>While recognizing that the rise and fall of RWP movements reflect fluctuating social and economic circumstances, I want to suggest that recent developments are manifestations of something more fundamental. They reflect a basic structural weakness in American democracy, one that renders it ever more vulnerable to the threat of right wing populist alternatives. This weakness is that democratic governance in America (and elsewhere) has not been successful in creating the citizenry it requires. Thus it is left with citizens who lack the requisite cognitive and emotional capacities to assimilate its cultural definitions and norms, to function in its institutional organizations and to participate in its public sphere. The claim I make here about the nature of the citizens in modern democracies, particularly the American one, is not new. However a consideration of its structural underpinnings and implications is.
Earlier in the paper he described the characteristics of a citizen in a liberal democracy. It is very unlikely that they exist in any great number, and instead a liberal democracy operates by elites conditioning the thinking of the mass of citizens through education, media, and other means of swaying public opinion. Thus, liberal democracy is an oligarchic authoritarian regime that tries its best to not appear to be such. It current quandary is how to exert sufficient control without revealing its true nature.
>The structural weakness of democracy.
>While recognizing that the rise and fall of RWP movements reflect fluctuating social and economic circumstances, I want to suggest that recent developments are manifestations of something more fundamental. They reflect a basic structural weakness in American democracy, one that renders it ever more vulnerable to the threat of right wing populist alternatives. This weakness is that democratic governance in America (and elsewhere) has not been successful in creating the citizenry it requires. Thus it is left with citizens who lack the requisite cognitive and emotional capacities to assimilate its cultural definitions and norms, to function in its institutional organizations and to participate in its public sphere. The claim I make here about the nature of the citizens in modern democracies, particularly the American one, is not new. However a consideration of its structural underpinnings and implications is.
Earlier in the paper he described the characteristics of a citizen in a liberal democracy. It is very unlikely that they exist in any great number, and instead a liberal democracy operates by elites conditioning the thinking of the mass of citizens through education, media, and other means of swaying public opinion. Thus, liberal democracy is an oligarchic authoritarian regime that tries its best to not appear to be such. It current quandary is how to exert sufficient control without revealing its true nature.