America's Past, Present and Future through the lens of Self-Governance

Please take a moment to read this three part essay from THE FEDERALIST blog.

PART I - What the Founders meant by self-governance.

"Self-government is, at root, a culture of public responsibility among a citizenry; that is, a widely accepted norm that citizens can and should take a role in public decision-making.  People must believe that they have the right, duty, and ability to govern themselves.  If they stop believing these things, self-government is effectively dead even if the rituals are still observed."

PART II - What Madison meant by self-governance.

"The undermining of meritocracy is compounded by a cultural shift that Madison could not have foreseen. He assumed that there was a category of men who could be easily identified and recognized as “enlightened,” who exhibited “patriotism” and “love of justice.” But the collapse of public consensus over basic values and norms in the United States in the latter half of the 20th century means that no such category exists. Americans have no commonly-shared understanding of justice, no agreed-upon public philosophy aside from the very thinnest consensus on democratic procedure. Without a shared notion of justice, there is no shared criteria by which to judge a candidate as an enlightened lover of justice. One party’s enlightened statesman is the other party’s extremist. Even if the system was designed to reward merit–which it is not–Americans seem unable to agree on what constitutes merit."

PART III - How Tocqueville anticipated our culture of dependency.

"The effort to renew self-government is too broad and deep for any of these policy proposals to have much of a lasting impact.  The effort is fundamentally a cultural and spiritual one.  “Feelings and ideas are renewed, the heart enlarged, and the understanding developed only by the reciprocal action of men one upon another.”  Alexis de Tocqueville believed that the way to sustain and renew democratic civilization, was to encourage face-to-face human relationships.  It is trite and clichéd but true:  the first step in saving democracy in America is to go to school, get and stay married, spend time with your children, and go to church.  Investing in relationships with the people immediately around you—in your family, at work, in church, in your neighborhood—is the single most important thing you can do because those relationships will renew your ideas, develop your understanding, and enlarge your heart.  Relationships make you smarter, wiser, and more loving."