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    How Much Time and Attention does Democracy Take?

    By amike on Tue, 03/24/2009 - 2:17pm |
    I have to make this post a quickie, which in a way will prove its point.  I'm in the middle of grading papers, and I need to avoid a riot by returning them to the kiddies in the next day or so.  I know I'm going to sound like a grumpy old man but here goes.  I'm wondering if serious discussions of political ideology and thought are possible in the public arena any more.  There are plenty of weighty tomes, some of them with weighty ideas in them, but that's not what I'm getting at.

    Recently it was time to introduce a new crop of freshman to Lincoln's Speech on the Missouri Compromise, given at Peoria in 1954.   It's a wonderful speech, exposing the grandeur of Lincoln's vision and his weaknesses as a child of his times.  But the speech is over 16,000 words long....23 pages of single spaced, 12 point type.  Being something of a gutless coward, I abridged it to something like four pages: there were specific rhetorical devices and idea genealogies I wanted to explore with them, and I knew I could cheerlead them into close reading something of that length with less effort on my part.

    The fine and not so fine citizens of Peoria stood and listened to this closely reasoned speech for nearly three hours.  The newspaper printed it in full, and it was widely reprinted and discussed.

    For the life of me, I can't imagine a significant proportion of Americans who would have the patience to do the same today.  How many complained when Bill Clinton gave a keynote address which lasted about an hour?  And that was a half generation ago.

    Another case in point.  The Federalist Papers: 85 coordinated extensive essays arguing for the adoption of the Federal Constitution.  Again, theses appeared in village newspapers and were reprinted time and again.  The newspapers were often pinned to boards at the village tavern and there are reports of persons patiently waiting in line to read them, before going in to enjoy an ale.  The essays weren't left unanswered, either, more than 85 Anti-Federalist Papers appeared, giving to the Federalists as good as they got from them.  These were perhaps less elegant, and certainly less coordinated, but they weren't less robust in promoting their points of view.  The Federalists won, of course, so their works have been collected and published-they're available online and off.  Losers tend to be forgotten by the academics in charge, but the good folks at Democrats of Cook County have provided them online, as have other contributors to the common good.

    We think we may be at a watershed in our political and cultural history.  How are we going to think and reason this through?  What's the length of the average opinion column today, and how many of them respond to the discourse of others, point by point, argument by argument?  I'm guessing that the longest blog posts on political subjects are posted by Glen Greenwald.  Today's post is about 1,300 words.  I don't fault him-that's probably about the length the majority of visitors will commit to read.

    The giddy folk in Washington wonder if Barack Obama is overexposing himself.  He's overexposing the ability of interviewers to ask insightful questions-but that's a different matter.  In his three major appearances this week he has spoken less than Lincoln did in one speech in little Peoria, Illinois, a century and a half ago.  If we lose a serious democracy in this country it may just be because we've lost the attention span necessary to give it the reasoned care it needs.  

    How about that?  609 words (plus the words to tell you it is 609 words).

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