Approaching Democracy [antikvár]

PREFACEOur deep commitment to undergraduate teaching led us to write this textbook; our abiding respect for democracy led us to our theme. In Approaching Democracy we join you in an exploration of the American experiment in self-government. As your guides we know that democracy has evolved over time in America and that the United States today has become a beacon for those seeking freedom and democratic government.As teachers we have taken our title and theme from Vaclav Havel, a former dissident Czechoslovakian playwright once imprisoned by that country's Communist government and later elected its president. Addressing a joint session of the U.S. Congress on February 21, 1990, Havel noted that with the collapse of the Soviet Union, miUions of people from Eastern Europe were involved in a "historically irreversible process," beginning their quest for freedom and democracy. And it was the United States of America that represented the model, "the way to democracy and independence," for these newly freed peoples. But Havel put his own spin on the notion of American democracy as a model. "As long as people are people," Havel explained, "democracy, in the full sense of the word, will always be no more than an ideal. In this sense, you too are merely approaching democracy. But you have one great advantage: you have been approaching democracy uninterruptedly for more than 200 years, and your journey toward the horizon has never been disrupted by a totalitarian system."This image of an America "approaching democracy" inspired the theme for our textbook. We write about American democracy as a work still in progress. Democracy as a system has become increasingly popular. The number of democracies worldwide, while just a handful of nations a century ago, increased from three or four dozen in the 1950s to 114 by the end of 1995. Clearly, we live in an age of democratic aspiration, and for many who seek to achieve democracy the United States represents a model of the democratic process. The United States has been making efforts to approach democracy for over two hundred years. In spite of its astonishing diversity and the consequent potential for hostility and violence, the United States has moved closer to the democratic ideal than nearly any other country, certainly more than any other country of comparable heterogeneity and size. But the process of approaching democracy is a continual one.We believe in the linkage between democracy and education. Indeed, everything about democracy is educational; it's about ideas, history, and politics. From civil rights to civil liberties; from the powers of Congress to the Contract With America; from judicial review to presidential vetoes; from motor voter to campaign finance reform; from affirmative action to immigration; from national health care to balanced budgets; from talk radio to C-SPANdemocracy is educational because it involves discussion, be it speaking from wooden soap boxes or on the Internet. Ideas drive democracy!We also believe the world in which we live has validated the democratic experiment in self-government. The triumph of democratic ideas in Eastern Europe was inspired by America's example of freedom and democracy. We are the laboratory for those who have broken from their totalitarian pasts and for those who dream of doing so. Nevertheless, democracy did not come easy to