fair Trial
Should a lawyer defend a guilty person? This and other questions are debated by Bronx district attorney Mario Merola, former New York mayor Edward Koch, CBS News anchor Dan Rather, and others.

VOD5. Crime and Insanity
Is a psychiatric evaluation precise enough to be allowed as testimony in a court of law? U.S. Court of Appeals judge Irving Kaufman, Hastings Center president Willard Gaylin, and others discuss the use of psychiatry in law.

VOD6. Crime and Punishments
Cruel and unusual punishment, from overcrowding in prisons to the death penalty, is debated by U.S. Court of Appeals judge Arthur Alarcon, Federal Bureau of Prisons director Norman Carlson, government leaders, civil libertarians, and journalists.

VOD7. Campaign Spending
Do limits on campaign spending infringe on First Amendment rights? Political consultant David Garth, Washington Post columnist David Broder, Bill Moyers, and others explore the issues.

VOD8. National Security and Freedom of the Press
What right does the public have to know about national security issues? Former CIA director and secretary of defense James Schlesinger, former attorney general Griffin Bell, and others debate the issue.

VOD9. School Prayer, Gun Control, and the Right To Assemble
A series of events embroils a small town in First and Second Amendment controversies. Featured are Griffin Bell, former secretary of education Shirley Hufstedler, and civil liberties counsel Jeanne Baker.

VOD10. Right To Live, Right To Die
Gloria Steinem, Joseph Califano, Rep. Henry Hyde, Phil Donahue, and others discuss the right to make intensely individual decisions about dying, abortion, personal freedom, and privacy.

VOD11. Immigration Reform
The rights of legal and illegal aliens to employment and to medical and educational services are debated by U.S. Court of Appeals judge Arlin Adams, Notre Dame president Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, and immigration officials and journalists.

VOD12. Affirmative Action Versus Reverse Discrimination
Are quotas based on sex or race unconstitutional? Participants include Ellen Goodman, former EEOC chair Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington Post columnist William Raspberry, and United Federation of Teachers president Albert Shanker.

VOD13. Federalism
How much power the federal government can wield over state and local affairs is debated in this final episode. Among those featured are Senators Orrin Hatch and Daniel Moynihan and Columbia University professor Diane Ravitch.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

Primary Sources: Workshops in American History

A video workshop for high school teachers; 8 one-hour video programs, workshop guide, and Web site

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

In this workshop, 12 high school history teachers explore the use of primary-source documents in the research and interpretation of American history. The programs feature informal lectures by prominent historians on pivotal events from the settlement of Jamestown to the Korean conflict and the Cold War. The teachers are led in discussions, debates, interviews, and role-playing as they investigate the original documents that "transmit the voices of America's past." Teachers will find that the activities in this workshop can be adapted and used in their own classrooms.
The topics relate to programs from Annenberg/CPB's instructional series A Biography of America, which can be viewed in coordination with this workshop.

Produced by WGBH Boston. 2001.

8 Videos:

Workshop 1. The Virginia Company: America's Corporate Beginnings
with Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

How can primary sources illuminate historical events? This workshop tells the story of Jamestown, a less-than-successful example of America's capitalist beginnings and a colony as a business operation. Drawing on contemporary accounts, workshop participants assume the roles of colonists and shareholders to argue the future of the Virginia Company's settlement at Jamestown.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 2: English Settlement. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 2. Common Sense and the American Revolution: The Power of the Printed Word
with Pauline Maier, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This workshop explores the power and importance of America's first "best-seller." Using the language of ordinary people, Thomas Paine's Common Sense called for revolution, challenging many assumptions about government and the colonies' relationship with England. This workshop contrasts the declarations of local communities with Common Sense to see how support for American independence rose up in the colonies.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 4: The Coming of Independence. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 3. The Lowell System: Women in a New Industrial Society
with Louis Masur, City College of New York

In the earliest days of American industry, the Boston Manufacturing Company created an innovative, single-location manufacturing enterprise at Lowell that depended on the recruitment of female mill workers. This workshop debates the impact of this new form of employment on workers — for better or for worse. Participants investigate the workers' experiences first-hand — through diaries, letters, published accounts, and official mill postings.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 7: The Rise of Capitalism. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 4. Concerning Emancipation: Who Freed the Slaves?
with Louis P. Masur, City College of New York

This workshop examines the role of the enslaved in bringing about the end of slavery in the United States. Through analysis of President Lincoln's attitudes and actions before and during the Civil War, and correspondence, speeches, legislative orders, newspaper articles, and letters written by African Americans — enslaved and free — workshop participants debate the influences prompting Emancipation.

Coordinated with A Biography of America programs 10: The Coming of the Civil War and 11: The Civil War. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 5. Cans, Coal, and Corporations: The 1893 World's Columbian Exposition
with Jonathan Chu, University of Massachusetts Boston

Intrastate transportation and industrial technology exploded in the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a new vision of America. Join the onscreen participants as they draw on essays written to celebrate the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago to explore this new perspective, both cosmopolitan and expansionist, and its implications for the future.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 15: The New City. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 6. The Census: Who We Think We Are
with Evelynn Hammonds, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Every 10 years, American citizens get a new view of who they are. In this workshop, a selection of Census forms over the past 200 years shows how categories of race and ethnicity not only reflect, but can shape and sometimes obscure, America's ideas of racial identity. Onscreen participants attempt to "find" themselves in evolving racial categorizations from 1830 to 1990 and, using recent Census results, formulate appropriation priorities for a Midwestern community.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 19: A Vital Progressivism. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 7. Disease and History: Typhoid Mary and the Search for Perfect Control
with Evelynn Hammonds, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

This workshop looks at the history of infectious disease in America — particularly typhoid, diphtheria, and polio — and their "conquest" by medical research and public health regulation. With the aid of contemporary medical journal articles and New York City health records, the onscreen participants investigate the medical and civil liberties issues exemplified by the case of "Typhoid Mary" Mallon. Facing off as either Board of Health officials or friends of Mary Mallon, workshop participants debate the typhoid carrier's fate.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 15: The New City. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 8. Korea and the Cold War: A Case Study
with Jonathan Chu, University of Massachusetts Boston

This workshop looks at the first use of military force under the Truman Doctrine, and the Korean War as the first practical manifestation of America's Cold War "containment" policy. Using works by George Kennan and Walter Lippman, treaties, and the texts of the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine, the onscreen participants take on the roles of major military, political, and strategic players at a mock Senate hearing to decide whether to intervene in Korea in 1950.

Coordinated with A Biography of America program 23: The Fifties.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

Social Sciences Discipline Page:

https://www.learner.org/resources/dis...

Source: Annenberg Foundation

Social Studies in Action: A Teaching Practices Library, K-12

A video library for K-12 teachers; 29 half-hour and 3 one-hour video programs, library guide, and Web site

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

The Social Studies in Action teaching practices library, professional development guide, and companion Web site bring to life the National Council for the Social Studies standards. Blending content and methodology, the video library documents 24 teachers and their students in K-12 classrooms across the country actively exploring the social studies. Lively, provocative, and educationally sound, these lessons are designed to inspire thoughtful conversations and reflections on teaching practices in the social studies.

32 Videos:
1. Introduction to the Video Library
This program presents the purpose of the Social Studies in Action video library. It introduces all the components of the library, explains the goals of NCSS, and presents examples of classroom lessons throughout the library. This program also addresses a variety of ways in which the library can be used for enhancing the curriculum, teacher reflection, and best practices for teaching.

VOD2. A Standards Overview, K-5
This program includes K–5 classroom examples from across the country that define and illustrate the 10 NCSS thematic strands and present a variety of ways that they can be integrated into the K–5 curriculum. The primary grades begin to lay the foundation and groundwork for big ideas and concepts in social studies, such as a sense of place, time, community, and justice.

VOD3. Historical Change
David Kitts is a first–grade teacher on the Santo Domingo Indian Reservation in New Mexico. In his bilingual classroom, Native American students are studying the history of farming through a lesson that compares farming in eighteenth–century New England to current–day practices in the Midwest. The lesson uses literature and the study of various farming tools and products to illuminate the changes that have taken place in the industry over time and in different parts of the country. The lesson includes group activity and discussion. Go to this unit.

VOD4. China Through Mapping
Mimi Norton teaches second grade at Solano Elementary School in Phoenix, Arizona. In this lesson, students learn about China's position on the globe and the location of important landmarks within the country. As a class, students create a giant map of China on the floor. Working in teams, students complete mapping tasks at classroom stations, focusing on the five themes of geography. As a culminating activity, students solve an interactive detective mystery created by Ms. Norton and work in small groups to solve problems based on their mastery of the map of China. Go to this unit.

VOD5. Leaders, Community, and Citizens
Cynthia Vaughn teaches first grade at the Rooftop Alternative School in San Francisco, California. The objective of Ms. Vaughn's lesson is to help her students differentiate between the titles and roles of elected officials at city, state, and country levels. After a class discussion outlining the various roles of these elected officials, students work in pairs to complete a chart, matching specific names with job titles and buildings, and then discuss their work with the whole class. Then, the students build their own fictitious community and explore and present the issues facing the town. Go to this unit.

VOD6. Making Bread Together
Meylin Gonzalez is a kindergarten teacher in Tampa, Florida. Ms. Gonzalez uses this lesson to introduce her students to several economic concepts, including production and cooperation. Using a children's book as a guide, Ms. Gonzalez reviews with her students how people work cooperatively on an assembly line to make a product. The students then experience the concepts of production and distribution through an activity in which they create an assembly line in the classroom and prepare hand–made bread. Go to this unit.

VOD7. Caring for the Community
Debbie Lerner teaches grades 1–3 at Red Bridge Elementary School in Kansas City, Missouri. Red Bridge incorporates a personalized learning curriculum in which students stay in the same classroom for all three grade levels. Ms. Lerner's lesson focuses on the concept of community and explores how her students can help make a difference in each other's lives. Students review the concept of resources and interview their superintendent to understand how decisions are made that affect the school budget. Students then work in groups to brainstorm and create flyers to help prepare for their school's upcoming remodeling. Go to this unit.

VOD8. Celebrations of Light
Eileen Mesmer teaches a combined kindergarten and first–grade class in Salem, Massachusetts, a diverse community outside Boston. Ms. Mesmer asks her students to explore the many ways the holidays are celebrated and to find commonalities among the various celebrations. Ms. Mesmer reads to the students from "The Winter Solstice," using it to help students understand the greater theme of community. Through math, writing, and drawing stations located throughout the classroom, students interact with the content in a variety of ways and through diverse learning styles. Go to this unit.

VOD9. Explorers in North America
Rob Cuddi, a fifth–grade teacher at Winthrop Middle School in Winthrop, Massachusetts, has been teaching for almost 30 years and has recently taken an active role in restructuring the social studies curriculum to accommodate both state and national standards. Mr. Cuddi's lesson introduces the theme of exploration in North America, posing three essential questions: How have people in history affected our lives today?; How do the human and physical systems of the Earth interact?; and What role do economies play in the foundation of our history? Go to this unit.

VOD10. California Missions
Osvaldo Rubio is a bilingual fourth–grade social studies teacher at Sherman Oaks Community Charter School in San Jose, California. Mr. Rubio's geography lesson focuses on the location and movement of California missions. In groups, students create artistic, oral, written, and other more sophisticated audio–visual presentations. Some students use the Internet to download images, while others use a digital camera and editing software to create their own presentations in the form of an I–Movie. Go to this unit.

VOD11. State Government and the Role of the Citizen
Diane Kerr is a fourth–grade teacher at Butcher Greene Elementary School in the ethnically diverse community of Grandview, Missouri, a few miles outside Kansas City. Ms. Kerr presents a lesson on the state of Missouri and its three branches of government. Students work in groups and create posters that represent the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government. The students also voice their concerns about what can be done to improve their lives. As a class, they then work to understand the process of how a bill becomes a law. Go to this unit.

VOD12. Using Primary Sources
Kathleen Waffle teaches fifth grade at John Muir Elementary School in San Bruno, California, a working–class suburb of San Francisco. In a unit on Colonial America, students examine an eighteenth–century business through a case study of a successful silversmith who lived in Colonial Williamsburg. In small groups, students use primary source documents (advertisements) and artifacts to identify the business strategies used by the silversmith. They then translate a historic contract between a master and an apprentice and examine how colonial apprenticeships compare with present–day job pursuits. Go to this unit.

VOD13. Making a Difference Through Giving
Darlene Jones–Inge is a fourth–grade teacher at O'Hearn Elementary School located in Boston's inner city. Ms. Jones–Inge, a teacher for 10 years, presents a complex lesson that focuses on the theme of giving. Ms. Jones–Inge has students work in teams to determine a meaningful service project addressing the needs within their school, community, country, or world. Through thoughtful voting and collaborative decision making, students must determine the goal and scale of their project. Go to this unit.

VOD14. Understanding Stereotypes
Libby Sinclair is a fourth– and fifth–grade teacher at Alternative Elementary School #2 in Seattle, Washington. In her lesson, Ms. Sinclair asks her students to define the term "stereotype" from a variety of perspectives. At the beginning of the lesson, Ms. Sinclair has students brainstorm individually and in groups to understand how stereotypes have affected their lives and their learning. After recognizing that the contribution of Negro baseball leagues has been omitted from the history of baseball, students thoughtfully plan and execute a letter campaign to contact text publishers. Go to this unit.

VOD15. A Standards Overview, 6-8
Lessons from grade 6–8 classrooms illustrate how the NCSS standards and themes can be integrated into the middle school curriculum. Middle school teachers explore a number of expectations and outcomes in their lessons and build on the fundamentals established in the elementary grades. Themes of civics, political science, and history begin to take on more meaning as the content in these lessons connects to students' lives.

VOD16. Explorations in Archeology and History
Gwen Larsen teaches sixth–grade social studies at Harbor School in Boston, Massachusetts. In her introductory lesson, Ms. Larsen guides students through an exploration of their family histories, leading to their place in the larger human family and the development of civilizations. Ms. Larsen's students work in groups to differentiate between fossils and artifacts. The lesson concludes with student presentations of their own family heirlooms. Go to this unit.

VOD17. Exploring Geography Through African History
Lisa Farrow is a seventh–grade world cultures teacher at Shiloh Middle School in a suburb of Baltimore, Maryland. Ms. Farrow's lesson provides her students with an understanding of African history and geography. After creating a personal timeline, the students create a historical timeline of Africa, focusing on the Bantu migrations, the rise of Islam, the West African trading empires, the Turkish empire, the slave trade, and European colonialism. Students take an active role in group work as they create maps and captions that define each period. Ms. Farrow concentrates on the importance of the trading empires and their connection to Africa's history as a whole. Go to this unit.

VOD18. The Amistad Case
Gary Fisher is a teacher at Timilty Middle School in the urban community of Roxbury, Massachusetts, part of the greater Boston area. In his eighth–grade U.S. history class, Mr. Fisher examines the history of African American slavery through a dramatic mock trial based on the Amistad case in 1839. Serving as the defense, prosecution, judges, and other historical characters in the trial, students develop their cases and present them in a formal court setting created in their classroom. In his class, Mr. Fisher collaborates with the Spanish teacher who provides special support for second–language learners. Go to this unit.

VOD19. Population and Resource Distribution
Becky Forristal teaches seventh–grade economics at Rockwood Valley Middle School, 20 miles outside St. Louis, Missouri. Her lesson focuses on a population simulation that explores world economics, demonstrating the inequalities in land, food, energy, and wealth distribution in the world today. Using a global map on the classroom floor, students are able to visualize how resources are distributed in both wealthy and under–developed nations of the world. Go to this unit.

32 Videos Continued from Previous Comment Box:

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

20. Landmark Supreme Court Cases
Wendy Ewbank teaches seventh and eighth grade at Madrona School in Bellevue, Washington. In a civics lesson on landmark Supreme Court cases, the students focus on the tension between the rights of the individual and the good of society. In the lesson, students work in groups, presenting various cases to the class in the form of a press conference. Key issues include the right to privacy, equal protection, and the First Amendment. On day two, students hold a town meeting to discuss whether the burning of the American flag is protected under the right to freedom of speech. Ms. Ewbank provides clear rubrics, which help students understand the expectations and goals for the lesson. Go to this unit.

21. The Middle East Conflict
Justin Zimmerman is a sixth-grade teacher at Magnolia School in Joppa, Maryland, about 30 miles north of Baltimore. Mr. Zimmerman explores the claims to land in the Middle East from three major religions — Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. After learning about the geography of the area, the students begin to explore the region's political unrest and discuss the controversy over control of the land of Israel. Through this lesson, the students begin to make connections that relate their own lives to the political and religious struggle. Go to this unit.

VOD22. A Standards Overview, 9-12
This program shows a variety of complex topics from high school lessons, illustrating how the NCSS standards and themes can be integrated into teaching in grades 9–12. Teachers will be able to see how the curriculum can be expanded to address complex issues and content in meaningful ways and become much more sophisticated in exploring all areas of social studies.

VOD23. Public Opinion and the Vietnam War
Liz Morrison is a ninth–grade American history teacher at Parkway South High School in suburban St. Louis, Missouri. In a lesson on the Vietnam War, Ms. Morrison explores how public opinion was shaped by key events. Students create a timeline and work in groups to discover how public opinion changed from approval to disapproval. The students view television footage from this period and listen to popular music that reflects both sides of public opinion. Ms. Morrison helps her students make connections from the Vietnam War to their world today. Go to this unit.

VOD24. Migration From Latin America
Mavis Weir teaches 10th–grade history at Casa Grande High School in Petaluma, California. In this lesson, students explore the various reasons people emigrate from their homeland. The class is broken up into six separate groups, each representing a different Latin American country with its own set of resources. Using both primary and secondary sources, students examine the economic, political, and environmental circumstances that cause people to emigrate. Each group presents their findings through a variety of creative presentations that include theatrical skits, artwork, and music. Go to this unit.

VOD25. Competing Ideologies
Wendell Brooks is a teacher at the diverse Berkeley High School in Berkeley, California. Mr. Brooks' ninth–grade history class focuses on a variety of political ideologies present during the period of World War I. His class includes lively discussion on capitalism, communism, totalitarianism, and Nazism, as portrayed by leaders such as Hitler and Mussolini. In his lesson, Mr. Brooks incorporates a Socratic discussion into his lesson, as well as group activities and presentations. Go to this unit.

VOD26. Economic Dilemmas and Solutions
Steven Page is a 12th–grade economics teacher at Vivian Gaither Senior High School in Tampa, Florida. In this lesson, students review and interpret the government's role in the economy. Working in groups, students examine economic dilemmas, including the implications of human cloning, year–round schooling, and drug legalization. Students then reach consensus on a "proper" economic decision and present their findings in the form of a skit, followed by a group discussion. Go to this unit.

VOD27. Gender-Based Distinctions
Tim Rockey teaches 12th–grade American government and politics at Sunnyslope High School in Phoenix, Arizona. Mr. Rockey reviews the concept of civil rights, with a focus on women's rights. Students evaluate the "reasonableness" standard as set by the court and come to understand where the court has drawn the line for gender–based decisions. They explore the following questions: Can public taverns cater only to men? Can females be excluded from contact sports? And can a state military college exclude women? After examining Supreme Court cases, students render a judgment as to the validity of the standard of equal rights. Go to this unit.

VOD28. The Individual in Society
Brian Poon is a teacher at Brookline High School in metropolitan Boston, Massachusetts. Mr. Poon's 12th–grade philosophy lesson focuses on the role of the individual in society. Based on readings by various philosophers, including Reinhold Niebuhr, Thomas Hobbes, Mao Zedong, Martha Nussbaum, and Plato, students apply the philosophers' viewpoints to solve the dilemmas of a fictitious nation called "Fenway." They then participate in a dynamic class discussion about how to integrate the best philosophical ideas to address Fenway's problems. Go to this unit.

VOD29. Groups, Projects, and Presentations
This program examines how social studies teachers in any grade level can use groups, projects, and presentations to help students become actively involved in their learning. Topics range from structuring groups to creating scoring guides and rubrics. Through examples of cooperative learning, decision making, and problem solving, teachers can examine how to use groups, projects, and presentations to promote powerful learning.

VOD30. Unity and Diversity
This program examines how social studies teachers in any grade level can embrace both unity and diversity in their classrooms. Topics range from exploring democratic values to building awareness of student diversity. Through examples of students connecting with one another and embracing the different cultures within their community, teachers can reflect on how to best address issues of unity and diversity in their classroom.

VOD31. Dealing With Controversial Issues
This program examines how social studies teachers in any grade level can encourage open and informed discussions with their students while dealing with controversial issues. Topics range from stereotypes and gender–based discrimination to the conflict in the Middle East. Through clearly identifying issues, listening to multiple perspectives, and formulating personal positions, teachers can explore a variety of strategies that can be used to teach challenging issues such as these in their own classrooms.

VOD32. Creating Effective Citizens
This program explores how social studies teachers in any grade level can help their students develop the democratic values that will make them effective and responsible citizens. Teachers are shown helping students see their community in a broader sense and inspiring them to think about ways they can make a difference. The classroom lessons emphasize how civic processes work, how to discuss issues from multiple perspectives, and how teachers can inspire their students to take social action.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

Social Studies in Action: A Methodology Workshop, K-5

A video workshop for K-5 teachers; 8 one-hour video programs, workshop guide, and Web site; graduate credit available

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

This video workshop provides a methodology framework for teaching social studies, with a focus on creating effective citizens. The eight video programs feature K-5 teachers exploring social studies themes, theories of learning, teaching strategies, and ways to connect social studies to the world beyond the classroom. Led by social studies educator Mary A. McFarland, the onscreen participants reflect on fundamental issues in teaching and learning social studies through discussions, debates, and activities that can be adapted to a K-5 curriculum. With the companion Web site and guide, this video workshop provides a stimulating learning experience for individual teachers or professional development groups.

Produced by WGBH Educational Foundation. 2003.

8 Videos:

Workshop 1. Teaching Social Studies
Why do we teach social studies? This session focuses on the relevance of teaching social studies and discusses strategies for helping students gain a deeper understanding of social studies content. The onscreen teachers review standards and themes developed by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) and view video clips from the Social Studies in Action video library to identify examples of powerful teaching and learning. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 2. Teaching for Understanding
How do we plan for learning? This session focuses on the Teaching for Understanding model, a framework for unit planning developed at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. The onscreen teachers use the framework to analyze unit planning in classroom videos, plan for their own social studies units, and create a pictorial timeline of U.S. history that outlines an entire year of learning. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 3. Exploring Unity and Diversity
Who do we teach? Because themes of unity and diversity surface within both academic content and classroom climate, this session focuses on strategies for teaching provocative issues in social studies as well as methods of addressing a diversity of learners. The onscreen teachers examine national documents for themes of unity and diversity, explore Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences, and develop a mini-lesson on immigration and citizenship. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 4. Applying Themes and Disciplines
What do we teach? Working from the NCSS themes and standards, the onscreen teachers identify approaches to integrating disciplines while teaching social studies content. Classroom video segments illustrate effective strategies for teaching across the curriculum and provide an opportunity to reflect on teaching practices. The session ends with the teachers developing a lesson plan that incorporates a variety of themes and disciplines. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 5. Using Resources
How can students use a variety of resources well? This session focuses on how to make the most of the resources that can be used in teaching social studies, from artifacts and primary sources to children's literature and the Internet. An adaptable mini-lesson uses children's literature to examine what constitutes a good citizen, resulting in a lively debate among the onscreen teachers. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 6. Engaging Students in Active Learning
How do we engage students in active learning? In this session, the teachers examine the elements of authentic instruction and cooperative learning to identify ways of engaging students in social studies content. They review the importance of questioning in relation to higher-order thinking and explore classroom strategies to stimulate thinking and bring social studies concepts to life for their students. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 7. Assessing Students' Learning
How do we know students are learning? Because assessment often provides only small snapshots of learning, this session provides teachers with a variety of tools and strategies to assess students' learning in formal, informal, ongoing, and culminating ways. The onscreen teachers analyze classroom video segments, develop criteria for assessment, and learn how to incorporate assessment strategies in a lesson on the most influential citizens in U.S. history. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 8. Making Connections
How do we connect social studies to life beyond the classroom? In this culminating session, the teachers demonstrate the major concepts they've learned throughout the workshop in social studies unit presentations. Classroom video segments further illustrate effective ways of bridging social studies concepts and the world beyond the classroom, and show creative examples of teaching and learning. Go to this unit.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

America's History in the Making

A video course for middle and high school teachers; 16 half-hour video programs, faculty guide, online textbook, and Web site;

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

This course for middle and high school teachers uses video, online text, classroom activities, and Web-based activities to explore American history from the Pre-Columbian era through Reconstruction. The video programs are divided into three segments: Historical Perspectives, an overview of the historical era; Faces of America, in which biographies of individuals illustrate larger events; and Hands-on History, a behind-the-scenes look at how history is studied, documented, and presented. Additional units introduce methods to strengthen teachers' knowledge of American history, while reviewing content. The online text, facilitator guide, and Web site supplement the video content.

Produced by Oregon Public Broadcasting. 2007.

1. Pre-Columbian America
This six-hour workshop focuses first on the Historical Thinking Skills, as developed by the National Center for History in the Schools. The second portion of the session introduces Pre-Columbian societies in North America. (This unit includes a facilitator guide and short video clips which are available on DVD and on the course Web site.)

VOD2. Mapping Initial Encounters
Columbus's arrival launched an era of initial encounters between Europeans, Native Americans, and Africans that continued for nearly 300 years. This unit examines how these contacts began the phenomenon now known as the Columbian Exchange, profoundly altering the way of life of peoples around the globe. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

VOD3. Colonial Designs
As encounter changed to settlement, relations between Native Americans and European colonial powers became more complex. This unit charts the changing interactions between competing European powers and Native Americans, and the increasing reliance on the race-based enslavement of Africans. Go to this unit.

VOD4. Revolutionary Perspectives
In the eighteenth century, Enlightenment ideas of freedom and equality swept through the British colonies. This unit traces the effects of those ideas and the impact on diverse groups such as British Loyalists, Revolutionary leaders, Native Americans, yeoman farmers, and enslaved blacks. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

5. Classroom Applications 1 (Print Only Unit)
This unit steps out of historical content to focus on the pedagogy of assessment techniques, revisiting the Historical Thinking Skills introduced in Unit 1. Beginning with self-assessment of previous unit activities, teachers will develop a student assignment based on content learned to date. (This unit includes a facilitator guide only.)

VOD6. The New Nation
Following the War of Independence, Americans disagreed — often passionately — about the form and function of the federal government. This unit explores how those conflicts played out as the new republic defined its identity in relation to other nations. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

VOD7. Contested Territories
The United States acquired vast territories between the time of the Revolution and the Civil War, paying a price economically, socially, and politically. This unit examines the forces that drove such rapid expansion, the settlers moving into these regions, and the impact on the Native Americans already there. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

VOD8. Antebellum Reform
As a response to increasing social ills, the nineteenth century generated reform movements: temperance, abolition, school and prison reform, as well as others. This unit traces the emergence of reform movements instigated by the Second Great Awakening and the impact these movements had on American culture. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

VOD9. A Nation Divided
Although the Civil War is viewed today through the lens of the Union's ultimate victory, for much of the war, that victory was far from certain. By examining the lives of the common soldier, as well as civilians, this unit examines the uncertainty and horrible destruction in the war between the states. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

VOD10. Reconstructing a Nation
Emancipation was only the beginning of a long road to freedom for those released from slavery. Following the Civil War, an immense economic and political effort was undertaken, focused on reunifying the divided nation. This unit examines the successes and failures of Reconstruction. (This unit includes a facilitator guide, video, and online text chapter.) Go to this unit.

11. Classroom Applications 2 (Print Only Unit)
This unit provides an opportunity for teachers to generate student assignments for use in their classrooms. Building on techniques learned in Unit 5 for teaching Historical Thinking Skills, it also reviews content from the final two interactives and Units 6 through 10. (This unit includes a facilitator guide only.)

12. Using Digital Technologies
This workshop unit introduces procedures to develop or improve Internet research skills, as well as related copyright laws so teachers can effectively use and teach with historical primary sources. The unit also demonstrates strategies for finding, and using a wide variety of high-quality Web sites, videos, DVDs, and historical documents. It includes templates for classroom lesson plans developed by the National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS).

VOD13. Taming the American West
Western settlers' assumptions of an endless, bountiful frontier were tested when they moved to the Great Plains and attempted to cultivate the unfamiliar, arid landscape. This experience led to the rise of populist politics, which championed farmers' and industrial workers' critique of political and economic powers. Go to this unit.

VOD14. Industrializing America
From factories in San Francisco to sweatshops in New York, productivity flourished — fed by waves of immigrants from Asia and Europe. This unit explores how growing urbanism contributed to changing social norms, from the working classes to the elite. Go to this unit.

VOD15. The Progressives
Overburdened cities led Progressives to agitate for reforms on political, economic, and social fronts. While most Americans agreed that government intervention was needed to address large-scale problems such as child labor or food contamination, there was little agreement on proper solutions. Go to this unit.

VOD16. A Growing Global Power
Fueled by patriotism, capitalism, and religion, the U.S. extended its reach beyond national borders. New partnerships between government and big business drove an evolving diplomacy that would set the tone for American foreign policy in the twentieth century. Go to this unit.

17. Classroom Applications 3 (Print Only Unit)
The thematic strands and historical eras from Units 13, 14, 15, and 16 are re-examined. This unit helps teachers develop a series of lesson plans that use primary sources and historical thinking skills, covering the content learned in previous units. Exemplary lesson plans from The National Center for History in the Schools (NCHS) are used as touchstone models.

VOD18. By the People, For the People
Plummeting agricultural exports, the stock market crash, and environmental disaster all led to an unprecedented economic depression. Subsequently, a new relationship between individuals and the government arose, with a strong communitarian spirit drawing the nation together before World War II. Go to this unit.

VOD19. Postwar Tension and Triumph
This unit examines the tensions of the Cold War era, reflected in divergent dichotomies: a growing suburban, white, middle-class and increasingly ghettoized blacks and Latinos; a faith in scientific progress contrasted with a fear of the bomb; and an idealization of individualism tempered by an anti-Communist call for conformity. Individuals and groups raised their expectations for equality as veterans returned from the global conflict of World War II. Go to this unit.

VOD20. Egalitarian America
Brown v. The Board of Education was one of the significant results of Americans demanding political, social, and economic equality. This call for parity in all walks of life was symptomatic of a growing social and political liberalism, which was fueled by the growing presence of mass media. Go to this unit.

VOD21. Global America
As the turn of the century approached, the pendulum of American politics and social structures began to swing back toward conservativism. With immigration from Asia and the Americas on the rise, the face of America changed rapidly. This unit examines the competing forces of ethnic and American identity in a world dominated by globalization and one remaining "superpower." Go to this unit.

22. Classroom Applications 4 (Print Only Unit)
The thematic strands and historical eras from Units 18, 19, 20, and 21 are re-examined. Participants develop lesson plans using primary sources, historical thinking skills, and content learned in previous units. The emphasis of this unit is on the use of digital primary sources, writing biographical accounts, and planning for student-written biographies.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

The Economics Classroom: A Workshop for Grade 9-12 Teachers

A video workshop for high school teachers; 8 one-hour video programs, workshop guide, and Web site; graduate credit available

Link: https://www.learner.org/resources/ser...

This video workshop for teachers provides a solid foundation for teaching the concepts covered in high school economics courses. Topics range from personal finance to global economic theories. In addition to defining economics concepts and outlining modern economic theory, the programs review the national standards for economics education and provide effective lesson plans and classroom strategies. The video programs also feature unscripted footage of diverse economics classrooms, interspersed with reflections by teachers and students. The accompanying print guide and Web site provide a complete package for the professional development of high school economics and social studies teachers.

Produced by Pacific Street Films, Inc. 2002.

Closed Caption ISBN: 1-57680-493-3

8 Videos:

Workshop 1. How Economists Think
This session introduces the workshop with an economist's perspective on everyday transactions. In this session, you will explore the four cornerstones of economic thought: everything has a cost, tradeoffs are necessary, incentives matter, and voluntary trade creates value. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 2. Why Markets Work
This session employs market simulations and exercises to illustrate key concepts of the market — the foundation of economic activity. Special emphasis is given to the interplay of supply and demand. See how supply and demand affect prices, and how prices can work as incentives — positive and negative — for consumers and producers. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 3. The Government's Hand
This session explores the intervention of the government in the free market, with price ceilings (such as rent control), price floors (minimum wage), or social welfare programs. When the government's hand produces surprising or unintended outcomes, economists need to consider the incentives offered, how others will react, and what the inevitable tradeoffs will be. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 4. Learning, Earning, and Saving
Learn basic personal finance and arm students with sound, practical advice to formulate and reach their own financial goals. This session reveals the truth about millionaires, the power of compound interest, and how investment in education pays off. A stock market simulation illustrates investment concepts. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 5. Trading Globally
Explore the global economy — why and how nations trade with one another. Meet some of the major players in the international market and find out how protectionism can have unintended consequences. Topics include where goods come from, absolute and comparative advantage, economies of scale, and international trade organizations and alliances. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 6. The Building Blocks of Macroeconomics
Macroeconomics looks at the economy as a whole, including inflation, recession, unemployment, economic growth, and gross domestic product (GDP). In this session, lectures, simulations, and exercises help explain these great forces and show how they fluctuate. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 7. Monetary and Fiscal Policy
Learn how the government controls demand with fiscal policy - affecting tax and spending - and monetary policy - involving the Federal Reserve, interest rates, and the banking system. See how these policy tools are developed and how they work in practice. Go to this unit.

VODWorkshop 8. Growth and Entrepreneurship
This session explores how innovation and entrepreneurship can flourish in and enliven a free-market economy. See why the good old days weren't all that good, what entrepreneurs do, and what makes countries richer over time. Discover the tradeoff for innovation. Go to this unit.

Source: Annenberg Foundation

More focused on Democracy in America:

Link: https://www.learner.org/courses/democ...

Source: Annenberg Foundation

Representative Democracy in America

Link: http://www.civiced.org/programs/rda

Source: Center for Civic Education

Howard Zinn on Democracy in America

What we have is not democracy, Zinn says. We just have formal institutions.

Link: http://bigthink.com/videos/howard-zin...

Part One -

What's Happening to American Democracy?
PEOPLE AND POWER
25:02Mar 23, 2016
We investigate how the erosion of democracy in the US is being revealed by the 2016 presidential campaign.

Note: Interesting Viewpoints - these are some them - considering we are looking back in time - before the actual election - interesting that the men (Sanders and Trump ) were focused on and Clinton was a side note (voters not looking to party establishment was the reason given) - the appeal of anti-establishment candidates - points to deep division between the electorate over social and demographic change - a war is being fought over a new emerging majority - it is polarizing America and weakening its democratic institutions. There is a cultural war - a battle over American and cultural values - driven by the counter revolution of the Republican party against this new majority. America is changing - dramatically changing. Racial minorities, unmarried women (interesting classification - I had to ask myself why is that a special category (lol), millennials, secular people with no religion - in the 2016 election they will be 63%. The Bush Gore situation started this polarization with Karl Rove making the evangelicals think that it was Armageddon if Bush did not win and things started to get ugly. Voting Rights Act - 1965 - But since 2010 - 21 Republican controlled states passed new voting laws. Supreme Court diluted voting rights act in 2013. American democracy has taken a huge step backwards in recent years.

Link One: http://video.aljazeera.com/channels/e...

Part Two -

Voters' Rights: What's Happening to American Democracy? - People and Power
PEOPLE AND POWER
25:03Apr 5, 2016
Part two of our investigation into the erosion of US democracy and how it is revealed in the 2016 presidential campaign.

Link Two: http://video.aljazeera.com/channels/e...

Source: Al Jazeera

More:

by Stanley B. Greenberg (no photo)

by Ari Berman

Bentley wrote: "Howard Zinn on Democracy in America

What we have is not democracy, Zinn says. We just have formal institutions.

Link: http://bigthink.com/videos/howard-zin..."

The amount of money spent on elections seems insane. I read Game Change. Sigh.

by

I know Adelle - if you have time watch the Al Jazeera videos (message 36). That discusses the numbers too. Mind boggling. They did a good job on it. There were some things that showed their specific frame of reference but it was easy to pick up on those and dismiss that as a specific bias although you are able to decipher the points being made and always have the ability to decide the points for yourself. Overall they did a good job.

This is a very interesting article:

What Would Tocqueville Think of Trump?
by John D. Wilsey

Tocqueville wrote in Volume 1, chapter 17 the following - “I am convinced that the most advantageous situation and the best possible laws cannot maintain a constitution in spite of the manners of a country; whilst the latter may turn to some advantage the most unfavorable positions and the worst laws. The importance of manners is a common truth to which study and experience incessantly direct our attention. It may be regarded as a central point in the range of observation, and the common termination of all my inquiries. So seriously do I insist upon this head, that, if I have hitherto failed in making the reader feel the important influence of the practical experience, the habits, the opinions, in short, of the manners of the Americans, upon the maintenance of their institutions, I have failed in the principal object of my work.”

So wrote Alexis de Tocqueville in volume I, chapter 17 of his classic work on American political and social institutions, Democracy in America. Tocqueville, a French lawyer and member of the aristocracy, came to the United States in the spring of 1831. He traveled around Jacksonian America for nine months, and returned to France in the winter of 1832. In 1835, he published the first volume of Democracy, which was received with enormous enthusiasm in both France and England. He published the second volume in 1840. The book continues to be one of the most far-reaching analyses of American culture ever written".

Tocqueville was convinced that the underlying reason for the success of democracy in America was the “manners” of the people. By manners, Tocqueville meant the value-assumptions of the Americans, their overall “character of mind.” He went on to say that manners referred to “the whole moral and intellectual condition of a people.”

In his statement above, Tocqueville said that American manners form the foundation for the success of the American experiment in democracy. This is striking for a couple of reasons. First, when Tocqueville used the term “democracy,” he had in mind much more than simply government by the people. He had a much more expansive definition of democracy—he equated democracy with equality of condition, the fact of the absence of feudal hierarchical social structures which had broad social and political ramifications.

Second, Tocqueville did not think that democracy was an unmitigated good. Rather, he assumed that democracy tended toward the tyranny of the majority. Equality of condition in a society would gravitate toward excessive individualism among the populace. This individualism would thus result in the people turning inward, away from civic duty and toward their private interests. As a result, the people would become civically lazy. They would lose interest in engagement with local affairs, become satisfied with nationalization of politics and the centralization of rule. They thus would learn to love only themselves, and cease to love each other. What kept democratic despotism in check was the uniquely American habit of voluntarily associating together in local bodies such as reform organizations, civic societies, and most of all, churches. This cultural and political habit—or manner—of localism thus was fundamental to the protection of liberty.

What influenced the manners of the Americans? In a word, religion. Tocqueville observed that Christian morals pervaded American society, and the Christian religion shaped and formed American manners. He said, “In the United States, religion exercises but little influence upon the laws, and upon the details of public opinion; but it directs the manners of the community, and, by regulating domestic life, it regulates the state.” Furthermore, Tocqueville observed that the Americans themselves believed religion to be indispensable to their republic.

So, more than geography, more than laws, more than anything else, manners—informed by religion—were the basis for American greatness and the only means of preserving freedom, according to Tocqueville.

Lest we rely on an idyllic picture of antebellum America, we should remember that Charles Dickens made his famous visit to America just ten years after Tocqueville. He was not impressed. He famously wrote to his friend William Macready in 1842 that “this is not the Republic of my imagination” and “I would not condemn you to a year’s residence on this side of the Atlantic, for any money.” He was also disgusted by how Americans sought to profit off of his visit to America, and described being nauseated by their tobacco spitting. He called Washington “the headquarters of tobacco-tinctured saliva.” Tocqueville was also realistic about Americans, noting that they were more obsessed with money-making than any society he had encountered. The quotable Tocqueville—that is, the usable Tocqueville—is celebratory of America, but a careful reading of Tocqueville alongside other contemporary accounts yields a more complex picture.

Trump as Case Study

Still, if Tocqueville was right about manners and their significance to American democratic institutions—and full disclosure, I believe that he is—then we are surely living in interesting times. The phenomenon of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump becomes an interesting case study in Tocqueville’s writings about manners. It is hard to be neutral about Trump. Ezra Klein recently expressed what many worried Republicans are thinking; namely, Trump is fun, but are we really prepared to have him represent the United States to the world? And what attracts voters to Trump? Seventy-eight percent of Republican primary voters in South Carolina liked him because he “tells it like it is.”

And how does he do that? He insults. He uses profanity. He bombasts. If you’re really interested, the New York Times has collected a catalog of Trump insults on the 2016 presidential campaign trail. (Spare yourself. If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all.) This kind of behavior reveals what he thinks about human dignity. Forget about his pro-choice stances, if you can. Forget about his racism, sexism, and anti-immigrant policy positions, if you must. Just note what comes out of his mouth.

Trump’s statements shock many. I hear a lot of my Christian friends express their befuddlement, asking things like “Who is supporting him?” and “I don’t know anyone who backs him.” Clearly, a lot of people are. And instead of being shocked by Trump and his buffoonery, we should be shocked at ourselves.

After all, Trump is not an anomaly. He is a reflection of American culture. He is the image of the coarseness and incivility in American culture that has grown more and more pronounced until today, when it is acceptable for a major presidential candidate to refer to one of his opponents by means of vulgarity. He ought to have his mouth washed out with soap. (That was my grandmother’s form of waterboarding.)

When we see Trump, we see ourselves. Trump is a credible candidate today, and he would not have been credible in the past. Trump has always been a boor, but American manners have not always been boorish enough for Trump to find a place in public discourse. Now they are. We have no one to blame but ourselves, we who have become narcissistic, uncivil, civically lazy, obdurate, gullible, uncouth, easily offended, and in the prophet Jeremiah’s words, we are so implacable, we do “not know how to blush.”

One of the insidious realities surrounding Trump’s rise is how many Christians have latched onto him. To be fair, Christians are split in their support of Trump. But many Christians continue to flock to him. In South Carolina, thirty-four per cent of Trump’s voters were born-again evangelicals, and thirty-one percent said that it was important that the candidate shares their religious values. Jerry Falwell, Jr. of Liberty University and Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Church of Dallas have publicly endorsed him. Franklin Graham has come short of a full-throated endorsement, but has spoken favorably of him. Mr. Graham has been especially supportive of Trump’s idea of banning Muslim immigration to the United States, ironically as a part of his “campaign for God.”

What does the rise of Trump say about the state of American Christianity? This subculture is sometimes hardly distinguishable from the coarse American society in general. Over the past few generations, text-based authority has been replaced, in large measure, by subjective authority. Individual constructs of pragmatics, feelings, preferences, and sensibilities have taken the central place of authority that the Bible had in other periods of history (prior to the introduction of existentialism and Protestant liberalism in the early 20th century). When textual and orthodox tradition is neglected and replaced by self-actualization as religious authority, then religious culture coarsens. And if Tocqueville was right about the influence of religion on manners, then the coarsening occurring in religious culture has had, and continues to have, a direct effect on the coarsening of culture in general.

Tocqueville’s Solution?

Today’s cultural decay is a complicated problem, to be sure. But if Tocqueville is any guide, there is wisdom in two more observations he made in Democracy in America.

First, Tocqueville noted that Americans were not especially virtuous, but they did have an abiding self-interest, and they recognized that their interests were promoted by the public interest. In other words, the best way to achieve private goods was to guard the interests of the whole. Tocqueville famously called this reality “interest rightly understood,” and posited that it prevents society from descending into moral chaos. It may not make all people in society virtuous, but it does raise those up who are particularly lacking in virtue: “I regard it as their chief remaining security against themselves.” Yet the principle of interest rightly understood does not come naturally to people. It must be taught, and again, religion has a role to play in the instilling of this principle.

Second, and most importantly, if society is to preserve liberty, it must be vigilant and determined to be proactive in doing so. For example, to exercise the principle of interest rightly understood, “daily small acts of self-denial” are required. Because egotism is the basic vice of the human heart, the selfie culture is the natural tendency in an equal society, and despots encourage egotism. Tocqueville said of the despot, that he “easily forgives his subjects for not loving him, provided they do not love each other.” And when they do not love each other, they will not seek to govern themselves but they will be satisfied to leave the responsibilities of government with the despot. This statement fits Trump, perhaps like no other statement from Tocqueville does.

Supporters of Trump are looking for the easy way out of what ails the country—an ailing military and economy, the failure of U.S. leadership in the world, illegal immigration, and the rising tide of secularism and the growth of the influence of those who profess no religious faith. They are looking for someone who can “make America great again” by “bombing…” ISIS, by getting rid of all illegal immigrants, by making sure that everybody says “Merry Christmas” around December-time. And of course, Trump assures us that if he is elected president, “we’ll win so much, you’ll get bored of winning.” If we are to believe Trump, all we have to do is elect him, and all our problems will go away.

Continued:

Tocqueville wrote that despotism promises all the answers, but it can only deliver despotism: “despotism often promises to make amends for a thousand previous ills.” Under a despot, the “nation is lulled by the temporary prosperity which it produces, until it is roused to a sense of its misery.” But liberty, Tocqueville stressed, is the fruit of long-term commitment, determination, and labor. And contrary to despotism, of which fruits can be measured in the short term (i.e. “he keeps the trains running on time”), liberty can only be appreciated once its effects have taken time to develop. “Liberty… is generally established with difficulty in the midst of storms; it is perfected by civil discord; and its benefits cannot be appreciated until it is already old.”

Cultural decline is never an inevitability. And there is no such thing as a point of no return. The statement, “we live in a coarse society” may be a truism, something most of us know intuitively. But human beings have free will, and they have it within their power to reject indignity, incivility, and boorishness. To put it bluntly, it is not necessary to use vulgar words to describe our political foes. But it is necessary to refine our manners, at least if we aim to preserve our liberty.

Trumpus delendus est.

Source: The American Conservative (for those of you who have asked for the link: http://www.theamericanconservative.co...)

And from The Federalist - which is a division of fdrlst media

Tocqueville’s Insights Into Donald Trump’s Identity Politics

The lesson in Donald Trump’s failure and success is an old one: in politics, class does not come first in America. Race relations, particularly those defined long ago by race slavery, do.

Link to article:

http://thefederalist.com/2016/08/12/t...

What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election?

Feverish thoughts from a moment of “extreme peril.”
By Arthur GoldhammerSEPTEMBER 28, 2016

In 1831, the young French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville and his friend Gustave de Beaumont, both lawyers in their early 20s bored by their desk jobs at a courthouse in Versailles, traveled to the United States. They ostensibly came to study American prisons, but more importantly to see for themselves the great American experiment with democracy, which both intrigued and terrified them. After nine months in Jacksonian America, which saw the pair ranging from the drawing rooms of New York and Boston to the frontier outpost of Saginaw in the Michigan Territory, and from the pestilential swamps of Frenchified New Orleans to the still largely barren national capital on the banks of the Potomac, they returned home—Tocqueville to write a book that would become a classic, Democracy in America, Beaumont to publish his novel Marie, or Slavery in the United States.

“A presidential election in the United States may be looked upon as a time of national crisis,” Tocqueville wrote. “As the election draws near, intrigues intensify, and agitation increases and spreads. The citizens divide into several camps, each behind its candidate. A fever grips the entire nation. The election becomes the daily grist of the public papers, the subject of private conversations, the aim of all activity, the object of all thought, the sole interest of the moment.”

To be sure, for all his prescience, the French visitor could hardly have foreseen the unique “agitation” of the 2016 presidential election, although he was under no illusion that popular sovereignty posed any sort of bar to the election of the uncouth and uncultivated. After all, the voters of one congressional district had sent to the House of Representatives “a man with no education, who can barely read [and] lives in the woods.” (The man’s name was Davy Crockett.) Nor was Tocqueville unfamiliar with the pretensions of wealthy New Yorkers who resided in “marble palaces” that turned out, on closer inspection, to be made of “whitewashed brick” with “columns of painted wood.” Hence, neither the ersatz splendor of Trump Tower nor its principal inhabitant’s unfamiliarity with the US Constitution or the Russian occupation of Crimea would have surprised him, although Donald Trump’s nomination as the presidential candidate of a major political party would surely have shocked him even more than Crockett’s election to Congress. A democratic people might not always choose its leaders wisely, but the quality of its choices would surely improve, Tocqueville believed, as education was democratized and “enlightenment” spread. Perhaps he was too optimistic.

Remainder of article:

https://www.thenation.com/article/wha...

Source: The Nation

How Tocqueville Predicted The Rise of Trump by Andrew Doran



Several years ago, The Economist published an article about how China’s leaders were reading Alexis de Tocqueville’s Ancien Regime in earnest. China’s elites, keen to remain in power despite the significant disparities between those ruling and those ruled, were closely studying eighteenth-century France in order to avoid the fate of France’s ruling class. (Whether the study of Tocqueville will help remains to be seen.)

Here is the link to the Economist article: http://www.economist.com/news/china/2...

The fact that China’s rulers, 160 years after the publication of Ancien Regime, are more interested in studying his opus on the French Revolution than Americans are would undoubtedly baffle Tocqueville. What would not baffle him is the wrath of the abandoned American commoner. The populist wave that has swept the nation is without parallel in American history. Represented principally, though not exclusively, by Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, it features complex, interwoven elements of progressive, liberal, nativist, reactionary, and classical liberal thought. It also features complex economic and foreign policy dimensions. It is, in essence, a thorough rejection of the established order. Thus can Daniel McCarthy of The American Conservative cast a vote for a socialist in the interests of “peace and gridlock,” while Susan Sarandon ponders support for Trump in the general election if Sanders is not the Democrat nominee. There is polling evidence that some supporters of either Trump or Sanders might cross party and ideological lines to support the other anti-establishment candidate in a general election. This suggests a deep lack of confidence in America’s governing institutions. Contempt for the public culture, Wall Street, and the media is palpable as well.

As Trump emerges the presumptive Republican nominee and Sanders continues to win primaries, the moment seems to be lost on many D.C. insiders. In Washington, one gets the sense of complete detachment from the angry nonelite mobs—left, right, and center. It may well be similar to the experience one might have had visiting Versailles on the verge of Revolution in France, the sense of detachment from the rest of the nation’s daily reality. This is what it looks like when the interests of ruling class and ruled diverge.

Tocqueville noted that the medieval order was sustainable so long as the lives and interests of noble and peasant were bound together. “The nobles possessed annoying privileges, enjoyed rights that people found irksome but they safeguarded the public order, dispensed justice, had the law upheld, came to the help of the weak and directed public business,” Tocqueville observed. “As the nobility ceased to conduct these affairs, the weight of its privileges seemed more burdensome and its very existence was, in the end, no longer understandable.”

The Bourbon kings, suspicious of nobility, gathered them all in Versailles where they could be monitored and distracted or deterred from plotting against the crown. Pierre Royer-Collard, in a famous 1822 lecture (at which Tocqueville, then a student, was almost certainly present), identified the rupture that took place before the revolution, and was a necessary ingredient: “the atomization of society,” by which he meant the destruction of the medieval order in which ruler and ruled were bound up together by bonds of mutual service. The nobility was gradually supplanted by the intendant, ignoble bourgeois bureaucrats, making the French, in Royer-Collard’s words, “an administered people.” Tocqueville understood well the duties that the nobles owed to the people and that their abandonment of their duties for the allure of the decadent court life of Versailles was a betrayal. He also noted the great irony of the Revolution in France—that it was only in Anjou, where the nobles had refused to abandon their duties for the opulence of Versailles, that nobles and people rose up together to protect the monarchy. Here were the last vestiges of the old order, of medieval France—and as far as the peasants were concerned, it was worth preserving.

Nearly a century later, Hannah Arendt turned to Tocqueville in her Origins of Totalitarianism. While Arendt acknowledged that her analogy ultimately limped (it has been the subject of much scrutiny since), her summary of the diverging interests of French nobility and commoner merits rereading today:

“According to Tocqueville, the French people hated aristocrats about to lose their power more than it had ever hated them before, precisely because their rapid loss of real power was not accompanied by any considerable decline in their fortunes. As long as the aristocracy held vast powers of jurisdiction, they were not only tolerated but respected. When noblemen lost their privileges, among others the privilege to exploit and oppress, the people felt them to be parasites, without any real function in the rule of the country. In other words, neither oppression nor exploitation as such is ever the main cause for resentment; wealth without visible function is much more intolerable because nobody can understand why it should be tolerated.” Arendt continued -

Remainder of article:

http://nationalinterest.org/blog/the-...

Source: The National Interest

Books Cited:

(no image) Ancien Regime, The by Tocqueville

by Hannah Arendt

Democracy in Dark Times?

by Jeremy Shere

We tend to take for granted the things we hold most dear—friends, family, health. And likewise, we tend to ignore the larger institutions that shape our lives, foremost among them our American democracy. Yet given the sweeping aftershocks of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, analyzing the present and future of democracy in America has never been more crucial. How has the democratic ideal fared since 9/11, and what does its present state bode for our future?

As a topic, “the future of American democracy” generates innumerable scholarly works. For Indiana University Bloomington political science professors Aurelian Craiutu and Jeff Isaac, however, the issue resonates beyond academic interest. While intensely devoted to the scholarly study of democracy as a concept, Craiutu and Isaac are equally concerned about democracy’s effectiveness as a real-life system influencing the fate of nations, populations, and individuals. In short, they study democracy as a living entity affecting us all.

Seeking the Future in the Past

The drawing hanging on the wall behind Aurelian Craiutu’s desk is frightening. Framed in black, a dark serpent, forked tongue unleashed, sits coiled atop a leering face. What does it mean? Is Craiutu—a bespectacled, Romanian-born professor in his late 30s sitting at the desk strewn with papers—a closet revolutionary? Is there a hint of menace in his well-groomed goatee?

“Ah, no,” Craiutu says with a laugh, “it has no relation to my work. It’s not political.” The drawing, titled Inspiration, is by one of his favorite Romanian artists, Marcel Chirnoaga. “I was seduced by the movement in the picture,” he says.

But the arresting work does provide a striking contrast to Craiutu’s animated and thoughtful fervor for his main intellectual interest: the writings of the eminent French political thinker Alexis de Tocqueville and his 19th-century contemporaries.

“Unlike many contemporary historians and political scientists, Tocqueville was both an incredibly astute observer of American life and politics and a brilliant analyst able to draw large philosophical conclusions from his fieldwork,” Craiutu says.

Remainder of article:
http://www.indiana.edu/~rcapub/v28n1/...

Source: Indiana University

by Aurelian Craiutu (no photo)

by Jeffrey C. Isaac (no photo)

Alexis de Tocqueville's Relevance Today
Over a year ago by PETER LAWLER



Most of you won't believe this, but I've actually gotten several requests to say more about Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, rightly called the best book ever written on America and on democracy. This two-volume study, written by a French aristocrat on the basis of his journey to our country, has the strange feature of being much more true today than when it was written. So here's more on Tocqueville and INDIVIDUALISM--a big downside of being democratic. I'll save the many upsides for another post.

Tocqueville called the effect of democracy on the heart individualism—by which he meant apathetic withdrawal from larger communities into a narrow circle of friends and family.

Democracy--or devotion to the equal significance of everyone--undermines the particular attachments that hold together family members, members of a particular class, citizens, and even creatures.

We democrats believe that love sucks, because it turns us into suckers. Our intention, to enhance our safety and secure our rights, is to have all our connections with other persons be governed by calculation and consent. Otherwise, we’ll surrender to their rule of others, be subject to their control. The American democrat brags, with his moral doctrine of self-interest rightly understood, that he is so emotionally free that he never allows his heart to trump his mind or clear calculation about his interests. Have you noticed that Americans think and talk like such libertarians more than ever these days?

We democrats resist losing ourselves or thinking of ourselves of parts of personal wholes—of families, friendships, countries, personal religions, and so forth. And we certainly, in the name of freedom and equality, refuse to submit to personal authority—to politicians, priests, poets, philosophers, professors, and so forth. For us, there's no difference between authority and authoritarianism.

The danger, Tocqueville thought, was that our personal isolation would make us too anxious and lonely. Our assertion of freedom is based on the good news that no one is better than ME. But the corresponding bad news is that I’m no better than anyone else. So I have no point of view that trumps the pressures from the huge impersonal forces that surround me.

In my flight from personal authority I end up submitting to impersonal forces—to public opinion (which comes from no one in particular), to popular science (promulgated by people who begin sentences not with “I think” but “studies show”), to technology, and to History. There’s no denying, as Tocqueville says, that impersonal forces explain more and more—and personal choice less and less—about what happens in democratic times. Have you noticed that--despite all that talk about being creative--people are more conformist and fashion-conscious than ever these days? And I can't count the number of experts who've noticed that, increasingly, technology owns us, and not the other way around. Pop scientific experts, of course, have become our self-help gurus (many of them showing up, of course, on BIG THINK)--replacing, for example, the wisdom of our elders and men of the cloth.

Apathetic withdrawal leads to self-surrender. The culmination of self-surrender, Tocqueville feared, would be schoolmarmish, soft administrative despotism, to a providential authority that would take the burden of our personal futures—of being beings totally on our own in a hostile environment—off our hands. So insofar as we can say that being human is all about being personally responsible for one’s own destiny, the culmination of individualism is a kind of lapse into apathetic subhumanity. Surely you have to admit that the various features of the "nanny state" are most attractive to the most isolated or lonely Americans--single parents, old folks cut off from their families, the competely dispossessed poor, and so forth.

For me, good news is that Tocqueville underestimated how radically individualistic apathetic withdrawal would be. And so he didn’t understand that individualism would make soft despotism unsustainable over the long term. The future of human liberty is not as threatened by democratic excesses as he sometimes feared.

Tocqueville thought that the self-centered individual would lose all concern with past and future. But he didn’t think he would actually stop thinking of himself as a being to be replaced. The American man he described is very unerotic and not much of a family guy, but he still manages to have a wife and kids. Their constant presence in his little house manages to arouse some real love in him. Tocqueville assumed that we’d remain social enough to be parents and children. His worry was the disappearance of active citizens, not the disappearance of children.

But maybe the biggest issue concerning the sustainability of liberal democracies today has to with people becoming so emotionally withdrawn or so self-centered that they quite consciously refuse to think of themselves as beings to be replaced. As Tocqueville would have appreciated, demographic sustainability is not THAT big an issue in our country yet because of the social, Darwinian behavior of our observant (and often Darwin-denying) religious believers. But in most places in the West (and Japan etc.) we can see that people, on average, are living longer and longer and having fewer and fewer children. There's a birth dearth; people aren't being replaced in adequate numbers, and society is aging in a rather depressing way (if you think about it).

From an individual point of view, what we have here is good news. It’s good to live a long time: At the turn of the 20th century, the average American lived until about 49, now that number is about 80. We have a new birth of freedom in a post-reproductive and for women pos-tmenopausal generation that evolutionary theorists have a hard time explaining. And of course for individuals it’s good that various contraceptive inventions have made us so pro-choice when it comes to being tied down by children. But what’s good for the individual might be bad for the species or bad for the country or too not according to nature. Let’s face it, safe sex–or bourgeois sex–just can’t be all that erotic, and we envy the other, more natural species who don’t know about it.

Our democracy, as Tocqueville predicted, is suffering from "heart disease," and its future is in doubt. But the future of human liberty not so much. We can see that the road to serfdom can't make it serfdom without fewer expensive and unproductive old people and many more very productive young people than we're likely to have. Individuals, in many ways, are more on their own than ever, and they know there's no government cure for either their moral or economic anxiety.

Source: Big Think

What Tocqueville Would Say Today
by Harvey C. Mansfield, Delba Winthrop
Saturday, June 30, 2001 - quite a few years ago but still interesting

Russell Baker once said that in our time people cite Tocqueville without reading him even more than they do the Bible and Shakespeare. Every American president since Eisenhower has quoted him, no doubt without reading him, and some of our professors, to say nothing of lesser citizens, have picked up their habit of fishing for what they like and throwing back the rest in Tocqueville’s great work Democracy in America.

It’s no mystery why everyone wants Tocqueville’s support: his work is both the best book on democracy and the best book on America—two subjects that for Americans, at least, are inseparable. We cannot fail to be interested in a book so renowned, but because of a certain laziness whose source is our partisanship, we fail to read it through or read it carefully, lest we come on something difficult to accept. The purpose here is not to invoke Tocqueville in a vain attempt to transcend partisanship, a possibility he rejected; but perhaps he can do something to raise the awareness of both liberals and conservatives and get them to see that their own party, not just the other party, has questions it needs to face.



Remainder of article:
http://www.hoover.org/research/what-t...

Source: The Hoover Institute

Current article:

TOCQUEVILLE SKEWERED HIS CONTEMPORARIES WITH A SHARP PEN by Matt Kelly - January 5, 2017



UVA Commonwealth Professor of History Olivier Zunz has edited and written the introduction to a new translation of Tocqueville’s “Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath.” (Photo by Dan Addison, University Communications)

Alexis de Tocqueville, the French writer, political theorist and politician, has helped Americans see themselves since 1835.

Tocqueville, most famous in the United States for his two-volume tome, “Democracy in America,” had an extensive career in France – one that is coming more to light in the United States through a new translation of “Recollections: The French Revolution of 1848 and its Aftermath,” published this fall by the University of Virginia Press. The work was translated by Arthur Goldhammer and edited by UVA Commonwealth Professor of History Olivier Zunz, who also wrote the introduction.

“Recollections” is a personal reflection Tocqueville, who died in 1859, did not intend for publication in his lifetime. An expurgated version was published in 1893, and it was only in 1942 that a complete text was made available. It contained “uncompromising judgments” and “unforgettable portraits,” in the words of its editor. “In ‘Recollections’ everybody, regardless of political persuasion, is named and undressed at every turn,” Zunz wrote in the introduction.

Tocqueville, who saw socialism as an obstacle to individual liberty, has enjoyed sustained popularity in the U.S. He came to the United States in 1831 with Gustave de Beaumont to investigate prison reform, and he and Beaumont talked with more than 200 people on politics, law and social practices in America. They traveled extensively around the country for nine months as Tocqueville gathered material, eventually leading to “Democracy in America.”

“Tocqueville was less read in the Depression years, when Marxism gained a foothold among intellectuals in the U.S., except by conservatives who fought the New Deal,” Zunz said. “In the Cold War, Tocqueville was prominent because U.S. civil society/volunteerism provided an alternative to state socialism in the dualistic world view. In the post-Cold War world, Tocqueville was all the rage.”

A politician himself, Tocqueville understood the rough-and-tumble of the game, much the same now as in his day.

“Tocqueville thought that politics was more important than political philosophy, although he was better suited for the latter,” Zunz said. “Tocqueville ran for re-election to the National Assembly in France’s first male universal suffrage contest after the Revolution of 1848. He campaigned on the stump in his native Normandy, only to describe the political battle: ‘All the petty vexations and calumnies and war of chamber pots that go with any election plunge me into dark ennui.’ How appropriate an image for what we just lived through.”

Tocqueville started writing “Recollections” in 1850 while at his family chateau in Normandy, recovering from his first bout with the pulmonary tuberculosis that would eventually kill him. While his health had always been frail, Tocqueville had reached the point where he had to request a leave of absence from the National Assembly. He started committing his memories to paper, lest they be lost.

“He had become ‘barely able to observe life as a spectator’ and was despondent about the future of his country – he was nearly certain that the Republic was about to collapse – as well as his own prospects,” Zunz wrote in the introduction.

While his time in the National Assembly had found him working on some important issues, such as prison reform, the abolition of slavery and the colonization of Algeria, he felt he had not advanced his “life’s passion” of political liberty. He was disgusted with his colleagues for fighting petty disputes over personal gains and for their lack of respect for civil liberties. He poured that into his writings.

“He is very trenchant and some of the portraits are very acid portraits,” Zunz said. “But it has some wonderful descriptions of political life and what it entails.”

“Recollections” is the third Tocqueville translation on which Zunz and Goldhammer have worked, the first being a new translation of “Democracy in America” for the Library of America in 2004 and then the massive “Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont in America: Their Friendship and Their Travels,” which was also published in 2011 by the University of Virginia Press.

The latter volume is “a complete report of the travel in the United States from 1831 and 1832,” Zunz said. “This is almost a complete transcription of Tocqueville’s travel notebooks and his letters home to family and friends, as well as Beaumont’s notes. Beaumont was Tocqueville’s travel companion, they were colleagues in the courthouse in Versailles, before they left. Tocqueville was only 25 years old at the time he visited America in 1831. He turned 26 on July 29, in the Michigan forest.”

Young Tocqueville came to explore this country following the revolution that deposed French King Charles X and created a monarchy under King Louis-Philippe.

“It was just after the revolution in France of 1830 and he wanted to have a break from it,” Zunz said. “He wasn’t sure if he could support the constitutional monarchy. He came from a family that had been completely decimated by the Revolutionary Terror of 1793-94. His great-grandfather, his grandparents, most of his uncles and aunts were guillotined.”

America, with its way of life and way of politics, made quite an impression on Tocqueville.

“In a democracy, Tocqueville argued, people found true greatness not in crowning achievements that benefited only a few [as in aristocratic societies], but in progress for most,” Zunz wrote in his introduction to “Democracy in America.” “In Alexis de Tocqueville’s own words, ‘Equality [read democracy] is less lofty perhaps, but more just, and its justice is the source of its grandeur and beauty.’”

The America that Tocqueville found was very different from the France in which he lived.

“He was discovering America from a monarchist’s background,” Zunz said of Tocqueville. “He was not supposed to like a republic or democracy, but he did. So to him it turns out to be very much a trip to figure out his own future. ‘What is a democracy like? What do they do over there?’ and he figured it out so well he helped Americans understand themselves.”

Zunz has had a long fascination with Tocqueville, in part because of their shared mission. Both are French and both try to understand America. Zunz, as a historian of America, has written “Philanthropy in America: A History,” “Why the American Century?” “Making America Corporate, 1870-1920,” and “The Changing Face of Inequality.” Zunz frequently cites Tocqueville, whom he regards as something of a lifelong companion.

“I began with Tocqueville when I was a graduate student,” Zunz said. “My mentor in France was a great historian of the French Revolution and a great Tocqueville scholar and he taught me about Tocqueville when I was young. And Tocqueville has been a companion, almost a friend, because his letters are so extraordinary. He is somebody who, in his writing, is sharing his doubts and his emotions with you.”

Zunz, along with the late Theodore Caplow, a UVA sociology professor, founded the Tocqueville Society, which publishes “The Tocqueville Review.”

“Initially the review was supposed to be about comparative social science and history, mostly France and America,” Zunz said. “I helped create it and became president of the Tocqueville Society, and as this little organization grew, it also became a forum for Tocqueville scholarship.”

Zunz said that most of Tocqueville’s work has been published in French – 32 volumes of observations, letters and profiles – and Zunz is now at work on a biography of Tocqueville, in an effort to capture the essence of the man.

“There is an American Tocqueville, who wrote ‘Democracy in America,’ the Tocqueville who helped Americans figure out who they were,” Zunz said. “There is a French Tocqueville, with a book on the French Revolution. The two discourses only partly overlap. And one of the tasks I want to do in writing his biography is to bridge them. I think I am in a unique position to do so.”

Zunz feels he knows Tocqueville and understands him.

“Tocqueville was not only a political philosopher or a historian or an intellectual – he was also a politician,” Zunz said. “To my mind, he is the person who embodies best the major shift from the aristocracy in the 18th century to modern democracy.”

Source: University of Virginia

In Defense of Moderation



Moderation has always been at the heart of the American political system, and is much more than the proverbial golden mean between the extremes.
AURELIAN CRAIUTU
01.14.17 11:58 AM ET

Last year’s presidential elections and the heated electoral campaign suggested that moderation is not a winning political tactic. To be sure, moderation did not get many people elected last November. But properly understood, moderation is actually a fighting virtue and winning card.

Interest in this old and elusive virtue has increased in the recent weeks, as we prepare for the inauguration of the new President. The title of a recent show on NPR in which I participated was “Moderation as Democracy’s Key in an Age of Extremes.”

In the New York Times and Washington Post, Peter Wehner and Jennifer Rubin spoke about moderation as a potentially effective strategy of opposing Trump and making Congress less dysfunctional.

I am not sure moderation is the key to solving all our problems in our age of increased polarization and ideological intransigence. But paraphrasing Albert Camus’s words, I do believe that our world still needs today “burning hearts, men who know the proper place of moderation.”

How so? We first need to address the prevalent skepticism toward moderation on both the left and the right.

The listeners of the NPR program were not shy at expressing their skepticism. Some questioned whether moderation is a virtue at all, while a few claimed that there is no real market today for moderation in our political system dominated by money, distrust, and greed.

Others argued that ours is a time for total opposition, radicalism, and mobilization instead of moderation. “I think I've figured out what annoys me about today's topic,” one listener wrote. “People don't organize based on ideas of moderation. On this view, “moderation now in the US would be called more accurately appeasement,” an endorsement for the status quo, or simply treason.

“To be moderate is to be a bystander,” another listener remarked. “What we are witnessing is a fatal moral crisis of our nation. We cannot normalize our current political climate by feigning moderation as a realistic tactic.” Finally, one (Christian) listener went all the way to claim that moderation is, in fact, the root of all our problems today. Period.

Moderation cannot possibly be at the same time the key to all our problems and their root as well. It is a notoriously slippery concept, with a long tradition behind it. So let’s define this often misinterpreted virtue to avoid further confusion.

Moderation is a complex, difficult, and eclectic virtue which has many faces and a distinguished tradition. The latter goes as far back as Aristotle and Plato and continues in the works of Montesquieu, James Madison, Edmund Burke, and Alexis de Tocqueville, to name only a few.

Moderation is much more than the proverbial golden mean between the extremes. It refers to several things: a certain character trait, a specific style of political action, and a unique set of institutional and constitutional arrangements. Behind all that, there is a unique political vision that may sometimes be difficult to grasp because it builds upon ideas and principles from all sides of the political spectrum. Yet, it is an original vision nonetheless.

What does it consist of? At its core lies a certain vision of the public good that seeks to promote more inclusion, toleration, fair competition, and fewer inequalities. As trimmers who seek to keep the ship of the state on an even keel, moderates display unhesitating loyalty to limited (and complex) government, freedom, and the rule of law. They eschew violence and favor incremental changes to improve their communities. Nonetheless, moderation should not be narrowly identified with the political center since those committed to this virtue can exist on all aisles of the political spectrum. Some moderates prefer to locate themselves in the center while others do not.

Political moderation has often been linked to the separation and balance of powers, executive veto, and bills of rights. That is why moderates promote social and political pluralism and work to promote balance between competing values, principles, ideas, and groups in society. But in so doing, they refuse to define one single best way, paying instead close attention to nuances and hybrid solutions. They think that gray, too, can be beautiful, as one of the heroes of my book, Adam Michnik, once memorably put it.

The moderates’s style of political action is best illustrated by their thinking politically rather than ideologically. Their opinions tend to be based on careful consideration of facts rather than on abstract moral imperatives. This way of addressing political issues is the opposite of ideological thinking, a closed system of thought based in eternal principles or infallible dogmas. As another great moderate (Raymond Aron) once said, “ in political affairs it is impossible to demonstrate truth, but one can try, on the basis of what one knows, to make sensible decisions.” The latter involve tough trade-offs and significant opportunity costs, and require constant small-scale adjustments and gradual steps. That is why moderates accept that we must learn how to cope with risks and unforeseeable consequences which simultaneously require pragmatic prudence and courage.

Another distinctive feature of the moderates’ style is their opposition to Manichaeism. Their world is not bipolar, black-and-white; it is a world made of many shades of gray (although perhaps not as many as fifty!). That is why moderates make a special effort to listen to all sides of the debate and keep the conversation open with their friends, critics, and opponents.

Their invitation to dialogue and their willingness to speak to their critics demonstrate their courage and determination not to look for “safe spaces” and lukewarm solutions.

Yet, moderation is not a virtue for everyone and for all seasons. A few decades ago, another moderate, Isaiah Berlin, confessed to Kay Graham, the editor of the Washington Post: “It obviously does not do to have a political position at all unless it is a god crude, simple thing, painted in bright colors.” He was right. It is difficult to act like a moderate because that implies a complex balancing act not unlike the art of walking along a thin wire or rope. It presupposes making constant judgments about how to balance different values and address the inevitable tensions of political life.

Moderation cannot then be a substitute for pragmatic partisanship for politics cannot function without strong contestation and deep disagreement. Moderation can however bring about the civility without which our system would be entirely dysfunctional. I think that John Adams was entirely right when writing that “without the great political virtues of humility, patience, and moderation … every man in power becomes a ravenous beast of prey.”

We should not forget that moderation has always been at the heart of the American political system. It may not offer a platform for effective mass mobilization, but being a moderate is not the same as being a bystander. Moderates like Abraham Lincoln in the U.S., Raymond Aron in France, and Adam Michnik in communist Poland put forward a bold agenda for resistance, civil discourse, and reform. Their examples demonstrate that moderation can offer a necessary compass to orient ourselves in the labyrinth of public and political life.

As such, moderation is, as Joseph Hall put it four centuries ago, “the silken string running through the pearl-chain of all virtues,” a cardinal virtue in the absence of which the normal functioning of political life would simply be unimaginable.

Aurelian Craiutu is Professor of Political Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the author of Faces of Moderation: The Art of Balance in an Age of Extremes (Penn Press, 2017).

by Aurelian Craiutu (no photo)

Source: The Daily Beast

Tracing Obama's beginning steps
The Times Staff Jan 10, 2017 by Tom Sistak


President Obama in Ottawa

Ottawa Mayor Robert Eschbach considers it an honor that he was able to introduce Barack Obama to more than 300 people for a gathering at the 807 Building in downtown Ottawa.

The presidency wasn't officially in sight yet for then-U.S. Sen. Obama at the May 5, 2005, event, but Eschbach was impressed with the politician's thoughts and eloquence.

Obama may have been impressed in his own right.

The mayor used an Alexis de Tocqueville quote to set the stage for Obama, who spoke in the town hall format. Eschbach cited: "Town meetings are to liberty what primary schools are to science; they bring it within the people's reach, they teach men how to use and how to enjoy it."

He said, 'Thank you, you're the first mayor to introduce me to de Tocqueville,' " Eschbach said Tuesday, recalling the event. "I can't say that I knew at the time (Obama) would go on to be president, but there was a feeling there was something special."

The rest of the story is well known.

Obama announced his bid for president of the United States. He defeated Republican candidates John McCain in 2008 and Mitt Romney in 2012.

Tuesday, Obama said farewell to the nation during a nationally televised speech in Chicago — the city and state where he had his political beginnings — after serving the maximum two terms.

Serving first as state senator, then as one of Illinois' U.S. senators, Obama's journey ventured through The Times readership area a number of times.

A Times photographer remembers Obama's first La Salle County appearance at Celebrations 150 in April 2004.

About 20 people showed up to hear the then-state senator speak.

Promoting his run for national Senate, Obama's speech came months before he grabbed a national spotlight at the Democratic National Convention.

In one of his first appearances after becoming a political star, Obama returned on a bus trip to the Illinois Valley — with his family and U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin in tow — making stops at Starved Rock State Park and the Granville Village Hall and treks to DePue and other towns.

In a story dated Aug. 2, 2004, reporter Dan Churney began his account of Obama's visit as follows:

"Before U.S. Senatorial candidate and state Sen. Barack Obama arrived Saturday morning in Ottawa, the sky was clouded over, but by the time he left, the heavens had parted to reveal a bright sun.

"Some might say that those skies reflect Obama's comet-like career — from dark obscurity to dazzling stardom in a few months."

Obama defeated Republican Alan Keyes and headed to Washington as the junior senator from Illinois.

He announced his bid for presidency in Springfield in February 2007. In October of that year, Obama made one final trip to La Salle County.

He spoke to a gathering of United Auto Workers union members at the UAW Hall in Ottawa, talking about free trade and protecting union rights.

It wasn't long before Obama would speak to hundreds of thousands of people in a presidential victory speech at Chicago's Grant Park, and then in front of thousands Tuesday at Chicago's McCormick Place.

But it started 20 people at a time, at gatherings similar to the one at Celebrations 150 in rural Utica. There were many of these gatherings across the state, and then the nation.

La Salle County was part of that historic journey.

Source: The Times

The following is not an article that I prescribe to its viewpoint and theme but in the interest of posting "other viewpoints" - I am posting this article since it quotes one of the most well known Tocqueville quotes. Although I do practice also my religion - I also do feel that America is good and already a great country. And I do not believe that President Obama has anything to do with an increasing trend in those who claim no religion at all whatever these polls might be. But here is the article. And remember the polls have been very wrong before.

The Biggest Trend During Obama’s Presidency

CHQ Staff | 1/13/17
Barack Obama campaigned for president on a platform of change. As his disastrous tenure comes to an end, there’s no denying America has changed, and that Americans aren’t happy with the changes that Obama forced upon a reluctant nation.

One of the most profound changes that has occurred is in America’s religious practices.

In “Democracy in America” Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville’s seminal work on American society, politics and culture published in 1835 the author observed, “Not until I went into the churches of America and heard her pulpits aflame with righteousness did I understand the secret of her genius and power. America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.”

However, according to the Pew Research Center, when it comes to the nation’s religious identity, the biggest trend during Obama’s presidency is the rise of those who claim no religion at all. Those who self-identify as atheists or agnostics, as well as those who say their religion is “nothing in particular,” now make up nearly a quarter of the U.S. adult population, up from 16% in 2007.

Christians, meanwhile, have fallen from 78% to 71% of the U.S. adult population, owing mainly to modest declines in the share of adults who identify with mainline Protestantism and Catholicism. The share of Americans identifying with evangelical Protestantism, historically black Protestant denominations and other smaller Christian groups, by contrast, have remained fairly stable.

Due largely to the growth of those who don’t identify with any religion, the shares of Americans who say they believe in God, consider religion to be very important in their lives, say they pray daily and say they attend religious services at least monthly have all ticked downward in recent years.

While the drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks and Latinos; among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education; and among women as well as men, according to Pew.

The major 2014 survey of more than 35,000 Americans by the Pew Research Center finds that the percentage of adults (ages 18 and older) who describe themselves as Christians has dropped by nearly eight percentage points in just seven years, from 78.4% in an equally massive Pew Research survey in 2007 to 70.6% in 2014.

Over the same period, the percentage of Americans who are religiously unaffiliated – describing themselves as atheist, agnostic or “nothing in particular” – jumped more than six points, from 16.1% to 22.8%. And the share of Americans who identify with non-Christian faiths also has inched up, rising 1.2 percentage points, from 4.7% in 2007 to 5.9% in 2014. Growth has been especially great among Muslims and Hindus, albeit from a very low base.

However, here’s another much more encouraging Obama-driven trend revealed in a recent Marist poll.

A new Marist Poll found that the majority of Americans — 89 percent — believe protecting religious freedom is an important undertaking, with 57 percent calling it an “immediate priority.”

While Republicans were the most likely (66 percent) to see the issue as one of immediate importance, the poll, which was commissioned by the Knights of Columbus, found that 55 percent of Democrats and 51 percent of Independents agreed.

By 12 percentage points, a majority of Americans (52 percent versus 40 percent) want the court to interpret the Constitution "as it was originally written" and not on what they think the "Constitution means now." Independents agree (50 percent to 42 percent), as do Republicans (78 percent to 18 percent). However, only three in 10 Democrats share this opinion (31 percent), and about six in 10 do not (59 percent).

By 40 points, the vast majority of Americans also believe religious freedom should be protected even when it conflicts with government laws (65 percent to 25 percent). Strong majorities of Republicans (74 percent), Independents (63 percent) and Democrats (60 percent) agree.

What’s our take on that surprising finding?

While the biggest trend during Obama’s presidency is the rise of those who claim no religion at all, and while Christianity and individual Christians have been under attack by Obama and his Far-Left progressive allies, making Christian religious practice a dangerous choice, we are encouraged that in the waning days of Obama’s presidency the vast majority of Americans reject the idea that government can supersede the tenets of one’s faith.

Source: Conservative HQ