[This press release used to reside at the Department of Education’s website but was removed by about January 19, 2025]
PRESS RELEASE
Emory University in Georgia enters into resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin – shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry
January 16, 2025
The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) today announced that Emory University in Georgia has entered into a resolution agreement to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 with respect to alleged harassment of students based on national origin (shared Palestinian and/or Muslim ancestry).
OCR’s investigation identified Title VI compliance concerns regarding the university’s response to campus protest activity and to notice the university received of discrimination against Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university students, based on shared ancestry, that could contribute to or create a hostile environment for students. Specifically, OCR is concerned that the gratuitous violence of the law enforcement activity reflected in widely publicized videos from the arrests during the April 2024 protests may have created a hostile environment within the campus community for Palestinian, Arab, or Muslim university members and those perceived to have associated with them. Additionally, OCR identified concerns that the university’s publicly available policies and procedures for receiving and responding to reports of discrimination based on national origin and race lack the clarity necessary to ensure that the university provides a prompt and effective response, consistent with the requirements of Title VI, to reports and complaints of race and national origin discrimination. And at the university’s request, OCR agreed to resolve the allegations regarding different treatment without making a determination as to whether those allegations raise Title VI compliance concerns, given the scope of remedy already confirmed to date in this investigation.
OCR recognizes Emory’s efforts during the pendency of this investigation to address a climate that the university characterized as marked by anxiety, tension, and fear for Palestinian, Arab, and/or Muslim university students. The university acknowledged “shocking” and “deeply distressing” scenes from the law enforcement response to the April 24 protests and expressed willingness to launch a thorough review, including of how Emory engages external law enforcement. In conjunction with the commitments made today in signing this resolution agreement, Emory has committed to ensuring a safe and non-discriminatory educational environment for all students.
OCR determined that monitoring the university’s fulfillment of the following terms of the resolution agreement announced today will effectively ensure the university’s compliance with the requirements of Title VI not to discriminate based on national origin, including shared ancestry:
• Revising its nondiscrimination policies and procedures to ensure all university offices consistently and effectively comply with Title VI, including a definition of harassment that includes harassment based on actual or perceived shared ancestry.
• Revising its policies and procedures pertaining to campus protests, demonstrations, and related forms of expression, to ensure that they provide safeguards for non- discriminatory application and enforcement, including with regard to granting requests for approval of planned protest or demonstration, and its response to these activities including whether to contact outside law enforcement.
• Assessing its response to campus protests, and its decisions regarding student requests for approval to conduct protests, during the 2022-2023 and 2023-2024 academic years.
• Providing OCR copies of all complaints and reports concerning alleged national origin discrimination, including shared ancestry, or race, and the university’s response to those reports or complaints during the 2023-2024 and 2024-2025 academic years, and taking remedial actions if required; and
• Conducting annual training on nondiscrimination and harassment for all students and employees, Title VI investigators and law enforcement utilized at the university;
• Developing and administering a climate survey to students and employees (survey subjects) at the university to identify whether the survey subjects feel they have been or are currently subjected to or have witnessed discrimination, including harassment, on campus or during university related activities, based on race and national origin, specifically including shared ancestry and ethnic characteristics.
“Emory University’s commitments today promise to bring it into compliance with federal civil rights law, as its full school community deserves,” said Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Catherine E. Lhamon.
The resolution letter to the Emory University and the resolution agreement are available on the Office for Civil Rights’ website.
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Page Last Reviewed:
January 16, 2025
Tag: politics
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I just submitted this proposal for a panel at the upcoming ISPP meeting. They better accept it. Can’t wait.
Panel Title: From Neoliberal to Authoritarian: The USA’s Fascist Tide
Panel Abstract: After fifty-plus years of neoliberalism, the United States is witnessing a bewildering right-angle turn from a politics that is laissez-faire, globalized, and individualistic to an authoritarian and increasingly fascist one that is chauvinistic, statist, and moralistic. While it might be tempting to say that we are in a post-neoliberal era, the papers in this panel argue that the rising tide of fascism in the USA — along with the terror and violence that might ensue from it — continues the neoliberal project. Each paper also investigates the psychological processes the new authoritarians employ to assuage the anxiety produced by neoliberalism while still continuing the neoliberal project. These processes are generally fascistic with a strong father figure promising protection from imagined enemies and forces. Noëlle McAfee argues that, rather than being a reversal of neoliberalism, the new authoritarianism is a vicissitude of it. The elements of its playbook feed on phobia and assuage the precariat’s anxieties while still shoring up the elite’s power. Catarina Kinnvall argues that the new authoritarians capitalize on precarity, making electoral promises they have no intention of delivering, increasing rather than decreasing insecurity among their constituencies. Pasko Kisić-Merino and Antonia Stanojević focus on how the new authoritarians employ genderphobic narratives to bemoan how ‘feminised’ liberal modernity robbed America and how American wholeness and enjoyment could be recaptured. Paul Nesbitt-Larking turns to how the rise of authoritarianism in the United States affects its northern neighbor’s capacity and willingness to assert political independence. In the asymmetrical relationship between the two countries, the American force field is seductive and attractive. While Canada’s dominant political communities have historically asserted their independence in various ways, the question arises as to how much the US’s mode of dividing communities and demonizing subaltern peoples might seep into Canada’s own political culture. To conclude, discussant James McAuley will offer reflections.
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Patrcik Quinn interview on April 25, 2024
Amy Goodman’s Democracy Now on April 26, 2024
Interviewed on the Chris Cuomo show on April 26, 2024
Interview with the Chronicle of Higher ED
OpEd in the Atlanta Journal Constitution
Daily Beast: https://www.thedailybeast.com/philosophy-chair-noelle-mcafee-among-protesters-arrested-at-atlantas-emory-university
Atlanta 11Alive, 11-minute interview
11Alive edited version with video
“Emory professor speaks out after being arrested during protest”
Washington Post
“College protests. A Trump trial. Raging wars. Is everything ‘on fire’?” by Reis Thebault and Hannah Natanson, May 5, 2024. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/05/04/university-protest-trump-trial-israel-gaza-ukraine-news/
Daily Mail “Instead of bringing in police and tearing down encampments, why don’t you go to REI and get a tent and sit down and talk with the students?” McAfee said. “What are you afraid of?”
Atlanta News First on April 26, 2024
France 24 on April 29, 2024
Dawn News
TRT World
WABE podcast
https://www.wabe.org/an-inside-look-at-the-growing-campus-protests-in-georgia/
WPTV West Palm Beach
“Many misconceptions about university anti-war protesters, Emory professor says”
From Rome
Minor mention
NYMag
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/university-protests-college-campus-palestine-gaza.html
The Nation
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Credit: the Atlanta Journal Constitution.
“Young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to raise the warning bell about what is amiss in the world.”
By Noëlle McAfee
May 10, 2024
April 25, a Thursday, did not go as planned. Instead of overseeing a series of meetings with an external review team in town to assess the department I chair at Emory University, by 11 a.m., I was in a police vehicle with a group of students and other protesters being hauled off to jail, and a clip of me being arrested began to go viral.
The clip is indeed mesmerizing: Here’s this nicely dressed, rather composed, somewhat older professor with blonde hair being handcuffed and dragged down the sidewalk by a police officer with his face covered in a balaclava as she pleads with a bystander to please call the philosophy department and tell them that the chair of the department and president-elect of the university Senate has been arrested.
I was one of 28 people arrested after the university administration called on the Emory Police Department to disband a protest that had sprung up that morning, a protest aimed at stopping support of a public safety training center and investment in Israel. I now know that the administration knew that Emory police would call in the Atlanta Police Department and, it seems, the Georgia State Patrol as well. (The university president said he does not know who called the GSP, though an email sent out by the Emory’s public safety official notes university participation.) I had happened down to the quad that morning to observe things, hopeful that the administration would not repeat the catastrophe of a year earlier when it had summoned a heavily militarized APD to disband a group of peaceful protesters. Surely, university officials wouldn’t be so stupid.
I found a colleague milling around the peaceful protest, along with other onlookers, enjoying the weather and chatting with colleagues. “At least the APD aren’t here,” I said to him. “Oh, yes they are,” he replied, pointing to the far corner of the quad. And then we saw a line of Georgia State Patrol troopers marching down the side of the quad, stopping just steps before where we stood. And then in a flash the GSP attacked the quad from one side and the APD tore into it from the other, leading to utter mayhem, screams, sounds of rubber bullets, acrid gas in the air, and right in front of me two or three officers pummeling a young woman who was on the ground trying to protect her face with both hands.
Since getting arrested for refusing to back away from this scene of police brutality, I have gotten love letters from all over the world, thanking me for standing up for the Palestinian people. I have also gotten hate mail and death wishes for the same. I seem to be a screen for people’s projections: the first in hopes that someone with some privilege in the West will care about the massacre of Palestinians; the second in outrage that anyone supporting Palestinians must be an antisemite or boneheaded elitist lefty academic who ought to lose her job or worse.
What they all misunderstand is my reason for being on the quad. It was not to express my views about the situation in Gaza, which I find to be too complex to convey in a round of chants and slogans. I was there to protect our students’ roles as civic actors, the conscience of our culture.
Think about it: At least every decade or two, young people are the ones to take to the streets and the campus quads to sound a warning bell about what is amiss in the world, whether an insane war on a small country in Southeast Asia or complicity with South Africa’s apartheid regime or climate crisis or the obscene wealth gap or now the situation in Gaza. Students carry out a vital role in a democratic system: identifying and thematizing issues. They name and frame problems. They put issues on the public agenda, which deliberative bodies can take up and start figuring out ways to address along with the various complexities that don’t make their way into protesters’ chants, slogans and demands.
When university presidents call in the cops to violently dismantle peaceful demonstrations, they demonstrate how little they know about how democracy works. They send a message to students that their voices are just an annoyance at best, dangerous at worst. These administrators might tolerate students reading about Henry David Thoreau and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., but they better not act like them. Obey the law, never question it. This all goes along with the neoliberal turn of a politics that champions consumerism and criminalizes political engagement, that cuts programs in the humanities in favor of more job training, that has no understanding of a liberal arts education.
I was one of the first people released from jail that day — with a ticket in my bag for disorderly conduct and criminal trespass. I called an Uber to take a student and me back to campus. It was quite surreal. That day and the next, in between meetings with our external reviewers, I wandered the campus to find students and faculty shocked and somber but continuing their discussions about the situation in Gaza and Israel — and Emory University. But at the university administration level, nothing changed. That evening it again called in cops and dispersed students. In meetings with the Senate and constituencies, it continues to vow to uphold law and order and seems to have no capacity for understanding the civic role of the university it runs.
Noëlle McAfee is a professor and chair of the Philosophy Department at Emory University, where she also is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences and interim co-director of the Psychoanalytic Studies Program. She is president-elect of the Emory University Senate.
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There’s an old civil rights slogan: We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. The slogan of the Trump base might be: He is the one we were waiting for. And they will continue to wait, now even after he has left office, even after a second impeachment, and even if the Senate votes to convict and prevent him from office again. They will continue to wait and clamor for someone who will restore what was supposed to be theirs: the American dream promised to descendants of the Europeans who came to America, white America.
The Trump base is not going away. In psychoanalytic terms, it remains gripped by a fantasy of white entitlement, an identity of being those who are truly deserving. They are beset by paranoia that enemies have stolen what they deserve.
This identity is largely unconscious, anxious, and unstable, a defense against a more primordial anxiety of having no real or rightful place in the world. One need not be a member of a white supremacist organizations to have an identification with whiteness and all its connotations. But most of those enticed by it are white.
Unlike historically rich ethnic or religious identities—whether Italian or Nigerian, Jewish or Muslim, whiteness is not really an identity at all. It is an epiphenomenon and legacy of colonialism, something shared by colonialists and constructed in opposition to those colonized.
White identity is guilt-ridden and fragile to its core; but it has through American history been the ticket to membership, inclusion, and citizenship. And now in the second decade of the twenty-first century, that ticket is being called out for being a fraud. It will no longer get you to the front of the line. You will need to wait your turn like everyone else.
Many in the Trump base deny they are racists, but there is ample evidence of their unconscious belief and primordial anxieties. Look at the symptoms.
During the election season, every single time Trump or one of his surrogates was asked about racial injustice, they immediately associated to Antifa. This is a symptom of the large-group identification and its childish defenses, including a paranoia that someone is out to destroy them.
Other symptoms need no psychoanalytic interpretation: the gallows at the morning rally on January 6, the Confederate Flag brought in to the US Capitol, the t-shirts emblazoned with racist and genocidal slogans.
Those enticed by a fantasy of white identity, whether consciously or not, are enraged at being denied the entitlement that should come from being the ones who made America great. For the fantasy of entitlement to stay alive, it needs someone who might fulfill the fantasy. Trump was their man. But without him they will find someone or something else.
A fantasy of white entitlement also thrives by identifying enemies to blame for robbing them of what they deserve. Conspiracy theories readily supply these, from the Deep State trying to undermine Trump to those largely black urban populations stealing the election.
What is to be done? Certainly, closing down online venues for conspiracy theories and misinformation helps. But so long as the root of the problem persists, no amount of “fact-checkers” will set things straight. No account of Trump’s tens of thousands of lies will unsettle his followers’ certitude that Trump (or whoever comes next) is their savior. Those caught up in these extreme defenses will find whatever “facts” fit their delusions.
To get to the root of the problem, we need to address the fundamental anxieties at work. For those white folks who have been left out of the global neoliberal economy, there is the anxiety of being in unmoored in the world. For those white folks who are profiting from neoliberal economies, there is an unconscious anxiety that whatever place they have was ill-gotten.
We need to embark a new collective founding of our country. This will include public policies that address the ways in which a neoliberal global economy is in fact robbing many of a decent life. A new founding will also include what each of us can do in our day-to-day lives, asking our neighbors and kin caught up in conspiracy theories, rage, and paranoia: How are you doing? Is everything alright? We can and should create spaces for everyone to reckon with guilt and responsibility, build relationships across differences, and share their grief and worry about the country.
In the end, we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.
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The cry that Donald Trump repeats at every rally — “Let’s Make American Great Again” — taps into a dual wager: (1) that those who imagine themselves as the dominant and quintessential “American” people need not mourn the loss of their presumed dominance at home and abroad and (2) that those who are undermining the old status quo can be undone, thrown out, excised from the body politic, making possible an ideal and perfect state. Those who will not mourn their losses nor tarry with indeterminacy, uncertainty, and democracy demand a politics of black and white and good and evil; and they presume that those who oppose them are the enemies of all things perfect and true.
This wager has been going on for decades if not millennia and is likely a large part of what made Reaganism and neoliberalism possible. All the ostensible reasons for taking down the welfare state had subterranean motives of demonizing the poor, the dark, the queer. Even the most belligerent and conservative politicians cloaked their ulterior motives with reasons, however illogical, e.g. Reagan’s mantra that a rising tide lifts all boats. (It didn’t take a Ph.D. to point out that if one didn’t have a boat, one was sunk.) But they did at least pretend to trade in reasons. And people who shared their ulterior views could vote for them and support their policies as reasonable affairs. We all said we dreamt of freedom and equality for all, even if we had different ideas about how this could be achieved.
But now there is Trump, who dispenses with all the niceties and gets to the truth — or what many imagine to be the truth — who says out loud what was never said on a national stage in the modern era, even by people who believed it. Here are few samples from recent rallies:
“Are you from Mexico? Are you from Mexico? Are you from Mexico?”
“Get out of here, get out of here. Get out.”
“We’ve become weak; we’ve become weak.”
“Our country has to toughen up folks. These people are bringing us down. … These people are so bad for our country, you have no idea. They contribute nothing, nothing.”
“Get him out. Go home to mommy. Go home and get a job. I tell you these are not good people, folks ….These are not the people that made our country great. But we’re going to make it great again… These are the people that are destroying our country. Get him out.”
The Trump phenomenon taps into a deeper political problem, not in just the U.S. but in multi-cultural polities throughout the world: a lack of public and shared means for working through ambiguity and loss, for coming to understand the strangers in our midst, that is, for moving from a paranoid-schizoid politics to what we might call a Kleinian depressive position. Psychoanalytic theory, including Freud’s tantalizing but undeveloped concept of working through, offers a doorway out of this mess. The iconic scene is the analytic space: patient on the couch, analyst behind, and the analytic third to their dyad where Manichaean divides can transform into shades of grey; where projected demons can be taken back and metabolized; where the adolescent selves we all are at one time or another might grow up and realize the world is not made of saints and sinners but of complex and imperfect people; and most importantly that there are no perfect solutions that will solve all our troubles.
The task now is how to take this micro-politics to a macro level, how to move to a politics of mourning and working though. How to see people different from us not as threats but opportunities to open up new worlds and possibilities.
Trump slams shut any such door. Maybe he needs to get himself out of here — or at least get off the stage.
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Here’s something I’m working on….
There are many languages of reason, but perhaps the most powerful and insidious one is the unconscious logic that emerges during political, ethnic, and religious conflict. What may at first seem madness, is, if looked at with the right lens, a very cool calculus of justice aimed at righting past wrongs — no matter how out of scale the “solution.” The unconscious is not mad. It keeps careful tally. It never forgets insults, injuries, traumas, or wrongs. It waits for its moment to set matters straight. And the unconscious of a people traumatized and bereft will bide its time for centuries, if need be, waiting for an opportunity to set matters right. Consider what lay behind the shot that set off World War I: six hundred years of grievance and political melancholia. Psychoanalytic hermeneutics can help make sense of the effects of political traumas. Might it also help people work through them? With his all-too-vague notion of “working through,” which shows up in dream work and the work of mourning, Freud thought he found an antidote to traumatic remembering and repetition, a process that could calm and bind the psychical excitations that trouble the organism. Considering a political body of restless people haunted by past traumas and injustice, what kind of Arbeit can help political communities deal with buried traumas and insults before they explode in vengeance? Without some kind of work, politics becomes an enactment of fantasied, unrealistic expectations; demonic projections; and persecutory anxieties. In this paper I draw on and move beyond Freud’s model toward a post-Kleinian one that can be tethered to the political process of public deliberation. In my account, political deliberation is not just a process of reason giving and consideration, which many political philosophers think it is, but an affective process that helps people work through fantasies of denial, splitting. and revenge and toward a position that can tolerate loss, ambiguity, and uncertainty, that is, the human condition.
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“‘Culture of Poverty,’ Once an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback” reports the New York Times this morning, referring to the debate that started with Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report that described “the urban black family as caught in an inescapable ‘tangle of pathology’ of unmarried mothers and welfare dependency.” According to the story, written by Patricia Cohen, while the idea had lots of traction politically up through Clinton’s war on welfare “as we know it,” many on the left in academia took offense at the suggestions that blacks were somehow to blame for poverty and that the situation was next to hopeless. And so discussing it became verbotten for decades.
I was just a tot when all that happened, but I grew up hearing references to the “culture of poverty” notion, and I never found it offensive, at least not prima facie. To say that one is born into a culture that is disempowering and hence helps explain inequity makes sense to me, especially if we don’t then blame the victim. This country is in toto to blame for a history that has never been recognized, wrongs that have never been righted, legacies that are harmful all around.
As Cohen reports, economists, sociologists and others are returning to the idea now, shorn of some of the baggage, able to actually look at the situation of unwed parents, absent fathers, and continuing poverty as a problem of culture. The new crop of academics are looking at the effects of shared understandings and perceptions. Positive ones help communities flourish; negative ones seem to doom communities to perpetual dysfunction. Paraphrasing Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson, Cohen writes,
The shared perception of a neighborhood — is it on the rise or stagnant? — does a better job of predicting a community’s future than the actual level of poverty.
I applaud all the work that Cohen points to in using the rubric of culture to understand poverty.
But I think we should take this much further. Even more widespread and endemic than a culture of poverty is a culture of powerlessness. Maybe five percent of the population is exempt from this problem, those with the money and / or connections and / or sense of efficacy to think that what they care about matters and that they can make a difference. So many more think that what they think about on issues of common, political concern just doesn’t matter and that little they do will make any discernible difference. It’s a wonder that as many people vote as do.
Our culture of powerlessness tells us that politics is what governments do, not what civil societies, publics, or public spheres do. It pays attention to administrative and economic power, not what Habermas calls, following Dewey’s lead, communicative power or what Arendt calls the power of acting and speaking in the presence of others. This is the culture we need to cultivate.
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I am ready to come clean with my worry about these two terms, “civil society” and “the public sphere.” My political theorists friends (trained in political science departments) act and talk as if the difference between the two is patently obvious. I just nod, a bit hesitant to admit that I don’t quite get it. Many others use the terms interchangeably to denote a NONGOVERNMENTAL arena. Okay, yeah, I get that
Between the state and the mass of individuals there is this other, nongovernmental realm. Hegel aside, let’s suffice it to say that by the late 20th century people were returning to the idea of civil society to point out the political importance of the nongovernmental arena of associations such as labor unions, civic clubs, higher ed, churches, bowling leagues, choral societies, garden clubs, you name it. Some theorists included the market; others didn’t. (This seems to me to be a huge question that didn’t get enough attention.)
At the same time, or really earlier, with Habermas’s publication of The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the term public sphere came into vogue. Habermas’s book was originally published in the 70s, if memory serves me (this is a blog so I don’t feel compelled to look it up just now). It was translated into English in the early 1990s, just when the term civil society was hitting it big.
Both terms seemed to hit the zeitgeist in the same way. But there were some key differences. Various arenas of civil society may, at any given moment, be attending to things political, or not. But the public sphere seems to be defined as an arena that is all about political matters.
Moreover, civil society is a demarcation of entities, asssociations, not activities. But “the public sphere” is something else. In the popular imaginary, the public sphere may be a space waiting in the wings upon which people can enter and attend to things political. But in Habermas’s conception it was something else altogether. He described it (in Steven Seidman’s 1989 volume) as the space that arises whenever two or more people come together to talk about matters of common concern.
In this sense, the public sphere is not a space but an occurence. It’s not an entity; it is a phenomenon. It is the effect of two, three, or more people coming together to figure out what to do on matters of common concern.
Where civil society seems to map formal and perhaps informal associations, the public sphere maps activities. We have here the difference between substance and process ontology. In philosophy, substance ontology focuses on the essence of things, which it generally sees as having essences and properties, with things being relatively static or at least continuous over time. It might move from a focus on a thing to its relations between things, but in general it attends to the thing itself. Process ontology doesn’t see things as fixed or having essences. It sees beings as matters of being, as phenomena. The desk upon which my hands rest isn’t a table so much as it is some matter TABLING. Likewise, we could say that the public isn’t an entity but a phemonenon of people in relation taking up matters of common concern. One day they might do that, and we call them a public, and another they don’t, and we don’t call them much of anything.
I still think that civil society is a useful notion, but I don’t think it should ever stand in for the more robust and specific conception of the public sphere. Perhaps we should attend to how, in a particular moment, under certain kinds of conditions, entities of civil society, and even those not seen as qualified members therein, morph into the public sphere.
if we think of the public sphere as a process and a phenomenon, as an effect of political engagement among people who may not in any way be “authorized’ to act, we can see it as a really poweful and potentially transgressive space for politics. The idea of civil society might contain that, but only the idea of the public sphere makes this manifest.
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This academic year I’ve been working on a new book project. Roughly, it’s a phenomenology of democratic politics — democratic in the deep and strong sense, not the thin sense of liberal, representative democracy. I’ve written several chapters, that have been published as papers here and there. It’s time to start ordering this all in a coherent way.
I think I’ll use this blog of mine as a way of trying out the ideas. Of course my writing here will be in a rather different register than the book.
I’ll start posting a discrete thought one at a time. Please do share your thoughts as I move along.
Here’s the first thought:
To help a country become more functional and even flourishing, it is important to look at the whole body politic. This will include at least two things: the mechanisms of government (what we often refer to as the state) and the political culture. To understand the political culture it is important to start from the very local and immediate. At the neighborhood level, when there is a problem, what do the people do? Do they have habits and norms of problem solving? Or do they leave the problems for someone else to address? What are people’s habits and expectations about who will define problems, frame them, decide what to do and then act?
Alexis de Tocqueville noted that we Americans are peculiar. In France when there is a problem people start knocking on the magistrate’s door, demanding that the magistrate do something. In America, when there’s a problem, people form an association to do something about it themselves. By the 20th century this habit was long gone. But if Tocqueville was right, in the 19th century the French and the Americans had distinctly different political cultures. They had certain habits and norms about what to do when problems happen.
Think about where you grew up or where you live now. When there’s a problem, how do people behave? Do they get together? Do they protest, beseech, complain, or even riot? Do they give up? These habits are crucial indicators of a community’s civic capacities.
gonepublic by Noëlle McAfee 