How our everyday interactions as neighbors shape-and sometimes
undermine-democracy "Love thy neighbor" is an impossible
exhortation. Good neighbors greet us on the street and do small
favors, but neighbors also startle us with sounds at night and
unleash their demons on us, they monitor and reproach us, and
betray us to authorities. The moral principles prescribed for
friendship, civil society, and democratic public life apply
imperfectly to life around home, where we interact day to day
without the formal institutions, rules of conduct, and means of
enforcement that guide us in other settings. In Good Neighbors,
Nancy Rosenblum explores how encounters among neighbors create a
democracy of everyday life, which has been with us since the
beginning of American history and is expressed in settler,
immigrant, and suburban narratives and in novels, poetry, and
popular culture. During disasters, like Hurricane Katrina, the
democracy of everyday life is a resource for neighbors who
improvise rescue and care. Degraded, this framework can give way to
betrayal by neighbors, as faced by the Japanese Americans interned
during World War II, or to terrible violence such as the lynching
of African Americans. Under extreme conditions the barest act of
neighborliness is a bulwark against total ethical breakdown. The
elements of the democracy of everyday life-reciprocity, speaking
out, and "live and let live"-comprise a democratic ideal not
reducible to public principles of justice or civic virtue, but it
is no less important. The democracy of everyday life, Rosenblum
argues, is the deep substrate of democracy in America and can be
its saving remnant.
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