Jennifer Mercieca
Associate Professor
Department of Communication
Texas A&M University
Apathy, Disengagement,
Civic Withdrawal
• Aristotle, “The good citizen must have
the knowledge and ability both to be
ruled and to rule”; the state is a “kind
of partnership” in which citizens
promote “the security of their
community,” defend “the constitution,”
and work for the “common
advantage.” (Politics, 3: 1276b-79a)
• Citizens are officers of the
government, not mere members of a
political community.
• Citizens have responsibilities and
obligations, but what can citizens do?
The Rights & Freedoms of
Citizenship• Freedom of Speech
• Freedom of Assembly
• Freedom of the Press
• Right to Petition
• Right to Vote?
Amendments: Fourteenth (Equal
Protection), Fifteenth (Race),
Nineteenth (Gender), Twenty-sixth
(Age) & the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
• We do not have the right to vote for
president, that right is retained by the
states—the Electors of the Electoral
College are technically the only ones
who vote for president.
Voter Turn Out• Between 1945 and 2000 the United
States had an average voter turn out
of 48.3%, which ranked us 114th
out of the 140 nations in the world
that hold free elections.
(Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance
http://www.idea.int/vt/survey/voter_turnout_pop2-
2.cfm)
• 2008 Election: 58.2% turn out,
which would rank us # 99, right
behind Tunisia. Even with all of the
excitement about Barack
Obama,18-24 year olds were still
the least likely of all age groups to
vote: 44.3% turned out in 2008. If
they were a nation, 18-24 year olds
would rank 125th—equal to El
Salvador—in turnout.
Table 1. Reported Voting and Registration, by Sex and
Single Years of Age: November 2008:
http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/socdemo/voting/
publications/p20/2008/tables.html
Other Indicators of Civic
Engagement:
Photo Credit: http://republicforwhichitstands.blogspot.com/2009/03/everett-
tax-day-tea-party.html, March 25, 2009
Founding Fictions’ Research
Questions:
• How have we imagined a government
based upon the will of the people?
• How have we imagined American
citizens?
• What do our historical debates about
the role of the citizen tell us about
how citizens can act in the
government today?
Rhetorical History
Founding Fictions is a “meta-rhetorical
history” that examines how the
structural elements within texts—the
arguments, tropes, and figures—
contributed to building the political
fictions that permeated and
dominated the contexts of which they
were a part.
I studied political theory, American
history, the biographies of the major
figures and their friends and
colleagues; I also studied the authors
that the Founders were known to have
read, the Founders‟ published and
unpublished papers, newspapers,
public and private correspondence,
literature, journals, public
deliberations and the pronouncements
of deliberative bodies. I moved back
and forth from texts to contexts and
back again—all with the goal of
understanding the constitutive
discourses of American citizenship.
Political Fictions
• Founding Fictions’ goal is to take
political theory out of the realm of
unquestionable elite discourse and re-
place it in the realm of the public.
• Political theory is a simulacrum of
dialectic: it is a rhetorical fiction that
appears faithfully to describe political
reality while it is also used to create
political realities.
• Political fictions are “narratives that
political communities tell themselves
about their government; like formal
constitutions, they have a constitutive
role in political discourse.”
• We find political fictions in just about
any textual artifact that describes or is
premised upon that nation‟s view of
its government.
• There could be a monarchic fiction,
oligarchic fiction, aristocratic fiction,
theocratic fiction, republican fiction,
or a democratic fiction.
Differences between
Democratic & Republican
Political Theories
• It is easy to confuse democratic and
republican forms of government
because in both “the people” are
sovereign.
• The difference between them is in
answering the question “who rules”
and how those who rule “administer”
or make decisions in the government.
• In pure democracy offices are drawn
by lot—not awarded by election—
and every citizen makes binding policy
decisions on all questions of
government— “the government of all
over all.”
• In republics decision making power
ranges from assenting to the original
constitution and then taking no
further part in government, to giving
binding policy decisions to
representatives who must faithfully
mirror their constituents‟ views.
• In democracies all citizens are equal;
republics are hierarchical.
Republican Political Fiction
• Plato described a democracy as, “a
state in which the poor, gaining the
upper hand, kill some and banish
others, and then divide the offices
among the remaining citizens, usually
by lot.” (Republic, Book VIII, 557a)
• Likewise, in the United States
“democracy” connoted turbulence,
chaos, leveling of the hierarchy, and
mob rule.
• For the first generation of Americans
“democracy” meant:
• The rule of “a rude insulting mob”—
Letters in Answer to the Farmer
• “Turbulence and contention”—James
Madison, Federalist 10.
• “The government of the worst”—
George Cabot, 1804.
• Perhaps prudently, the Founders
created a republic, not a democracy.
The US has embraced more inclusive
practices of citizenship over its
history, but it has never achieved
equality or ever permitted “the
government of all over all.”
Citizens as Romantic Heroes
• Despite this negative view of
democracy, the Founders of the
Revolutionary era imagined citizens as
romantic heroes.
• According to Hayden White, romantic
narratives are a “drama of self-
identification symbolized by the hero‟s
transcendence of the world of
experience…it is a drama of the
triumph of good over evil, of virtue
over vice, of light over darkness, and
of the ultimate transcendence of man
over the world.” (Metahistory, 8-9)
• Romantic citizenship: a citizen was
imagined to believe that he or she was
a hero who would conquer
adversity—whether the “adversity”
was the gun of a British regular, the
corruption of luxurious British goods,
or the tyranny of Parliament and the
King—and act in the republic‟s best
interest to ensure a safe, happy, and
prosperous America.
• Romantic citizens were enabled to act
for the common good.
Romantic Citizenship
• “Ought not the people therefore to
watch? To observe facts? To search into
causes? To investigate designs? And
have they not a right of JUDGING
from the evidence before them, on no
slighter points than their liberty and
happiness?” John Dickinson, 1767,
Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania, VI,
37)
• King George was the “chief officer of the
people, appointed by the laws, and
circumscribed with definite powers, to
assist in working the great machine of
government, erected for their use, and
consequently subject to their
superintendence …While those bodies are
in existence to whom the people have
delegated the powers of legislation, they
alone possess and may exercise those
powers; but when they are dissolved by the
lopping off of one or more of their
branches, the power reverts to the people,
who may exercise it to unlimited extent,
either assembling in person, sending
deputies, or in any other way they may
think proper.” Thomas Jefferson, Summary
View of the Rights of British Americans, 1774
Citizens as Tragic Victims
• Rebellions after 1783 proved that the
Articles of Confederation were
woefully unsuitable for the needs of
the 13 states, leaders assembled in
Philadelphia in the hope of providing
stability in government, even at the
expense of citizen control over the
government.
• Citizens had turned from romantic
heroes to tragic victims.
• According to Hayden White, tragic
narratives reflect the “resignations of
men to the conditions under which
they must labor in the world…man
cannot change them but must work
within them.” (Metahistory, 9)
• Tragic Citizenship: political
corruption is eternal, citizens are not
the patriot heroes who will act for the
common good, but rather complicit
victims of corruption. The only
solution is to give more power to the
system, which will provide stability.
Tragic Citizenship
• The insurrections “exhibit a
melancholy proof…that mankind
when left to themselves are unfit for
their own Government.” (George
Washington to Henry Lee, October
31, 1786)
• “The general object was to provide a
cure for the evils under which the US
labored; that in tracing these evils to
their origin every man had found it in
the turbulence and follies of
democracy and some check therefore
was to be sought for against this
tendency in our Governments.”
Edmund Randolph, 1787.
• “The people immediately should have
as little to do as may be about the
government, they want information
and are constantly liable to be misled.”
Roger Sherman, 1787.
• “My idea of the sovereignty of the
people is, that the people can change
the constitution if they please; but
while the constitution exists, they
must conform themselves to its
dictates.” James Madison, Debate
Over the First Amendment, 1789.
Democratic Political Fiction
• Americans began to call their
government a democracy rather than
a republic in the 1820s, but the
constitution was never changed from a
republic to a democracy. What we
think of as the “rise of Jacksonian
democracy” can be more profitably
understood as the “rise of the
democratic fiction.”
• 1816—Compensation Act and the shift
from republican to democratic
representation.
• 1824— “corrupt bargain” and the shift from
republican to democratic campaigning.
• 1828—Andrew Jackson wins the grudge
match election and consolidates power in
the Executive Branch while extolling the
virtues of the “common man.”
• 1840—Whigs use the Democrats‟
democratic fiction to get their “Man of
Hard Cider & Log Cabins” elected, even
though William Henry Harrison was a
member of a family that had ruled in
America since well before the Revolution,
which meant that he was no man of the
people.
Citizens as Ironic Partisans
• Political leaders used the democratic fiction
ironically, as a legerdemain; the people used
the democratic fiction earnestly, to demand
the power that they knew was theirs.
• One effect of the democratic fiction was to
change the locus of controversy from
political theory to political organization—it
was no longer possible to openly debate
political theory.
• A second effect of the democratic fiction
was to turn citizens into partisans, thus
adding another layer of stability between
the people and their dangerous opinions
and the administrative power of the
government.
• “We hold it a principle that every man
should sacrifice his own private
opinions and feelings to the good of
his party and the man who will not do
it is unworthy to be supported by a
party, for any post of honor or profit.”
Martin Van Buren‟s Albany Argus, 1824.
What do Americans do to
Critique the Government?
Stability vs. Participation
• “There is a “practical absurdity” in the
contradiction between our claims to
popular sovereignty and our
commonplace judgments of the
popular will, who would say that the
„King‟ is sovereign, but in the next
breath deny the „King‟s‟ ability to
resist sophists, accuse him of such
ignorance that he cannot tell his own
interests, and then top the argument
with the claim that public ethics force
officers of state, who owe their power
to the „King‟ to pay not attention to
him.” Michael Calvin McGee, 1978
• Do America‟s political fictions enable
the people to control the government?
No, they do not.
• Popular governments are profoundly
unstable, because when the people
rule there can be no settled question,
no unquestioned rule, no ruling
power, and no powerless citizen.
America‟s political leaders have simply
dismissed public opinion as irrational,
ill-informed, and the product of
demagogues because it provides
justification to protect stability.
Why Are Citizens Apathetic?
• “Why am I so interested in politics? But if I
were to answer you very simply, I would say
this: why shouldn‟t I be interested? That is
to say, what blindness, what deafness, what
density of ideology would have to weigh me
down to prevent me from being interested
in what is probably the most crucial subject
to our existence, that is to say the society in
which we live, the economic relations
within which it functions, and the system of
power which defines the regular forms and
the regular permissions and prohibitions of
our conduct…So instead of asking me, you
should ask someone who is not interested
in politics and then your question would be
well-founded, and you would have the right
to say “Why, damn it, are you not
interested?” Michel Foucault, 1971.
• I have argued that Foucault‟s “density
of ideology” can be thought of as
America‟s founding fictions.
• Why are citizens apathetic and
disengaged? Because the
Constitution‟s tragic republicanism
was designed to prevent citizen action
and while we call our government a
democracy, we treat citizens as tragic
victims and as ironic partisans rather
than as romantic heroes.
What Can We Do About It?
What do you think?