Rival Visions of Equality in American Political Culture

1992 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-280 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard J. Ellis

This article distinguishes between a competitive individualist process-oriented vision of equality and an egalitarian results-oriented vision of equality, and examines the changing relationship between these visions of equality in the American past. What is “exceptional” about the United States is not, as is often claimed, that it lacked a tradition of equal results but that those who favored equalizing results believed that equal process was a sufficient condition for realizing equal results. This study contends that these rival visions of equality, once believed to be mutually supportive, have become increasingly divorced in 20th century America.

2013 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ricardo A. Herrera

Military service was the vehicle by which American soldiers from the War of Independence through the Civil War demonstrated and defined their beliefs about the nature of American republicanism and how they, as citizens and soldiers, were participants in the republican experiment. This military ethos of republicanism, an ideology that was both derivative and representative of the larger body of American political beliefs and culture, illustrates American soldiers’ faith in an inseparable connection between bearing arms on behalf of the United States and holding citizenship in it. Patterns of thought and behavior within the ethos were not exclusively military traits, but were characteristic of the larger patterns within American political culture.


Author(s):  
James A. Morone

This chapter examines the role of culture in American politics. It begins by asking, is there a distinctive American political culture? and exploring three answers: Yes, the traditional American culture (known as the American creed) is still going strong; no, the American creed has faded; and, finally, traditional accounts of American political culture were myths conconted by the powerful. It then discusses four major, overlapping cultural traditions: individualism/liberalism, community, the ascriptive tradition, and morality. The article argues that the United States had, and still has, a vibrant political culture, courtesy of generations of immigrants who bring new perspectives and marginal groups striving for legitimacy. As a result, the American political culture is a perpetual work in progress, constantly contested and continuously evolving.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 (36) ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Edward Cyril Lynch

 RESUMOTrata-se de uma introdução teórica ao pensamento político brasileiro, na forma didática de verbete, com a seguinte ementa: Política e cultura política brasileira - A cultura política europeia e seus grandes temas: autoridade, liberdade e igualdade. - A expansão colonial europeia e a conformação da cultura política periférica. - A cultura política iberoamericana e o tema do atraso. - A orientação modernizadora da cultura política brasileira. - A importação das instituições dos países cêntricos como indutor da modernização. - Os modelos cêntricos: Inglaterra, França e Estados Unidos. - A inefetividade institucional: a dicotomia país legal versus país real. - A percepção da defasagem entre instituições e realidade: três diagnósticos. - Primeiro diagnóstico: atraso do país legal em face do país real. - Segundo diagnóstico: inefetividade do país legal sobre o real. - Terceiro diagnóstico: adiantamento demasiado do país legal diante do real. - A frustração em torno da modernização institucional: o pedagogismo. - Reação à crise de legitimidade da política tradicional: as vanguardas modernizadoras. - As vanguardas burocráticas (1): o governante. - As vanguardas burocráticas (2): os militares. - As vanguardas burocráticas (3): a magistratura e o ministério público. - Ideologias políticas brasileiras. - Ideologias políticas (1): o nacional-estatismo. - Ideologias políticas (2). O liberalismo cosmopolita.ABSTRACTThis is a theoretical introduction to Brazilian political thought, in the didactic form of entry, with the following syllabus: Politics and Brazilian political culture. - European political culture and its major themes: authority, freedom and equality. - European colonial expansion and the configuration of peripheral political culture. - The Ibero-American political culture and the theme of backwardness. - The modernizing orientation of Brazilian political culture. – Importation of centric countries’s institutions as inductor of modernization. - The central models: England, France and the United States. - Institutional ineffectiveness: the legal country versus real country dichotomy. - The perception of the gap between institutions and reality: three diagnoses. - First diagnosis: delay of the legal country in relation to the real country. - Second diagnosis: ineffectiveness of the legal country over the real country. - Third diagnosis: excessive development of the legal country before the real country. - The frustration surrounding institutional modernization: pedagogism. - Reaction to the crisis of legitimacy of traditional politics: the modernizing vanguards. - The bureaucratic vanguards (1): the ruler. - The bureaucratic vanguards (2): the military. - The bureaucratic vanguards (3): the judiciary and public ministry. - Brazilian political ideologies. - Political ideologies (1): the national-statism. - Political ideologies (2). The cosmopolitan liberalism. 


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 392-419 ◽  
Author(s):  
GLENDA GOODMAN

AbstractThis article investigates Revolutionary-era American political culture through contrafacta of the British anthem “God Save the King.” Before, during, and after the Revolution the tune was frequently set with new lyrics that addressed political topics. The formats through which the song circulated (it was disseminated widely in manuscript and print), shaped the meaning and reception of these various contrafacta. Tracking “God Save the King” through the eighteenth century reveals how the United States remained connected to Britain, even when the lyrics—and the goals of the Revolution—repudiated that bond. Song versions also provide a musical map of the fragmenting political landscape of the early Republic. Ultimately, the diversity of the formats and the song versions reveal the ambivalent relationship between postcolonial United States and Britain, as well as the diversity of political culture within the United States.


2014 ◽  
Vol 66 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 249-264
Author(s):  
Miroljub Jevtic

A number of European countries, as well as the United States, Canada and Australia in the second half of the 20th century, received many immigrants from Hindu, Buddhist and Islamic region. This has created a specific situation which did not exist at the time of the formation of these states. At a time when those states were formed the vast majority of the population belong to the Christian political culture. As a result, secular constitutions were created. Because Christian theology can accept the secular principle of organization of the state .Immigrants have brought their cultural and political model. For example, an Islamic political model excludes secularism and demand theocracy. Thus, if the question of eventual transformation of the constitution is posed autochthon population and Muslims can not make a compromise, if each side insists on its model. This means that the multicultural constitution is impossible.


2015 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 127-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel LaChance ◽  
Paul Kaplan

Reality television in the United States has often been understood to reinforce the punitive and neoliberal turns American political culture took in the late twentieth century. But in this article, we examine how it can work to unsettle as well as naturalize punitive and neoliberal ideologies. We do so via a case study of To Catch a Predator, a reality-based television program documenting the detection, legal apprehension, and extralegal punishment of adults seeking sex with teenagers. Both the appeal of the show and its susceptibility to the backlash that ultimately shut down its production, we argue, lay in a tacit invitation to viewers to imagine themselves as predators as well as parents or prosecutors.


1989 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 465-493 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard M. Merelman

This article proposes a structuralist alternative to mainstream behavioural studies of political culture in the United States. After first describing the deficiencies in the mainstream approach, the article suggests that political culture as attitudes and values should be seen as surface elements of a deep cultural structure. The structuralist alternative is presented in some detail, with emphasis upon cultural narratives. Building upon structuralist theory, American political culture emerges as ‘mythologized individualism’, the ramifications of which are described in terms of American ideological cognition and in terms of American capacities to use culture as a means of realizing democratic ideals. In these latter respects, mythologized individualism is found wanting.


Author(s):  
Anna Igorevna Filimonova

After the collapse of the USSR, fundamentally new phenomena appeared on the world arena, which became a watershed separating the bipolar order from the monopolar order associated with the establishment of the US global hegemony. Such phenomena were the events that are most often called «revolutions» in connection with the scale of the changes being made — «velvet revolutions» in the former Eastern Bloc, as well as revolutions of a different type, which ended in a change in the current regimes with such serious consequences that we are also talking about revolutionary transformations. These are technologies of «color revolutions» that allow organizing artificial and seemingly spontaneous mass protests leading to the removal of the legitimate government operating in the country and, in fact, to the seizure of power by a pro-American forces that ensure the Westernization of the country and the implementation of "neoliberal modernization", which essentially means the opening of national markets and the provision of natural resources for the undivided use of the Western factor (TNC and TNB). «Color revolutions» are inseparable from the strategic documents of the United States, in which, from the end of the 20th century, even before the collapse of the USSR, two main tendencies were clearly traced: the expansion of the right to unilateral use of force up to a preemptive strike, which is inextricably linked with the ideological justification of «missionary» American foreign policy, and the right to «assess» the internal state of affairs in countries and change it to a «democratic format», that is, «democratization». «Color revolutions», although they are not directly mentioned in strategic documents, but, being a «technical package of actions», straightforwardly follow from the right, assigned to itself by Washington, to unilateral use of force, which is gradually expanding from exclusively military actions to a comprehensive impact on an opponent country, i.e. essentially a hybrid war. Thus, the «color revolutions» clearly fit into the strategic concept of Washington on the use of force across the entire spectrum (conventional and unconventional war) under the pretext of «democratization». The article examines the period of registration and expansion of the US right to use force (which, according to the current international law, is a crime without a statute of limitations) in the time interval from the end of the twentieth century until 2014, filling semantic content about the need for «democratic transformations» of other states, with which the United States approached the key point of the events of the «Arab spring» and «color revolutions» in the post-Soviet space, the last and most ambitious of which was the «Euromaidan» in Ukraine in 2014. The article presents the material for the preparation of lectures and seminars in the framework of the training fields «International Relations» and «Political Science».


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