Religion in Its Place
By Jim Sleeper, a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University. His books include The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (1990) and Liberal Racism (1997). This article is adapted from a paper presented at a symposium held by the Campbell Public Affairs Institute, a research center of the Maxwell School of Syracuse University.
Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America was so nuanced a description of this country's unprecedentedly democratic civic society of the 1830s that it set a standard against which sociologists and policymakers are now diagnosing a precipitous decline in civic responsibility. And in some of today's assessments, Tocqueville's understanding has become the admonition he sometimes intended it to be: We're told that the American people are losing what he called "habits of the heart" that accustomed good republicans to fuse self-interest with a deep dedication to the public good without having to think all that much about it, let alone having to study doing it. It is as if the habits of our hearts have become irreversibly bad habits. What Tocqueville called "the slow and quiet action of society upon itself"--the little ways in which Americans taught one another to commingle personal and public good--inducts us now instead into a proliferating "logic" of mistrust: self-fulfilling expectations of others' bad faith prompt guarded, antisocial exchanges, litigation in situations once mediated by a simpler good faith, and credulous watching of Fox News.
Civil Society and Media Freedom: Problems of Purpose and Sustainability in Democratic Transition
By Craig L. LaMay, an assistant professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, is the editor most recently of Journalism and the Debate Over Privacy (Erlbaum, 2003). He is currently writing a book on the role of media assistance in foreign aid and democracy promotion.
The problem of the press is confused because the critics and the apologists expect the press to … make up for all that was not foreseen in the theory of democracy. – Walter Lippmann, 1922
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