There is a crisis in American democracy that results from a crisis in citizenship. The combination of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and America's retreat from a commitment to civil rights and worker rights has led many Americans to doubt the efficacy of political or civil engagement. A long-established shift away from the public world of citizenship to the private world of consumption exacerbates these problems. Compounding this is a general rejection of strategies of collective action for reform in favor of more personal methods of change. Voting rates and other forms of civic engagement hover at shamefully low levels, particularly for our young people.
Democracy is predicated upon a belief in the fundamental sovereignty of the citizenry of a nation.
This sense of a vacated democracy has become an expected norm in our contemporary society, resulting in an alienated citizenry and a defrauded democratic republic. The citizen does not exist in a vacuum, but rather the body politic mandates the responsibility of one generation to teach the next generation what their responsibilities are to the nation. The practice of citizenship includes a healthy respect for the citizen's place within our political structure. The citizen knows, for example, that elected officials are responsible for implementing her will in her interest. The citizen knows also that a government that does not reflect the will of the governed, can, and must, be changed.