Listening to this week’s soliloquy,
I couldn’t help but remember the words: “that’s not who we are.” President
Barack Obama uttered those words in so many of his speeches, there’s a YouTube
collage summing them up to 46. I believe the reason this resonates with the Americans
as much as it does, is because we are a nation based on values. Unlike any
other country in the world, what unites us is not any one ethnicity, religion,
or race. What makes us Americans is our values.
I would argue that we equate upholding
our values with our identity, which is the reason why we consider Global Public
Sphere to be very closely tied to Liberal Political Theory. The idea of public
sphere for us means that public authority derives from the consent of those
people on whom the authority is being exercised. In Prof. Jackson’s two-by-two,
we represent the lower left-hand box, where we are deliberating the
implications of the common identity that we hold together. Sure, there are
differences amongst us, and we value individualism more than most other
countries, but we make a clear distinction between what’s American and what’s un-American.
Discussions on what kind of society we want to be may be carried out in the
Supreme Court, as well as in our everyday conversations, but they always come
down to what kind of society we want to be.
On the other hand, there’s Constitutionalism,
and we believe it’s very important to uphold our Constitution. The forefathers came
together and decided on the sets of rules for presidency, government and legislature;
we then let the Constitution decide how we are going to operate.
While on a grand scale we adhere to
Constitutionalism, the Constitution sets the basic rules, and we come up with laws
and deliberate the implications of the common identity we hold.
It is no surprise then, that as a
society, we are constantly debating, how far can our government go? How do we
protect our civil liberties? How do we uphold our values while fighting
terrorism?
I fully agree with you that, when it comes to the Global Public Sphere, America is represented by our identity (i.e. the lower left-hand box). American governance is so deeply rooted in defining values, morality, and the type of society we want to be. Just think of "the American dream." I appreciate that you brought up the point that we adhere to Constitutionalism in terms of the biggest picture, and then develop laws based not only the Constitution, but on the ways in which these laws represent the American identity. This makes me think of a question I have had several times in our class: is it possible for a society to be in one box for a certain topic, and a different box for another? Can the boxes overlap? Can society change its box? (there's that pesky fundamental change question again!)
ReplyDeleteSarah, thank you for your thoughtful comment! What do I think of your question whether the countries travel around the two-by-two boxes, depending on the issues at hand? I believe they do! If we take the United States with respect to our allies, for instance, we could place ourselves in the lower right-hand corner, but it would be difficult to say we see the world eye to eye with Russia or China, even in this political atmosphere. Hence, the only box I see us in, when it comes to those two, is the upper left-hand box. To make things worse, there are also times when I see the two-by-two as a round hole where we’re trying to fit the square peg in. Or, reverse in this case, as the two-by-two is practically a rectangle? You get the point. In other words, I do not believe our two-by-two is a one-size-fits-all.
ReplyDeleteI very much like this line of thinking Eka. The stark contrast between President Obama and President Trump really highlight many of the themes talked about in this week's lecture. As you say, Obama frequently spoke of America's "values" and what America is and is not. Today, Trump does the same, but seems to focus less on "values" and more on "interests", with his very campaign slogan being "Make America Great Again". I think this whole premise of identity and the global public sphere really takes us back to the Interests vs. Ideas module. It caused me to question the relationship between interests and identities. Do our identities determine our interests or the other way around? In Obama's America, it seems as though our identity drove our interests. In Trump's, the opposite seems to be the case. Trump seems to be focused on "bringing jobs back to America" and "America First", while Obama seemed to focus much more on the "ideals" piece. It's very interesting to watch these themes play out today. These interests and identities play a major role in determining how actors will behave when debating issues on the world stage (or within the public sphere).
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