The American West
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It has been said that after the long, difficult push across the American continent--destroying and creating, but always expanding--the United States reached the Pacific and, having nowhere else to go, had to turn and face itself. This, it seems to me, capsulizes the American experience as neatly as any idea I have come across in my two years of American Studies. It evokes the heedless, headlong advance in geographical terms that was coupled with a limitless faith in the general notion of unending technological and economic progress. But it also points up what was ignored during those pursuits and hints at how during the twentieth century, "the American Century," these previously disregarded problems made themselves known in increasingly strong ways. Those who believed most firmly in, and who benefited most from, the drive and bustle of America's first centuries now found themselves in the position of men as described by Sojourner Truth in her famous "Ain't I a Woman" speech (1851) on slaves' and women's rights: "man is in a tight place, the poor slave is on him, woman is coming on him, he is surely between a hawk and a buzzard" (118). In the flow of information, even in courses organized around particular themes, it is sometimes very difficult to step back and get a perspective on the American experience as a whole. The clue to the perspective I have developed came with the discussion of the ideas of the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in the reading for the semina
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en who founded the nation. It only required that voting be universal (i.e., for all white, male landowners) and that anyone who could compete economically be free to do so. It did not, of course, require that these wealthy men surrender any of the wealth or power they had accumulated. Substantive democracy, on the other hand, views equality in "comprehensive terms" and holds that "equality of opportunity must be expanded to include aspects of equality of conditions" (Dolbeare & Medcalf 23).
This is not a difficult distinction to understand. But, perhaps deliberately, the supervalue is, when invoked by politicians and other elites, allowed to stand for both types of democracy indiscriminately. That is to say, they allow people to believe that they are referring to complete openness of opportunity and the desire to create equality of conditions when, in fact they are referring to procedural democracy that manages the affairs of the nation but keeps its distance from the pursuit of wealth. When George Bush spoke of a "new world order" the "political content and economic implications" of this order were left vague (Dionne 351). But, as Dionne understood, it is to be hoped that the Western democracies fostering democracy in th
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Approximate Word count = 2801
Approximate Pages = 11 (250 words per page)
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