Horizons for the American Citizen
Missouri State University Public
Affairs Conference 2006
Dr. John H. Keiser
April 20, 2006
In the spirit of this conference, I contend that a citizen’s horizons depend on the perspective provided by his or her culture, nation, and personal understanding and exercise of citizenship. Too many of us are unclear about all three of these concepts. Being an American citizen is distinct. I have not heard a compelling definition of “citizen of the world,” because the world is divided into eight or ten cultures with dominant or core nations in each. The list of wars within and between those cultures, nations and their “citizens” is long. The spread of nuclear weapons to ideologues, the use of oil as the holy water of religion and politics, and the relative growth of non-American economies reinforce differences. Rights and opportunities vary for individual citizens in these places, and are often nonexistent for newcomers or visitors.
As important, the context from which to contemplate horizons for American citizens is characterized by Jacques Barzun, a distinguished historian, and a host of other observers, when they chronicle the compelling evidence that Western Culture, of which the United States is the most influential segment, has achieved decadence in the last 500 years. All citizen-students should read the sobering final chapter of Barzun’s book, From Dawn to Decadence. It helps to set an agenda, to select horizons.
The distinction and challenges of being an American citizen and exercising American citizenship are what I’d like you to consider today—and for the rest of your lives. I maintain that America and Western Civilization remain unique, and that American citizenship, resurrected, appreciated and practiced by all who reside within our borders is the place to begin to reconstruct our nation and Western Culture. It starts with the knowledge that America is a nation and an idea not a place and a state.
One is born Chinese, Czechoslovakian, Japanese, Iranian, or Mexican, but a person becomes an American regardless of birthplace—including the fifty States. “American” is not a racial, tribal or ethnic identity because, I repeat, America is an idea, articulated by human beings from around the world. There is an American Creed that took shape for 150 years in the words of Jonathan Winthrop, Jonathan Edwards and Roger Williams as the nation developed, that has been essential for over 200 years after it was formed, and that was understood and practiced by George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, Martin Luther King and countless others whom they represented. The American Creed, captured in the Declaration of Independence and in the Preamble to the Constitution, is a philosophical/political identity composed of liberty, freedom, independent conscience and thought, self-reliance, justice, equality and hard work geared to exploit opportunity.
The revitalization of the nation and its culture is possible by those who pursue the American Creed in democratic fashion. Democracy tells you what you are, not what you will become. But it is also a process basic to activating the American Creed that is future-orientated and focused on what humanity and the individuals who make it up is and can become. Because of it and those who realize what they have, America remains the symbol and promise of a new beginning. But reaching new horizons requires discipline and struggle, for America was born in war, preserved the Union and eliminated slavery in war, and realigned democracy through strenuous political reform early in the last century.
When Benjamin Franklin was asked after the Constitutional Convention, “What have you given us?” He replied, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Essentially, he believed that the motivated American citizen practicing American citizenship would preserve the American Republic (1) by dealing with good and with evil within one’s American soul; (2) by recognizing and strengthening the distinct culture formed around the American Creed; (3) by maintaining unity and avoiding a cleft society through officially and formally integrating immigrants as new Americans; (4) by understanding that properly nurturing their progeny as American citizens validated the nation’s present and was the key to its future; and (5) by becoming guerilla democrats when necessary to awaken their neighbors to set horizons and to realize the American Dream collectively. Missouri State University, I understand, has a mandate to implement Franklin’s wisdom, which properly considered encompasses personal behavior as well as domestic and foreign policy of government, and I wish to review and promote the horizons that he had in mind.
The American Soul
The first horizon of American citizenship is internal and based on the realization that every individual experiences both good and evil within himself or herself and that he or she must confront that reality, activate conscience, and search for truth. Those who speak of persons who have not “found themselves” do not seem to recognize that a self is made not found and that goodness and/or greatness are not a function of circumstance but of conscious choice. America assumes a community of individuals based on the quality of all who have sought internal freedom and morality. Many years ago I found this assertion captured in the first lines of Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” As he put it, “I celebrate myself, and sing myself, and what I assume, you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.” The process of answering “who am I” is the beginning of national unity and purpose and unites the self with nature before seeking material and political power. If this process is replaced by a preliminary declaration of membership in an ethnic or social subspecies, it contradicts natural rights and cripples democracy which presupposes that individuals are essentially the same and entitled to similar opportunities and equal protection of law.
In Western Culture, as processed in America, it has been religious principle which focused and/or articulated the internal struggle (by believers and unbelievers) between good and evil. As Jacob Needleman told this conference last year, and, as he emphasizes in his excellent volume, The American Soul, this universal dualism must be faced by every potential citizen before American reconstruction of government and society can begin. Thomas Jefferson recognized this magnificent individual potential as Hellenic, Judaic, Christian, Western—as American.
Because America is essentially an idea and every citizen’s horizon is initially internal, this self-examination by individuals delimits their agenda before collectively leading to a national mind able to consider issues with a shared inclination to counter evil with good. Preliminary debate within ones conscience leads individuals to open their minds to one another in an atmosphere of equality—which was articulated by my coal-mining grandfather, who went to the coal mines after the fourth grade, when he regularly reminded me that “you’re as good as anybody but you ain’t any better than nobody.”
George Washington, the greatest and most essential American, recognized the need for him to deal with personal aggression, acquisitiveness, and power and to overcome them with moral and spiritual values to build a nation. After the Revolutionary War, when his semi-royalty was possible, the revered General without whom independence would not have happened rode home. After being unanimously elected President, and reelected, he refused a third term. As the richest man in America, instead of creating a dynasty, he divided his estate among more than thirty heirs. Recognizing the evil of slavery and its threat to the Union, he freed his slaves. He demonstrated great understanding, leadership, and faith in the individual American citizen and democracy by stepping back. He neither ordered nor financed the Washington Monument. As he put it:
The citizens of America placed in the most enviable condition, as the sole Lords and proprietors of a vast tract of Continent, comprehending all the various soils and climates of the World, and abounding with all the necessaries and conveniences of life are now. . . possessed of absolute freedom and independency. They are, from this period, to be considered as actors on a most conspicuous Theatre, which seems to be peculiarly designed by Providence for the display of human greatness and felicity.
Washington succeeded in his internal struggle, and assumed his fellow citizens would reconcile the tensions between good and evil within themselves and then participate in the great art form of the American government set up by the Constitution. In creating this public document the Founders recognized that good and evil were perpetual, but that the public mind made up of individual minds which had confronted this reality in themselves could subordinate evil with (1) checks and balances manifest in three branches of government, (2) in the principle of federalism balancing state and national power, (3) in a bill of rights protecting individual freedom, and (4) in a general recognition that nothing would have to be removed from the document to guarantee each individual’s liberty and equality through amendment as the nation evolved. Along with the American Creed, the Constitution is why America is the world’s oldest democracy. It was based on a belief that if citizens preserved the happiness of others they could assure their own.
Western (American) Culture
In the second place, horizons for American citizens in the 21st century are clearer when they recognize the need to define themselves by the strengths of their unique Western (American) Culture. That was less important in the 20th century because after two World Wars and the Cold War, America’s worldwide dominance was unmistakable and nations were apportioned between the Free World and Communism—the common threat. In a modern, more divided world with increasing entities portraying the United States as the common threat, American citizens’ horizons are evaluated by practitioners of multiple cultures who frequently do not appreciate those horizons.
Whether cultures clash militarily, religiously or politically or not depends on dynamic circumstance, but Samuel Huntington’s listing , in his somewhat controversial volume The Clash of Cultures, of a distinct Sinic (or Chinese), a Japanese, a Hindu, an Orthodox (or Russian), a Latin American, an African and an Islamic culture that differ from a Western Culture has not been convincingly refuted. The bloodshed between the latter two (Islam and the West) over cartoons featuring Muhammad, aside from struggles over terrorism, oil and democracy, should make the case for multiple and conflicting identities as the core states of these cultures replace the sole superpowers, the U.S. and Russia. A public affairs curriculum at a university outlines these cultures, because to appreciate themselves all American citizens must be familiar with them. That’s what the statue of the Missouri State University graduate holding the world at the entrance of Strong Hall symbolizes.
But the young lady holding the world is the product of Western Culture. The elements of Western Culture remain (1) Classical civilization, or Greek philosophy and Roman law; (2) Christianity, or Catholicism and Protestantism; (3) European languages, or the Latin, Romance, Germanic and English tongues; (4) separation of church and state, or God and Caesar with separate allegiances; (5) the rule of law, or constitutionalism; (6) social pluralism or identity through associations and societies; (7) representative bodies, or the organized collective interests of individuals and associations; and, (8) individualism or personal liberty and choice. These characteristics must be the bases of self-understanding when the American citizen faces and adapts to the cultures of the world that have different perspectives on each category. At the same time, citizens can not ignore the signs of decadence (“change” if you will) in Western Culture which must be reversed by renewed shared values.
The core states of the world’s cultures are becoming more modern, but less Western. One world, world harmony, and the “end-of-history” thesis popular with the collapse of Communism is an illusion. Globalization is an economic and technological, not a cultural, phenomenon. Western Civilization as a universal civilization is not modern reality because universal civilization requires universal power. Power today is divided more widely among a number of cultural-specific core nations and is highlighted by nuclear proliferation, energy supplies, economic growth and a worldwide Islamic resurgence pushing adherence to conflicted Islamic behavior rather than to tolerant Westernized conduct. While war can be justified in both the Bible and the Koran, America accepts all beliefs rather than condemning unbelievers. Hamas, as one example, does not. Coexistence of cultures, as well as American foreign policy, requires understanding and education as well as an appreciation of what humanity has in common.
Your horizons will be clouded if you do not accept multi-culturalism in the world and the need for renewal of Western and American identity here. I know you have had the opportunity to hear emotional advocates get that backwards and promote multi-culturalism at home and universalism, or their definition of a single worldwide American-Western Culture, abroad. And you know advocates of universalism, which is a fiction based on American fragments feeding from the salad bowl rather than from the melting pot, who contradict themselves when they criticize the Bush administration for practicing an international policy of imperialism, imposing its will on others to increase American wealth and power. Neither imperialism nor universalism (cultural imperialism) is welcomed by other cultures.
American Unity
Third, as you set horizons as American citizens it is necessary to meet the challenge of immigrants from other civilizations who refuse or are denied assimilation to their new neighbors in the United States and who weaken national unity as they continue to implement the culture and politics of their native society. Certainly Muslims in Europe have done as much and demonstrated to our European counterparts that an effective nation depends on unity. The American Creed molded individuals from every part of the world into a nation and must continue to do so.
I have identified Latin America as a culture, a civilization, and, agree or not, if you listen to Castro-influenced leaders in Venezuela, Bolivia, and large numbers in Mexico, you recognize growing anti-Americanism. Unless the United States manages to integrate Mexican immigrants more effectively, and particularly if it fails to meet the challenge of twelve million illegal immigrants by making them willingly and philosophically legal, it will become a cleft nation and American citizenship will become relative as shared horizons disappear. Enlightened governmental action is required, and employers must realize that if all we want is illegal immigrants’ labor, then all they can be expected to want is our money.
While English is not “the legal” language of the United States and while college graduates should know several languages, English must be the language of American unity, the language of shared horizons. The Mayor of Los Angeles broadcast his response to President Bush’s State of the Union address in Spanish and circulated written copies in English and several other languages. That upset those whose ancestral language was not used and led others to ask such questions as why Mayor LaGuardia of New York never gave citywide addresses in Italian. Biographers say that he understood the importance of unity. As one observer, originally from India, wrote, “Mr. Villaraigosa chose to deliver his message in Spanish, and by doing so he sent a clear signal of his chosen tribal identity (and not just the accident of his birth). That may help him in his vote bank, but it will not help his city.”
It is essential that an increasingly fragmented American society restore unity and that Hispanics and other recent arrivals be brought into the American body politic and implement the American Creed. Too many of us in education and government have invested in and profited from promoting relativism, multiculturalism and separatism illustrated by California universities with 60 or 70 courses in Chicano Studies including Methodology of the Oppressed; Dance of the Chicanos; Body, Culture, and Power; Chicana Feminism and many more whose overemphasis deprives first and second generation Hispanics of the balance and strengths of the true definition of an educated person. As to curricular and public affairs’ balance, there is nothing on the treatment of illegal aliens from Guatemala and other Central American countries into Mexico; nothing on why there is no comparative illegal alien problem from the bordering nation of Canada; and a disappearing reference in the catalogues of the major ideas and events of American history and of the phenomenon of assimilation.
Assimilation did not and will not come primarily from government coercion, income redistribution and social chauvinism but rather through legal entry, traditional education and status achieved through hard work. Those Mexican-Americans who have been so successful and who have contributed so much have an obligation to help all of us facilitate this. Unfortunately for the United States it is much more difficult for illegals to emphasize the strengths of traditional Mexican Culture including the family, the church and extended kin when criminal operatives and drug dealers transport them across the border; when they are paid in cash for their labor and do not pay taxes; when they are supported by state programs to which they do not contribute; when they can only afford to participate in and limit their assimilation to the pathologies of consumer and junk culture; and when they find that those who originally desired their labor now resent them. While there was always tension between “immigrants” and “natives,” America was not built this way. If it had been there would have been more than one Civil War.
Hyphenated identities have always existed, and everyone should be familiar with his or her heritage, but America exists because it nationalized immigrants around its basic idea, which seemed to bring them here, rather than denationalized them, as happens elsewhere. The goal of American citizens is not to reshape other civilizations and cultures in the American image, but to preserve, protect, and renew America’s unique qualities along with the rights of all citizens who reside in our nation. The challenge for Muslim-Americans, for Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds who come to America with various perspectives on their Islamic heritage underlines the emphasis on unity in this country. That challenge is not new. The time for all to become citizens and take responsibility for unity is now.
Nurturing Progeny in America
In the fourth instance, societies are judged and their horizons are shaped by how they nuture their progeny; how they prepare their children to deal with the internal confrontation of good and evil that they must face; and how they help them to participate in public affairs. This has been the traditional reason for marriage and for the creation of public schools. As you weigh the importance of families and schools, consider my contention that you are not born American but become American, and ask yourself where that happens best, i.e., home and school. Horizons of young citizens are affected by the perspective provided by the “family”—or whatever has taken its place. “Family values” presently divide Americans into believers and heretics, and model practitioners are no longer easy to find. That same division is manifest in the schools and colleges.
The decline of each of the world’s historic civilizations was marked by the collapse of marriage, fidelity, parentage, and the value of the child; and accompanied by an emphasis on sex by all elements of society. The traditional form of union, of family, has not disappeared in America, but the variants where children are not the glue, created and sold by economics and social reality as well as by experimental moralists and such classic commentators on virtue as Howard Stern, are becoming traditional, i.e., both parents employed; single-parent families from increased divorces, teen-age pregnancy and illegitimacy; second or third families with children from previous relationships; families rearing grandchildren; unmarried couples with or without children; homosexual couples without children or with a child adopted or not--all of which have contributed to increasing numbers of semi-orphans, an early introduction to street life, the day-care center as home, and limited horizons for Americans. Although there are success stories, serious education, simple manners, a basic moral sense, and public orientation does not characterize this atmosphere. Those setting horizons for children becoming citizens now have an opportunity and an obligation to strengthen the nurturing of progeny one family at a time because an effective substitute does not now exist.
Similarly, horizons for young citizens will be clearer, nobler and more achievable if American public education finds a way to focus on those horizons, and to emphasize the words “American” and “public” that precede and define “education.” Attendance in American public schools was required by law to strengthen individual citizens and the nation, not to keep social problems off of the street. Historically, America made it clear how education should make youth literate while meeting the nation’s greatest needs. In response to the crucial place of ministers in the early colonial years Harvard and other institutions produced them. (Compare that focused purpose to the debate surrounding the resignation of Harvard’s President Summers.) The revolutionary fathers and mothers, the best-educated generation of Americans ever, combined classical education with administrative experience to build a new nation. To answer the call for capable leaders for the army and the navy after independence, the military academies were established; and to assure that the new government at all levels was well-served, Thomas Jefferson opened the University of Virginia with a public-affairs mission, focusing on the law.
The critical importance of freedom and unity was prominent on the Northern campuses before 1860; and, to provide the engineers and agricultural scientists to utilize the trans-Mississippi West, the Morrill Act established land-grant institutions in 1862. As the agricultural countryside was drained of population and the cities burgeoned with domestic and foreign immigrants, teachers’ colleges were opened to educate those responsible young citizens in the public schools. To serve an increasingly technical phase of the industrial revolution, community colleges arrived as the new century began. The G.I Bill of Rights, along with other programs and rewards related to service, brought veterans into the mainstream of society.
Today, metropolitan universities and an increasingly formal emphasis on public affairs have aided citizen students to focus horizons through education. However, in spite of the demand in both public and private markets the United States has fewer students studying math and science than do core nations in other cultures; and, struggling to restore manufacturing at home, this year American universities will graduate 70,000 engineers while India will graduate 350,000 and China, 600,000. Our present challenge is to see a strengthened educational philosophy and system focused on the American citizen, on national identity and need, and on public affairs balancing private affairs around the American Creed.
That focus has been clouded by politically-correct censorship, special group interests, the inability of educators to relegate gadgetry to its proper place and to separate “information” from knowledge, the failure to agree on the definition of an educated person by identifying the best that has been thought and said in focused, required general education, and the necessary will to prepare teachers to impart literacy to students increasingly deprived of the perspective and discipline once provided by the churches and the family. The developing citizen’s struggle to balance good and evil internally, to appreciate cultural differences, to make American citizenship the basis for societal and national renewal, requires dedicated teachers who understand that value is not exclusively measured with money or personal pleasure. That is a national agenda for all Faculty Senates and/or a Presidential-job description.
Those who built and preserved the nation as educators would be amazed by Stanley Fish, the consummate relativist, whose regular comments in the Chronicle of Higher Education is characterized by his claim that “as admirable a goal as it may be, fashioning citizens for a moralistic society has nothing to do with truth.” He represents much of education today, wherever it occurs, even in boot camp. At Camp Leonard Wood, according to the press, drill sergeants have become counselors and their view of whether or not a recruit has the physical, mental and moral values (the discipline) to become a soldier has been softened to aid recruitment. In 1955 I believe that I learned more from a Marine DI, who as he introduced lessons, informed a group of citizen-students at Quantico, Virginia that “pain is good; extreme pain is extremely good.” Becoming a literate American citizen requires some pain as well. “Standard-based proficiency” must replace “basic skills” to justify academic advancement. Applying standards does not devalue the humanity of those who can not meet them, and it strengthens the nation.
American higher education has become an expensive luxury—you need an MBA and luck if you hope to pay your student debt. How can education introduce the low-income student, at whatever stage of life, to a better existence or to meet the nation’s challenges if after working fulltime his certificate of debt still outweighs his diploma? If private universities charge $30,000 for a year’s tuition, without room and board, and public universities annually raise rates well over inflation, they are emphasizing materialism and possessive individualism regardless of their curriculum and quality of teaching. Education must be a right, but it has become a business and those institutions of higher education organized as “for-profit” businesses are cheaper than the traditional campuses who speak of relative quality in unconvincing fashion. Purposeful attainable public education for all remains the key to the future of American citizens and their nation, and along with the responsible family, is a basic element in judging how this society nurtures its progeny.
Guerilla Democracy in America
Fifth, there is a need for practitioners of guerilla democracy, for American citizens committed to set horizons meant to revitalize America. Just as my advisor in graduate school in the early 1960’s, Robert Wiebe, contended in his book, The Search for Order, that America had become a society without a core, he makes the clearest case I know for democracy to restore that societal core in his volume, Self Rule. Democracy requires a move for all to interact, an equality in interaction that draws all those who live, work or resolve problems together into pools of participants with the cardinal sin being exclusion. Advocates acknowledge the weakness in America’s attempt to sell democracy to the world, to Iraq, when less than half of eligible voters vote in presidential elections and more people watch the Superbowl than vote in those elections. Democracy produces a citizen’s agenda, then implements it, but because of cultural and national differences, democracy alone practiced by other political entities, as we will learn in the Middle East, does not guarantee pro-American results.
Benjamin Barber defines democracy as “a form of government in which all of the people govern themselves in at least some public matters at least some of the time.” To do that democracy places voting at the center of the political process. Guerilla democrats replace opinion polls with voting. Opinion polls ratify public passivity—the democrat shuns them and votes. Student government on campus, often the product of less than a 20% turnout, is not true democracy. That as well as any other election that does not get a majority turnout should be invalidated on democratic grounds as a scarlet letter on the citizens, the non-voters, who may then accept their responsibility for unfortunate results.
Democracy mobilizes what citizens bring to public life and exercises healthy disrespect for the view that justice depends on an “informed electorate” when the information is colored by special interest advertising and centralized, hierarchical distributors. Recognizing that big money pursues centralized power including the media that often can’t find Main Street for Hollywood or Wall Street, the democrat has more faith in those who receive the messages than those who send them. What the American citizen, the democrat, must prevent is not what is said but allowing money to set the agenda for discussion. A number of the topics that I have mentioned today rarely appear high on a centralized hierarchical agenda.
Citizens must recognize that the two great constraints on democracy are money-driven centralization and hierarchy and make them responsive. Consider the cost to be a candidate for national office and ask why elected officials wouldn’t respond to centralized, hierarchical financial power. After all, service in Congress prepares one to be a lobbyist. The Constitution, and the democratic process which activates it, is established to regularly question authority—majority or individual. That questioning process, which centralization and hierarchy discourages, is what strengthens democratic authority and legitimizes decisions.
America’s corporate hierarchies, originally the world’s pioneers in systematic organization, have become snarled in personal privilege, top-down directives, and resistance to reform. The average CEO’s salary in the U.S., according to The Wall Street Journal, is 475 times greater than the average worker’s salary. In Japan, 11 times greater (Toyota is prospering while General Motors and Ford face bankruptcy); in France, 15 times; in Canada, 20; in South Africa, 21; and in Britain, 22. At the same time American workers are bearing the great “risk shift” as they become responsible for retirement and personal pensions; health care; and surviving for longer periods on unemployment as jobs disappear.
Employed and unemployed are facing an increasing tax burden loaded with monumental federal (and state) deficits, unfocused “entitlements,” debatable defense expenditures, and diet-wrecking pork served as a guarantee of reelections. Citizens are told that lack of savings and increased debt for individuals are ruinous, but that the same characteristics are a sign of healthy capitalism for the government. The public learns about unions when the multi-millionaire role models in professional athletics threaten to strike, a bitter joke to my coal-mining relatives and other modern-day laborers. In business, and increasingly for too many business leaders, money is the sole means and measure of success, whereas in a democratic society money is but one of a number of more important inputs. Citizens need to weigh the relative value of land, labor and capital—to contemplate why there is a Labor Day and not a business day and to restore the balance.
As an advocate of democracy at home and abroad, the President speaks of an “ownership society.” He means turning social security and health care over to individual citizens. But one must remember and remind authorities, including the President, that there is a national domain that we, as citizens, already own and that defines the nation and that makes us rich. As an American citizen, you have the freedom to retreat to the rivers, lakes, national forests, mountains, and bordering oceans (which we own); to relish the natural beauty and wildlife that lives there (and that we own), and to breathe clean air, and to drink pure water. That national domain, that “unbought beauty,” defines our nation and its citizens—it is ours and we must keep it and care for it. Like Western Culture, however, there are signs of decadence. A trip to China will underline the challenges of worldwide environmental deterioration and the belief of people with growing wealth that they have a right to fresh air and palatable water. An American citizen’s horizons will be clearer, more defining of America, if the national domain is protected for future generations, if it is not sold for individual or corporate profit. After all, that part of the “ownership society” established by Theodore Roosevelt and others is already in place and must remain with the owners. Since we own it, the President and/or Congress should seek our approval before they place “for sale” signs on our national domain.
A democratic-consumer society (we are at least the latter), would insist that corporate officers become responsible to citizen-consumers as corporate actions affect the communities, of whatever size, that they serve. A true guerilla democrat might propose that every fifteen years the people affected by a corporate charter demonstrate market force by voting to renew it or not, determining whether or not it serves a useful function in a responsible way.
There are shelves of books on leadership, extolling those who are products of our centralized, hierarchical system that must be replaced by those that focus on examples of energizing and managing a democratic system. The signature characteristic of the democratic leader is personal humility fueling driving ambition for the organization rather than for himself. That leadership speaks to the individual American citizen, the guerilla democrat who is the most legitimate lobbyist, who activates his or her political rights wherever they go, politicizes their life-ways at work, at leisure, in schools, in churches, in volunteer organizations, as well as in government and therein sets horizons involving major priorities for America’s citizens. Public spaces, shopping centers and ball parks are places for guerilla democrats to conduct public affairs to help revitalize America and Western Culture. Every classroom, every academic discipline, has a contribution it must make to a public issue. Twenty-first century America cannot afford a “silent majority.”
Democracy depends on majority rule and nothing inherent to democracy sets majority rule and individual rights at odds. That is an article of faith for guerilla democrats. You have heard that before the Civil War John C. Calhoun promoted the concurrent majority to protect slavery. He believed in the rights of the States to nullify any federal law to which they objected while working with the national majority on lesser matters. That was ante-bellum political correctness, which in spite of its modern advocates, will not work in the 21st century.
Guerilla democracy too often is replaced by terrorism in other cultures. The doctrinal, bloody hostility between Sunnis and Shiites in Islam has been non-negotiable since the death of Muhammad and can not be solved by anyone alive today. Hopefully, it can become non-violent. This elemental hostility leading to the destruction of the Shiite shrine at Samara, regular assassinations and looming civil war, underlines the seeming impossibility of matching the orderliness of American leadership successions through democratic election. That leaves Muhammad, the perfect leader, whose honor must be untainted if the basis of all factions of Islam is to be maintained, which is why cartoons or criticism are religiously/culturally/politically demeaning and unacceptable. Islamic culture is distinct but suffers tribal splits, and voting in unifying, calming change is a very long-term challenge. In America voting, after non-violent organization, is the accepted way to realize citizens’ horizons in a unified nation, and the guerilla democrat insists on it.
Conclusion—Horizons for the American Citizen
In conclusion, American democratic individualism and citizenship is based on action without receiving harm in public or doing harm in private and depends on a collective mind that results in focusing on public affairs and doing good. Again, democracy reveals who we are, not what we will become, but it is also the process that allows us to set, contemplate and achieve horizons, to articulate our American dream, and to achieve it as American citizens through implementing the incomparable American Creed. I suggest that is how horizons for the American citizen should be set and contend that those involving (1) resurrecting the American Soul, (2) legitimizing Western-American Culture, (3) assuring American Unity, (4) prioritizing the nurturing of American Progeny, and (5) awakening American Guerilla Democracy will sparkle in sunlight once you create them.
Thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak with you. It’s a privilege to be an American.